The Normalisation of Political Lying

The defining legacy of the past 14 years has been the elevation of political 'savviness' over honesty

As you read this, voters across the country are being targeted with hundreds of Conservative campaign adverts spreading outright lies about the Labour Party.

These lies, which include entirely made-up claims about Labour planning a national road-charging scheme, are utterly shameless in their dishonesty.

Yet far from triggering outrage, they have been largely ignored by a political media which not only seems to be indifferent to lies, but in some cases actively celebrates them.

From the Brexit campaign, right up until the present day, dishonesty in British politics has increasingly been treated, not only as a necessary evil, but even as a virtue.

So how did we get here, and will a change in government really bring an end to this era of political dishonesty, or merely mark the start of a new chapter?

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The ‘Cult of the Savvy’

In order to understand how lying became such an accepted part of our politics, we first have to understand the environment in which it has flourished.

For the New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, part of the answer comes from the creation of what he describes as the “cult of savviness”.

“Most of the people who report on politics aren’t trying to advance an ideology,” Rosen remarked, back in 2011.

“But I think they have an ideology, a belief system that holds their world together.”

For Rosen, that belief system is what he calls “savviness”.

“Savviness is that quality of being shrewd, practical, hyper-informed, perceptive, ironic, ‘with it,’ and unsentimental in all things political,” says Rosen.

For followers of this “cult of savviness” all that really matters is whether something is deemed to be politically “savvy”, regardless of whether it is either right, or true.

However, the cost of this addiction to savviness, is the further erosion of trust in our political and media system.

“Take the most generic ‘savviness question’ there is”, Rosen explained.

“One journalist asks another: how will this play with the voters? Listening to that, how will this play with the voters, haven’t you ever wanted to shout at your television set, ‘hey buddy, I’m a voter! Don’t talk about me like I’m not in the room when I’m sitting right here watching you.’

This style of journalism, which positions us as what Rosen calls “connoisseurs of our own bamboozlement” has now become the defining characteristic of most political coverage.

In newspaper columns, TV debates, and panel shows, commentators line up to discuss how the latest piece of rank political dishonesty will “play” with and “cut through” through to the voters, who are in fact the very people listening to this discussion about how we are set to be bamboozled.

Yet at almost no point are we ever asked to consider whether such dishonesty is acceptable.

In fact, far from engaging in such questions, most political commentary actively disregards them as being sentimental and “unsavvy”.

As Rosen puts it, for political “insiders,” it is always necessary to “position the journalist and his observations not as right where others are wrong, or virtuous where others are corrupt, or visionary where others are short-sighted, but as mature, practical, hardheaded, unsentimental, and shrewd where others are didactic, ideological, child-like and dreamy.”

This could be seen most clearly during the Brexit campaign, when commentators lined up to coldly explain why the shameless, and in some cases dangerous lies told by the Brexit campaign were actually part of a “savvy” political strategy.

So when the Leave campaign falsely warned that millions of Turks were heading to the UK, or wrongly claimed that leaving the EU would lead to hundreds of millions of pounds extra a week for the NHS, they were not portrayed as simply being deceptive, or racist, but as being “savvy”.

A similar attitude was also taken towards Boris Johnson, whose lies, bigotry and immorality were routinely dismissed by commentators as being “priced in” to public perceptions of him and therefore not mattering, right up until the point when they actually did.

Such detachment from the impact of political dishonesty is not exclusive to one party or political movement, but can be found right across our politics.

It can also be seen in the many attempts to justify Keir Starmer’s dishonesty in the pledges he made to Labour members back in 2020 - almost all of which he has since abandoned.

The attitude towards Starmer’s breaking of his pledges is neatly encapsulated in a piece written this week by the former Labour aide Tom Hamilton.

In the piece, Hamilton describes what he says is “the source of the biggest criticisms of Starmer from the left” which is that he “won the leadership by relentlessly focusing on the voters he needed to win within the Labour Party, and then pivoted towards the national electorate rather than sticking with a prospectus whose chief appeal was to people who had already been shown to be a minority of a minority”.

While he claims to not be “wholly unsympathetic” to these criticisms, he adds that Starmer’s ten pledges were “mostly bad, and he shouldn’t have made them”, so therefore “dropping bad policies is better than sticking to them, and winning is better than losing.”

This final sentence is particularly instructive because it exposes the founding tenet of savviness, which is that winning is all that really matters in politics, regardless of how it is done.

This world view was also exposed in a very revealing recent interview of the former Conservative MP Rory Stewart by the Times political commentator Matt Chorley.

In the interview Chorley repeatedly confronts Rory about his decision to step down from the Conservative party, rather than remain on the inside in the pursuit of power. When Stewart replies that he couldn’t in good conscience remain part of a political party which elevated the likes of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss to high office, Chorley paints him as being a political loser, putting it to him that the people he criticises are “better at politics”.

As Stewart himself summarises, “Your fundamental judgement here [Matt] is that Liz Truss is a better person than me because she became Prime Minister.”

While this may be an exaggeration of Chorley’s position, it is not a particularly wild one. For followers of the savvy school of politics, winning is the only real measure of virtue.

For Chorley, who presents the savvily titled ‘How to Win an Election’ podcast with fellow political insiders Danny Finkelstein, Peter Mandelson and Polly Mackenzie, Stewart’s fundamental crime appears to be his lack of political savviness, which most commonly presents itself as a lack of interest in “winning”.

As Rosen himself puts it “what is the truest mark of savviness? Winning, of course! Or knowing who the winners are”.

Yet while ‘knowing who the winners are’ is obviously important in both politics and political journalism, so is honesty, and a failure to care about the latter can ultimately lead to the inability to achieve the former, as Boris Johnson’s short prime ministerial careers so clearly demonstrates.

Yet even if lying in politics were a surefire route to political success, that would not make it right, and the unwillingness of so many politicians and commentators to grasp that basic point is a key part of why we are now in a situation where distrust in British politics has reached such a historic high.

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A Return to Service?

Of course politicians are more than aware of this rising distrust in our politics. Awareness of this fact is why Rishi Sunak launched his premiership with a pledge to restore “integrity” and “accountability” to our politics.

However, not only did he fail to meet his pledge, but he actively contributed to undermining those principles further.

When he first made his ‘five pledges’ to voters, Sunak urged voters to “judge me” on whether he had met them.

Yet rather than owning up to having failed to do so, Sunak has instead simply attempted to pretend that down is up and black is white.

In multiple debates and interviews during this campaign, the Prime Minister has repeatedly sought to claim that small boat crossings are coming down, when they are in reality reaching record highs. Meanwhile he has continued to insist that he is cutting taxes, when he is actually raising them to new highs.

This routine dishonesty is not only wrong in its own terms, but is actively contributing to the wider erosion in public trust in politics. Far from being bamboozled by the lies, most voters are making the (largely correct) decision to simply stop listening to them any more.

So what are we to make of the alternative?

In his own recent appearances, Starmer has also sought to condemn political dishonesty, while insisting that he will bring in a new era of “political service” once in office.

In an interview with Channel 5 News on Thursday, the Labour leader said he was shocked by Sunak’s lies during this week’s BBC debate.

“I’m genuinely disappointed that the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom resorted to lies,” Starmer said.

“I just don't think that should happen. Whichever political party you are, I think there's a sort of rule of leadership that you don't go into that place.”

Yet on the same day that the Labour leader delivered his condemnation of political lies, he was also asked what he thought about the unfairness of the current First Past the Post voting system, which is set to deliver his party up to 70% of seats on as little as 36% of the vote.

Asked by ITV News whether he believed the current system was unfair, Starmer replied that he didn’t, saying that it was the “right system” because if "gives us strong government”.

Yet as my colleague Josiah Mortimer has reported, when he was asked the same question four years ago, Starmer gave the complete opposite response, saying that electoral reform was essential in order to end a situation in which "millions of people feel their votes don't count".

So was Keir Starmer being dishonest back then, when he pledged to reform our broken electoral system, or is he being dishonest now when he says that the current system is actually the “right” one?

The truth is that for the political savvy such questions ultimately don’t matter and indeed are rarely even asked. For the savvy, all that really matters is winning, regardless of the wider cost to our politics and political culture.

And unless that changes, the era of political dishonesty we have lived through over the past decade, will only continue.

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I will be appearing at the Byline Festival at Dartington Hall, Totnes, from election night on July 4th up until Sunday July 7th. Other speakers will include Jay Rosen, Peter Oborne, George Monbiot, Bonnie Greer, Rosie Holt, Chris Packham and many more. I hope to see you there.