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The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism
* THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER *'A clinical and merciless account of Johnson's mendacity... gripping' Guardian When Peter Oborne wrote The Rise of Political Lying, looking at the growth of political falsehood under John Major and Tony Blair, he believed things had got as bad as they could be. With the arrival of Boris Johnson at No 10 in 2019 began a new and unprecedented epidemic of deceit. In The Assault on Truth, a short and powerful polemic, Oborne shows how Boris Johnson lied again and again in order to secure victory so he could force through Brexit in the face of parliamentary opposition. Johnson and his ministers then lied repeatedly to win the general election in December 2019. The government's woeful response to the coronavirus pandemic has generated another wave of falsehoods, misrepresentations and fabrications. Oborne has brought the book fully up to date, to the end of Johnson's time in No 10. The scale and shamelessness of the lying of the Johnson administration far exceeded the lying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and other issues under Tony Blair. This book argues that the ruthless use of political deceit under the Johnson government was part of a wider attack on civilised values and traditional institutions across the Western world, especially by Donald Trump in the USA. The Johnson and Trump methodology of deceit is about securing power for its own ends - even when they get exposed for lying, they shrug it off as a matter of no consequence. Oborne assesses whether their time in power has tainted their successors. It matters because all Western institutions are built around the idea of integrity and accountability. This means that an assault on truth is an assault on the rule of law, state institutions and the fundamental idea of fairness, and even democracy itself.
224 pages, Paperback
Published January 5, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 156 reviews
February 20, 2021
I’m not a great fan of Oborne, in fact, I think he is rude, belligerent, and narcissistic , however on the premise that ‘it takes one to know one’, I give him full credit for this book and his exposure of Boris Johnson and the right-wing media that supports him. Oborne has proven beyond doubt that Johnson is an inveterate liar and charlatan. He has cleverly linked his statements to websites, if any of his readers want to crosscheck anything. There are almost as many ‘notes’ as there is dialogue in the book.
There are certain points he makes that I would disagree with esp. ‘the majority of the British people voted for Brexit’ which is certainly a fallacy. The majority of THOSE WHO VOTED did, in fact, win a majority and the British voting system being what it is, did produce a ‘majority’.
Over the years, Oborne has been a stickler for the truth which also begs the question as to why he fell for the Brexit propaganda lies and voted to leave the EU. (He no longer believes in Brexit).
He has exposed modern British politics for what it has become and often refers to the Nolan report and the 19th century Northcote-Trevelyan system of government which was far more trustworthy.
Today’s media has been captured by the scoundrels and are leading us to a very unsavoury future. So, finally, I have to say, more power to you Mr. Oborne, but sadly few are listening.
There are certain points he makes that I would disagree with esp. ‘the majority of the British people voted for Brexit’ which is certainly a fallacy. The majority of THOSE WHO VOTED did, in fact, win a majority and the British voting system being what it is, did produce a ‘majority’.
Over the years, Oborne has been a stickler for the truth which also begs the question as to why he fell for the Brexit propaganda lies and voted to leave the EU. (He no longer believes in Brexit).
He has exposed modern British politics for what it has become and often refers to the Nolan report and the 19th century Northcote-Trevelyan system of government which was far more trustworthy.
Today’s media has been captured by the scoundrels and are leading us to a very unsavoury future. So, finally, I have to say, more power to you Mr. Oborne, but sadly few are listening.
February 11, 2021
This book by Peter Oborne is an excoriating take down of Boris Johnson and prima facie evidence of how he has literally lied his way into the top job in British politics. Oborne explains what he thinks this means for the Tory party, our body politic, the media and ourselves as citizens. The media come out of all this pretty badly as you might expect. In Oborne’s assessment, they have aided and abetted a charlatan’s rise to one of the most influential roles on the planet and are irredeemably damaged and flawed as a result. It’s hard to disagree with him. As a book that puts the mendacious Johnson in the dock and hands down a unanimous verdict of guilty as charged, this book undeniably does its job. It’s somewhat lighter on solutions to stop such a situation occurring. Oborne’s exhortations for people to write to their MPs, peers and others in public life to complain when they encounter lying and deceit isn’t really going to cut it, especially when by his own admission many parts of officialdom were complicit in facilitating Britain’s lying PM’s rise to the top. Still though, the book is well worth reading and fair play to Oborne for writing it.
August 6, 2023
I think this is required reading for anyone who seeks to understand why Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are such outrageous liars.
The worst thing is that some newspapers and television channels don't question the lies, they accept them without challenge, betraying their role as the guardians of the rights of the ordinary citizen.
Peter Oborne concentrates on the lies of Johnson and his role in the undermining of Parliament and important democratic institutions in the UK including the Civil Service. Johnson tried to do this as he, like Trump, is a 'progressive' politician who feels that institutions frustrate progress because they obstruct self-expression and that the desire to do the right thing is more important than an insistence on procedure, in other words the end justifies the means. These politicians fabricate and twist the truth to suit their agenda.
The worst thing is that some newspapers and television channels don't question the lies, they accept them without challenge, betraying their role as the guardians of the rights of the ordinary citizen.
Peter Oborne concentrates on the lies of Johnson and his role in the undermining of Parliament and important democratic institutions in the UK including the Civil Service. Johnson tried to do this as he, like Trump, is a 'progressive' politician who feels that institutions frustrate progress because they obstruct self-expression and that the desire to do the right thing is more important than an insistence on procedure, in other words the end justifies the means. These politicians fabricate and twist the truth to suit their agenda.
February 21, 2021
Peter Oborne is an apt chronicler of Johnson's lies, so the bulk of the book is good. What is annoying though is that the author naively believes in decency of pre-Johnson Tories. There is nothing decent in Margaret Thatcher's taking away milk from financially struggling children. There is nothing decent in later Tories voting for overturning the Human Rights bill, or introducing ideologically-driven austerity that cost thousands of lives and at the same time increasing MPs salaries to £70.000 a year and its just a major shame that an author as astute as Oborne does not see that.
December 25, 2021
I don't know or read much about UK politics but where interested enough to give this a try. Found this to be a well written non fiction that don't seem to shy away from saying how it is. It shows how ugly politics is sadly
January 30, 2024
15th book of 2024.
Oborne has certainly been keeping receipts. The second chapter alone outlines a number of Johnson lies* with relevant footnotes to backup his claims. Several of them, he writes, he researched himself to get to the truth (which, at every count, was the opposite to what Johnson had said). Of course, Oborne also attacks Tony Blair and the lies he and the Labour party told to drag Britain into a war with Iraq. He, Oborne writes, began the path that led to Johnson and his lies. He does compare Johnson as Prime Minister to the Johnson he knew writing for The Spectator decades ago and wonders what changed. It’s no secret to anyone that Johnson was fired from two journalist posts for lying, and yet, he made it into No. 10 regardless. Oborne compares Johnson to Trump (both liars, though he points out Johnson’s aloofness compared to Trump’s outright revelling in it), and to Merkel on the pandemic front, just to prove how competent she was in steering Germany through that period. Oborne does show his arrogance and self-importance in the conclusion when he starts talking about how he is sending the manuscript of this book to the House of Commons and that people have to call out lies they hear as soon as they do. And if they are accused of lying by anyone in politics, to immediately sue them, even if it’s Boris Johnson himself. Clearly written but slightly outdated in that we know much of the content already. Now we have Rishi to talk about, Johnson is almost forgotten in the media. For now.
_______________________
*Here are some: that Johnson’s government was building forty new hospitals: untrue; that Corbyn had a £1,2 trillion spending plan: untrue, that Corbyn ‘thinks home ownership is a bad idea and is opposed to it’: untrue, and that Corbyn wanted to abolish the British armed forces: very untrue; Johnson once claimed on a hospital visit he had given up drink: untrue (he had been photographed drinking the day before and the day after); ‘‘There was a [baby boom] after the Olympics, as I prophesied in a speech in 2012’’: untrue (Oborne checked this himself); Johnson told activists he was building a new hospital ‘in the marginal seat of Canterbury’: untrue; ‘‘we will certainly make sure that the A&E in Telford is kept open’’: untrue; he claimed NHS funding would go up to £34 billion: untrue: ‘Adjusted for inflation, the £34 million comes down to £20.5 billion. Not even close to the £24 billion a year spent on average by the Labour government up to 2009’; on the Andrew Marr show Johnson said Corbyn wanted to ‘‘disband MI5’’: untrue; he also claimed Corybn had a ‘plan for unlimited and uncontrolled immigration’: untrue; he also said Corbyn would ‘‘whack corporation tax up to the highest in Europe’’: untrue, Labour said they would up to 26 per cent (France was 31 per cent at this time and Belgium was 29 per cent); he claimed Britain corporation tax was ‘‘already the lowest in Europe’’: untrue; Johnson likened Corbyn to Stalin: obviously untrue and, as Oborne says, this comment was to ‘trash history and language, and insult all of Stalin’s victims’; he continually promised there would be no customs checks or controls for good moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland: untrue; he claimed that Britain’s membership in the EU cost ‘an extra £1 billion a month’: untrue; the Tory social media altered a video of Sir Keir Starmer (then shadow Brexit secretary) replying to Piers Morgan about Labour’s Brexit position: they cut Starmer’s silence as he listened to the question and moved it to after Morgan had asked the question so he appeared to be flummoxed when in actuality, he answered ‘immediately, confidently and fluently’; the lies he told throughout the pandemic, causing Britain to be one of the worst sufferers, despite being one of the most capable.
Oborne has certainly been keeping receipts. The second chapter alone outlines a number of Johnson lies* with relevant footnotes to backup his claims. Several of them, he writes, he researched himself to get to the truth (which, at every count, was the opposite to what Johnson had said). Of course, Oborne also attacks Tony Blair and the lies he and the Labour party told to drag Britain into a war with Iraq. He, Oborne writes, began the path that led to Johnson and his lies. He does compare Johnson as Prime Minister to the Johnson he knew writing for The Spectator decades ago and wonders what changed. It’s no secret to anyone that Johnson was fired from two journalist posts for lying, and yet, he made it into No. 10 regardless. Oborne compares Johnson to Trump (both liars, though he points out Johnson’s aloofness compared to Trump’s outright revelling in it), and to Merkel on the pandemic front, just to prove how competent she was in steering Germany through that period. Oborne does show his arrogance and self-importance in the conclusion when he starts talking about how he is sending the manuscript of this book to the House of Commons and that people have to call out lies they hear as soon as they do. And if they are accused of lying by anyone in politics, to immediately sue them, even if it’s Boris Johnson himself. Clearly written but slightly outdated in that we know much of the content already. Now we have Rishi to talk about, Johnson is almost forgotten in the media. For now.
_______________________
*Here are some: that Johnson’s government was building forty new hospitals: untrue; that Corbyn had a £1,2 trillion spending plan: untrue, that Corbyn ‘thinks home ownership is a bad idea and is opposed to it’: untrue, and that Corbyn wanted to abolish the British armed forces: very untrue; Johnson once claimed on a hospital visit he had given up drink: untrue (he had been photographed drinking the day before and the day after); ‘‘There was a [baby boom] after the Olympics, as I prophesied in a speech in 2012’’: untrue (Oborne checked this himself); Johnson told activists he was building a new hospital ‘in the marginal seat of Canterbury’: untrue; ‘‘we will certainly make sure that the A&E in Telford is kept open’’: untrue; he claimed NHS funding would go up to £34 billion: untrue: ‘Adjusted for inflation, the £34 million comes down to £20.5 billion. Not even close to the £24 billion a year spent on average by the Labour government up to 2009’; on the Andrew Marr show Johnson said Corbyn wanted to ‘‘disband MI5’’: untrue; he also claimed Corybn had a ‘plan for unlimited and uncontrolled immigration’: untrue; he also said Corbyn would ‘‘whack corporation tax up to the highest in Europe’’: untrue, Labour said they would up to 26 per cent (France was 31 per cent at this time and Belgium was 29 per cent); he claimed Britain corporation tax was ‘‘already the lowest in Europe’’: untrue; Johnson likened Corbyn to Stalin: obviously untrue and, as Oborne says, this comment was to ‘trash history and language, and insult all of Stalin’s victims’; he continually promised there would be no customs checks or controls for good moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland: untrue; he claimed that Britain’s membership in the EU cost ‘an extra £1 billion a month’: untrue; the Tory social media altered a video of Sir Keir Starmer (then shadow Brexit secretary) replying to Piers Morgan about Labour’s Brexit position: they cut Starmer’s silence as he listened to the question and moved it to after Morgan had asked the question so he appeared to be flummoxed when in actuality, he answered ‘immediately, confidently and fluently’; the lies he told throughout the pandemic, causing Britain to be one of the worst sufferers, despite being one of the most capable.
February 17, 2021
Watching Prime Minister question time with increasing ire, and questioning where or when, never mind why, British society emphatically chose a liar and a cheat as the leader of the country, my husband bough me this. With forensic dissection, Peter Osborne notes the small and large steps along the way to a place where three word slogans rule over difficult grey areas. A must read for anyone interested in UK politics.
October 14, 2021
I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds the rest of us — Martin Hammond, Alexander Johnson's housemaster at Eton, in his school report. Epigraph to Chapter Six
Peter Oborne isn't somebody I'd have many political opinions in common with. I do, however, believe that he would listen to what I had to say with respect. He's an old-school Conservative and what he and I would absolutely agree on is the importance of integrity in politics. I spent most of the 1980s actively campaigning against the government of Margaret Thatcher (not a Conservative that Disraeli would have recognised, by the way, much more a Gladstonian Liberal) and I still believe I was right to do so, but I have never doubted that Thatcher knew what she was doing and told the truth as she saw it. Respect for truth has always been integral to the functioning of British politics; Oborne reminds us that it is part of the contract that persuaded the people to accept the sacrifices of two world wars.
When the senior MP and cabinet minister John Profumo told the House in 1963 that his extra-marital relationship with Christine Keeler involved no impropriety and was found to be short of the truth, he had to resign: not just his cabinet post but his parliamentary seat. Forty years later, when Tony Blair took the country into an illegal and futile war on the back of a brazen fabrication of "weapons of mass destruction", he escaped with impunity. It opened the door for a chancer, a man who loved to be the centre of attention, who longed to be King of the World, to plot his course to being Prime Minister by lying his way to the top. A ruthlessly ambititious man known as Al to his family and (very few) friends who hid his ruthlessness behind a fake persona called Boris. Who was sacked by the Times for making up stories and by his party leader for lying about his extramarital affair. Whose strategy when called to account was to distract by bluff, bluster and fake self-effacing bonhomie. There's a classic interview with Eddie Mair on YouTube where Mair refuses to be distracted and plays him straight as he confronts Al with his many lies and deceptions.
What Peter Oborne does in this book is to clinically dissect the career of Al 'Boris' Johnson and lay the lies, including many told to the out on the table as if for a post mortem examination. Oborne is not naive enough to believe that it is absolutely wrong to lie to the House; it has always been acknowledged that a lie may be the right thing in exceptional circumstances. He learned this when, as a young reporter for the Evening Standard, he was quick to denounce William Waldegrave for saying just that. Waldegrave, a patrician Conservative of the old-school, was my MP for a while and although I worked my guts out in the 1997 landslide to prise him from his hitherto rock-solid Bristol West seat and cheered as loudly as anybody when the result was declared (were you up for Waldegrave? You'd have missed him if you went to bed after Portillo but only by minutes), I can testify that whatever his politics he was a man of total integrity who always answered my letters personally and honestly with no trace of fobbing-off. Justifying himself afterwards, Oborne tells us, Waldegrave chose not to cite Churchill, who told many lies to the House as wartime leader, many of which were necessary, but to his non-partisan credit gave the example of the Labour chancellor James Callaghan who, in 1967, ruled out the devaluation he knew was about to happen. Not to have lied in those circumstances would have triggered a run on the pound that would have cost the Treasury and the country dearly.
Peter Oborne tells of a man who lied and deceived his way to the top political office. But he doesn't let it rest there. Johnson's lies and deceptions are part of a wider attack, we are told, on the very pillars of British democracy: Parliament, the rule of law, and the independence of the Civil Service and the judiciary. "Truth and liberal democracy," he reminds us, "are intertwined". If the people are to hold rulers to account then they must have access to objective truth. We can't know what was said in Buckingham Palace in the summer of 2019 but we can conclude that he lied to the Queen if he told her that he was able to command a majority of the House of Commons: clearly in the light of what happened subsequently he could not and he knew he could not. We know he planned to prorogue the House in order to ram Brexit through without proper parliamentary and when he was called out for doing so and found by the Supreme Court to have acted illegally he threatened to clip their wings. When long-standing Conservatives of principle challenged him they had the whip summarily removed. When top civil servants, there to give impartial advice and stop ministers from making total arses of themselves, didn't tell him what he wanted to hear he had them, including his own cabinet secretary, sacked and replaced with others who would. And so it goes on. In the week that I write this review, some time after first reading the book, we have learned from Johnson's former éminence grise Dominic Cummings, dropped like a hot brick when he became inconvenient, that in December 2019 Johnson signed a major international treaty with every intention of reneging on one of its most important provisions, purely for electoral advantage (or to "whack" the leader of the opposition, as he put it. Let's not forget, by the way, that Johnson's ineptness in his one previous experience of senior government office has left British citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe stewing in an Iranian prison to this day. He left that job before he was sacked for incompetence, but in typical style he timed it to his advantage and staged his exit as a principled flounce.
Look, you wouldn't expect me to be a big fan of any Conservative prime minister, but this small but explosive book is an important testament to our time, coming from a member of Johnson's own tribe with real honesty and integrity. If there's such a thing as a good Tory it's Peter Oborne in my view. Oborne acknowledges, as I do, that Johnson is a talented wordsmith, and that he was a good editor of the Spectator which I wouldn't really know about. His destiny, Oborne believes, would surely have been as editor of a paper like the Daily Telegraph, where he would have earned much more than his prime ministerial salary. Johnson's, and our, tragedy is that as a politician he is a walking, talking disaster.
May 26, 2021
I've not heard of Peter Oborne before this book and, having listened to the audio version with the author himself narrating, I'll be quite happy if I never hear of (or from) him again. Oborne is immediately odious, cranky, defensive and belligerent. He's the drunk at the party everyone tries to avoid because he's simply mean and borderline a bully.
There's also issues with the content of the book. There's literally nothing of worth about Trump in this ridiculously slim book and I see no reason why Oborne and his publishers felt the need to whack him into the title. This book is all about Boris Johnson. It didn't need to pretend to be about anything else.
Oborne claims he's not using all the lies he could have, having collated a great number, but I really wish he had used more and spent less time lecturing us all about just how bad Boris is and how he feels about it. For the lion's share of the time, this is simply nothing more than a rant.
It all gets a little embarrassingly obvious how much of a rant this is when Oborne goes off on one about how nobody likes him any longer, he can't get any work and he's been ruined by the collusions of the Press and the PM's office. In my experience, such one-way rants are rarely the whole truth and such is the belligerence of Oborne that I'm quite prepared to believe he was universally ditched because he's an explosive liability that nobody actually likes to work with. And in the press world, that takes some doing.
But.
That all said, Oborne does succeed in presenting important and sizeable lies which have been spouted by Johnson and his team which are demonstrably false and have been extremely destructive. He is persuasive about the origins - namely, Blair's time in office where cronyism and spin blossomed considerably - and how Johnson isn't just a new form of Tory, but is destroying the very foundations of ethics on which Tories traditionally stand.
I was very much impressed that at the end of the book Oborne gives suggestions for what we can do, as individuals and as a nation, to reverse the power of Boris. He doesn't just drunkenly and flamboyantly fling his drink around at the party declaring "I hate that c**t". There's just a glimmer that, despite his definite bias and emotional intensity, that there is reason, evidence and action to take here.
If only I could believe it. I'm afraid watching both how the media - including the BBC - utterly ransacked Corbyn, and how people in the street licked up this nonsense like it was kitten's milk, I've pretty much given up thinking there's any point doing anything. One day Johnson will be gone and we can spend years afterwards - just as we did with Blair - calling him names and shaking our heads in disbelief that anyone could have thought he was any good. But it will all be show. The sad fact is, Johnson knows he's got the Midas Touch with the nation and that we are too stupid on the whole to see what he's doing and stop him getting away with it.
The only hope comes from Johnson himself: that he will take that one step too far at which point everyone will give themselves a collective shake out of the malaise and go "say what?"; the charlatan will be seen for what he is and will go.
Or not. I don't know any longer and, frankly, I don't care. I just don't have the same bitterness and emotional intensity of Oborne. But then I hope, at parties, I'm not the other drunk who everyone wants to avoid.
There's also issues with the content of the book. There's literally nothing of worth about Trump in this ridiculously slim book and I see no reason why Oborne and his publishers felt the need to whack him into the title. This book is all about Boris Johnson. It didn't need to pretend to be about anything else.
Oborne claims he's not using all the lies he could have, having collated a great number, but I really wish he had used more and spent less time lecturing us all about just how bad Boris is and how he feels about it. For the lion's share of the time, this is simply nothing more than a rant.
It all gets a little embarrassingly obvious how much of a rant this is when Oborne goes off on one about how nobody likes him any longer, he can't get any work and he's been ruined by the collusions of the Press and the PM's office. In my experience, such one-way rants are rarely the whole truth and such is the belligerence of Oborne that I'm quite prepared to believe he was universally ditched because he's an explosive liability that nobody actually likes to work with. And in the press world, that takes some doing.
But.
That all said, Oborne does succeed in presenting important and sizeable lies which have been spouted by Johnson and his team which are demonstrably false and have been extremely destructive. He is persuasive about the origins - namely, Blair's time in office where cronyism and spin blossomed considerably - and how Johnson isn't just a new form of Tory, but is destroying the very foundations of ethics on which Tories traditionally stand.
I was very much impressed that at the end of the book Oborne gives suggestions for what we can do, as individuals and as a nation, to reverse the power of Boris. He doesn't just drunkenly and flamboyantly fling his drink around at the party declaring "I hate that c**t". There's just a glimmer that, despite his definite bias and emotional intensity, that there is reason, evidence and action to take here.
If only I could believe it. I'm afraid watching both how the media - including the BBC - utterly ransacked Corbyn, and how people in the street licked up this nonsense like it was kitten's milk, I've pretty much given up thinking there's any point doing anything. One day Johnson will be gone and we can spend years afterwards - just as we did with Blair - calling him names and shaking our heads in disbelief that anyone could have thought he was any good. But it will all be show. The sad fact is, Johnson knows he's got the Midas Touch with the nation and that we are too stupid on the whole to see what he's doing and stop him getting away with it.
The only hope comes from Johnson himself: that he will take that one step too far at which point everyone will give themselves a collective shake out of the malaise and go "say what?"; the charlatan will be seen for what he is and will go.
Or not. I don't know any longer and, frankly, I don't care. I just don't have the same bitterness and emotional intensity of Oborne. But then I hope, at parties, I'm not the other drunk who everyone wants to avoid.
January 18, 2022
18/01/22 update:
Well this aged well 😂😂😂
Well this aged well 😂😂😂
May 18, 2021
Full Review Here: https://thewrathofthepeople.blogspot....
Aside from having no conceptual clue of the reasons behind the current sentient cancerous growth currently inhabiting 10 Downing Street, a pretty good book.
To start with the positives, it is an unrelenting assault on the scumbag, fraud and liar Boris Johnson. Johnson, a disgusting sack of blubbering meat, who has managed to hide his inner elite sociopath (his constant history of racism, sexism, homophobia, and an almost religious worship of the rich) under a hideous masquerade of bloviating, charming, bumbling affableness, has managed to launch himself into the highest place in the land almost seemingly without effort. Oborne shares my, and I would hope all sane thinking peoples, utter distain and contempt for the unprincipled swinebag that is he. He meticulously picks apart Boris Johnson's endless lies. It must be pathological for the man, someone should study his brain when he dies and check it out, for it clearly is beyond what most humans are capable of. Johnson is a man so dishonest if he said the words "I love you" to whatever comfort woman he is currently playing about with he'd probably do it with two fingers crossed behind his back. Johnson is the objective proof that Britain is not a meritocracy. Born to disgustingly obscene wealth for no reason other than the background of his family, Johnson is an unprincipled, underhanded, lazy, useless, arrogant, lying, dishonest, cretinous, narcissistic, bloated fucking pig. He has a level of corruption that would put the Borgias to shame and a level of shit-peddling public showmanship that would P.T. Barnum wince. Squirming his way from the gilded halls of Eton (and then Oxbridge, where he spent the idle pastimes of his youth trashing restaurants and urinating on homeless people as part of the Bullington Club), he crawled his wretched hide through a long slow march through the institutions of Britain. As Oborne notes, he lied pathologically and constantly as his role in the Times and the Telegraph, the former of which he was sacked from for such liars. But the UK press is a bottomless well where every low-life monstrosity can roam, where no amount of genuine stupidity, personal immortality, journalistic unprincipledness and fawning sycophancy to power (as Oborne notes, the mainstream media, the cancer press in particular, has been uniquely propagandistic for him, regurgitating with all the trained obedience of crufts dogs every lie and smear that comes ejecting out from 10 Downing Street) is barred from getting a job. He then became mayor of London, whose main role there waste to waste money on vanity projects that went nowhere (Boris Bridge etc.) Having gotten way into becoming an MP, he then decided to jump onto the Leave camp, a campaign of dishonesty and lies that would only be surpassed by Johnson's 2019 campaign (the lowest point of British democracy yet). The main contributing role of the Leave campaign was to further isolate Britain's already dimming and increasingly irrelevant role on the world stage, ferment a level of racism and xenophobia in this country not seen since the mid 70s, and primarily becoming a petulant whining vehicle for older white English men in the home counties to account a litany of fabricated crimes (bendy bananas and regulating pillow cases and such) and cosplay the most ludicrous self-victimising narratives that painted the petty grievances of right wing conservatives against a right wing EU as equivalent to the French resistance to the Nazis. Ultimately, it ended in the murder of Jo Cox, a sitting MP. The Leave campaign helped radicalise Thomas Mair into his murder, by the obsessive and fanatical smearing of anyone even mildly disagreeable to the right wing's project as traitors. He won, of course, but it also shows as well as being an opportunistic liar from which principle is irreverent to personal gain, he's also got blood indirectly on his hands (although the grinning charlatan Farage bares most blame for that).
Now as PM, he has been as bad as anyone could have dreamt. Having insatiably lusted after power for all his life, in his jumped up and power craved little world where he was told from birth that he was destined and born to rule (the British education elite system being a kind of ghastly farm for the breeding of sociopaths to keep the establishment permanently in power), now has jumped his way into power, on the back of an election where he lied so often and so frequently Oborne had to make a website to keep track of them. With a vast pile of donor money to fill the online sphere with a deluge of made-up crap and bullshit, his dream was achieved. He is PM.
All this is well documented by Oborne, and is deserved celebration that there is at least one (and it is almost only one, British journalists have a level of scepticism and mental immunity to lies ranging from somewhere between zombies to animals) journalist willing to embody the principles of his job. As he notes, openly lambasting the media's total absence of critical scrutiny has got him effectively blacklisted from the British journalist class's closed clique of sycophants and flatterers.
But his analysis for why Johnson is in power is poor. Obore is a Tory, and old fashioned, one nation Tory. And herein lies the problem. Oborne is convinced Johnson and his cronies (like Cummings) are invaders to the Tory party, unprincipled lunatics that have declared war on the traditional conservative values of probity, decent and restraint. But he's wrong, this is a delusional reading. Johnson is as conservative as they come. For sure, more vulgar, more stupid, more diseased, more overtly populist than before. But fundamentally there is nothing he had been doing that has not been set in motion for the past 30 or so years. The complete absence of Thatcher from the book, who he admires, is just bizarre. He condemns Jonson for a cozy relationship with the press. He seems to have forgotten Thatcher's total unwavering support from the right wing press, as well as personally benefiting them (she turned a blind eye to Murdoch's purchasing of the Times in violation of the monopolies act, and the endless stream of gutter smears and deamination that was targeted to the miners is proof of their political use for her). He condemns Johnson and co for treating politics as a battleground from where no ability can be made to come to consensus. That was literally Thatcher's raison d'etre (again, her extermination of the miner's being an open war against the entire working class in Britain). He condemns Johnson for culture war politics, failing to note that Thatcher effectively criminalised homosexuality in Britain for Section 28. He condemns the reliance of spin and media wizardry, seeming ignoring her use of Saachi and Saachi for campaigning. True, the difference was Thatcher was a genuinely committed class warrior, she knew her class (petty bourgeois home owners and international capitalism) and fought for it with a level of brutality and single minded viciousness that we on the left can only dream of matching. Johnson is a showboating, preening, egomaniac whose entire career has been one long vanity project. But all he did was radicalise the tendencies of Thatcherism. In fact, he seems to have no knowledge of the slow, mounting right wing coup that has overtaken this country over the past decade. He is bewildered at the British public's voting of Johnson, yet the ghoulish figure of Farage droves politics rightward for years before that in successive victories.
Take too their contempt for the civil service. He seems to have no knowledge of neoliberalism, where all this comes from. In his obsession with painting a fairly ludicrous rosy view of British public life from the war to now), all the tendencies he most despises comes from the new right that colonised the Conservative party in ‘75 through Thatcher and co (along with genuine lunatics like Keith Joseph). He's missed the mark of the "end of conservatism" by about 30 years. He seems to have forgotten James Buchannan’s hatred and loathing for the civil service, for civil society, for anything outside of the market logic. Cummings may dress up his rhetoric in radicalism, but look behind it, but what with his hatred of supposedly recalcitrant civil service bureaucrats and veneration of tech wizards and some pseduo-spontaneous will that unique genius individuals are supposed to have (in a strain of Soreleanism that is there too), he's regurgitating neoliberalism 101, specifically Silicon Valley tech neoliberalism. The hallmark of Thatcherism, as Stuart Hall pointed out, was its "authoritarian populism", the application to traditional tory beliefs (family, church, nationalism etc.) with aggressive populist framing of market choice and personal freedom. The presence of Enoch Powell, about as traditional tory as one can get and the missing link between Heath and Thatcher, and who first pioneered this kind of politics, is nowhere to be found. In fact, as William Davies has pointed out brilliantly, the distain for objective knowledge, expertise and civil society forces was pioneered by Hayek, who fetishized abstract, wild, spontaneous "market forces" with its almost semi-mystic worship of the price form as the source of all knowledge, against what he saw was the attempt by planners to use facts, data and rationality to plan economies (Thatcher had a copy of his book in her handbag).
Because he has no understanding of neoliberalism, or more broadly capitalism, he cannot understand the broader dynamics that create Johnson. He berates him for being a project of the rich, of the press barons, but also the finance elites who took over parties' funding and let him in. Who allowed capitalism to reign unstrained in this country? Who allowed the rich to behave like second rate gods and rape all democratic procedures? Thatcher. He venerates a conservatism that is incompatible with the capitalism he values. Truth cannot exist under capitalism, as capitalism only values what is marketable and sellable, not truthful. The "marketplace of ideas" metaphor is so silly for precisely this reason. As the YouTube video essayist Peter Coffin rightly points out "in the marketplace of ideas attention is the currency". Neoliberalism is therefore incapable of valuing truth at all. If he wanted to destroy the power of the tech monopolies’ capacity to utterly destroy democracy he could support the nationalisation of them, turn them into public services subject to a binding charter of responsibilities, regulations and rights (like the BBC is, supposedly, bound to). But then that would clash to heavily with his own antiquated and deluded one-nationism. The institutions he venerates as pillars of conservatism (the civil service, church, family etc.) are impossible to sustain under the barrage of neoliberalism's relentless project of atomisation. Neoliberalism creates shoppers out of voters and consumers out of citizens. It is a cancer which has destroyed out societies utterly. Until one is opposed to it, all this blather about good old conservatism is sheer nonsense that is deflecting the truth of the situation.
However, I feel it would be remiss to dismiss him entirely. He is surely right to point out that Tories of old were, in fact, decent. I have tremendous respect for Harold Macmillan, whose administration actually built more houses than the previous Labour administration (his condemnation of Thatcher's "selling the family silver" being a case in point, and I have huge respect for Ted Heath, who was an old school believer in social stability and reform, unwilling to crush the labour movement out of memories of the effects of mass unemployment in the 30s was sincere in his speaking and beliefs and utterly contemptuous of spin and bullshit, disdainful towards the American alliance favoured by everyone today, and genuinely quite committed to social democracy . They are now long gone, and hearing their sincerity and genuine commitment to civil life (Heath, lest we forget, dumped Powell is seconds for his racism, concerned by his effect of society) is almost tragic to see in retrospect when looking at the current creatures paraded to lie on TV.
He is, after all, right to denounce Johnson on the things he does and says. No one can take qualms with the raw analysis of the book. He is right to upheld the principles of the civil service and of a commitment to truth telling. As much as I hate and loathe the British state, and think its history is appalling, what Johnson is doing is clearly far, far worse. We look set for brutal years of Torysim, without even the threadbare level of genuinely sincere liberalism to hold onto, which, at least in days past, did provide some means of access for forces of civil society to fight back. As with the global rise of right wing neo-fascist populism the left must find itself in the unenviable place of actually having to defend the basic principles of liberalism against right wing populism, for if the COVID crisis has shown us nothing is that right wing populism will send us all to utter hell. Neoliberal technocracy is terrible. Neo-fascist populism is unliveable .The politics of Johnsoniasm are a barrier to any leftist hopes in Britain, and it's continued success renders our goals ever the more harder. In that sense, Oborne should be cheered for at least, however naively, in trying to return this country to some sense of sanity.
Aside from having no conceptual clue of the reasons behind the current sentient cancerous growth currently inhabiting 10 Downing Street, a pretty good book.
To start with the positives, it is an unrelenting assault on the scumbag, fraud and liar Boris Johnson. Johnson, a disgusting sack of blubbering meat, who has managed to hide his inner elite sociopath (his constant history of racism, sexism, homophobia, and an almost religious worship of the rich) under a hideous masquerade of bloviating, charming, bumbling affableness, has managed to launch himself into the highest place in the land almost seemingly without effort. Oborne shares my, and I would hope all sane thinking peoples, utter distain and contempt for the unprincipled swinebag that is he. He meticulously picks apart Boris Johnson's endless lies. It must be pathological for the man, someone should study his brain when he dies and check it out, for it clearly is beyond what most humans are capable of. Johnson is a man so dishonest if he said the words "I love you" to whatever comfort woman he is currently playing about with he'd probably do it with two fingers crossed behind his back. Johnson is the objective proof that Britain is not a meritocracy. Born to disgustingly obscene wealth for no reason other than the background of his family, Johnson is an unprincipled, underhanded, lazy, useless, arrogant, lying, dishonest, cretinous, narcissistic, bloated fucking pig. He has a level of corruption that would put the Borgias to shame and a level of shit-peddling public showmanship that would P.T. Barnum wince. Squirming his way from the gilded halls of Eton (and then Oxbridge, where he spent the idle pastimes of his youth trashing restaurants and urinating on homeless people as part of the Bullington Club), he crawled his wretched hide through a long slow march through the institutions of Britain. As Oborne notes, he lied pathologically and constantly as his role in the Times and the Telegraph, the former of which he was sacked from for such liars. But the UK press is a bottomless well where every low-life monstrosity can roam, where no amount of genuine stupidity, personal immortality, journalistic unprincipledness and fawning sycophancy to power (as Oborne notes, the mainstream media, the cancer press in particular, has been uniquely propagandistic for him, regurgitating with all the trained obedience of crufts dogs every lie and smear that comes ejecting out from 10 Downing Street) is barred from getting a job. He then became mayor of London, whose main role there waste to waste money on vanity projects that went nowhere (Boris Bridge etc.) Having gotten way into becoming an MP, he then decided to jump onto the Leave camp, a campaign of dishonesty and lies that would only be surpassed by Johnson's 2019 campaign (the lowest point of British democracy yet). The main contributing role of the Leave campaign was to further isolate Britain's already dimming and increasingly irrelevant role on the world stage, ferment a level of racism and xenophobia in this country not seen since the mid 70s, and primarily becoming a petulant whining vehicle for older white English men in the home counties to account a litany of fabricated crimes (bendy bananas and regulating pillow cases and such) and cosplay the most ludicrous self-victimising narratives that painted the petty grievances of right wing conservatives against a right wing EU as equivalent to the French resistance to the Nazis. Ultimately, it ended in the murder of Jo Cox, a sitting MP. The Leave campaign helped radicalise Thomas Mair into his murder, by the obsessive and fanatical smearing of anyone even mildly disagreeable to the right wing's project as traitors. He won, of course, but it also shows as well as being an opportunistic liar from which principle is irreverent to personal gain, he's also got blood indirectly on his hands (although the grinning charlatan Farage bares most blame for that).
Now as PM, he has been as bad as anyone could have dreamt. Having insatiably lusted after power for all his life, in his jumped up and power craved little world where he was told from birth that he was destined and born to rule (the British education elite system being a kind of ghastly farm for the breeding of sociopaths to keep the establishment permanently in power), now has jumped his way into power, on the back of an election where he lied so often and so frequently Oborne had to make a website to keep track of them. With a vast pile of donor money to fill the online sphere with a deluge of made-up crap and bullshit, his dream was achieved. He is PM.
All this is well documented by Oborne, and is deserved celebration that there is at least one (and it is almost only one, British journalists have a level of scepticism and mental immunity to lies ranging from somewhere between zombies to animals) journalist willing to embody the principles of his job. As he notes, openly lambasting the media's total absence of critical scrutiny has got him effectively blacklisted from the British journalist class's closed clique of sycophants and flatterers.
But his analysis for why Johnson is in power is poor. Obore is a Tory, and old fashioned, one nation Tory. And herein lies the problem. Oborne is convinced Johnson and his cronies (like Cummings) are invaders to the Tory party, unprincipled lunatics that have declared war on the traditional conservative values of probity, decent and restraint. But he's wrong, this is a delusional reading. Johnson is as conservative as they come. For sure, more vulgar, more stupid, more diseased, more overtly populist than before. But fundamentally there is nothing he had been doing that has not been set in motion for the past 30 or so years. The complete absence of Thatcher from the book, who he admires, is just bizarre. He condemns Jonson for a cozy relationship with the press. He seems to have forgotten Thatcher's total unwavering support from the right wing press, as well as personally benefiting them (she turned a blind eye to Murdoch's purchasing of the Times in violation of the monopolies act, and the endless stream of gutter smears and deamination that was targeted to the miners is proof of their political use for her). He condemns Johnson and co for treating politics as a battleground from where no ability can be made to come to consensus. That was literally Thatcher's raison d'etre (again, her extermination of the miner's being an open war against the entire working class in Britain). He condemns Johnson for culture war politics, failing to note that Thatcher effectively criminalised homosexuality in Britain for Section 28. He condemns the reliance of spin and media wizardry, seeming ignoring her use of Saachi and Saachi for campaigning. True, the difference was Thatcher was a genuinely committed class warrior, she knew her class (petty bourgeois home owners and international capitalism) and fought for it with a level of brutality and single minded viciousness that we on the left can only dream of matching. Johnson is a showboating, preening, egomaniac whose entire career has been one long vanity project. But all he did was radicalise the tendencies of Thatcherism. In fact, he seems to have no knowledge of the slow, mounting right wing coup that has overtaken this country over the past decade. He is bewildered at the British public's voting of Johnson, yet the ghoulish figure of Farage droves politics rightward for years before that in successive victories.
Take too their contempt for the civil service. He seems to have no knowledge of neoliberalism, where all this comes from. In his obsession with painting a fairly ludicrous rosy view of British public life from the war to now), all the tendencies he most despises comes from the new right that colonised the Conservative party in ‘75 through Thatcher and co (along with genuine lunatics like Keith Joseph). He's missed the mark of the "end of conservatism" by about 30 years. He seems to have forgotten James Buchannan’s hatred and loathing for the civil service, for civil society, for anything outside of the market logic. Cummings may dress up his rhetoric in radicalism, but look behind it, but what with his hatred of supposedly recalcitrant civil service bureaucrats and veneration of tech wizards and some pseduo-spontaneous will that unique genius individuals are supposed to have (in a strain of Soreleanism that is there too), he's regurgitating neoliberalism 101, specifically Silicon Valley tech neoliberalism. The hallmark of Thatcherism, as Stuart Hall pointed out, was its "authoritarian populism", the application to traditional tory beliefs (family, church, nationalism etc.) with aggressive populist framing of market choice and personal freedom. The presence of Enoch Powell, about as traditional tory as one can get and the missing link between Heath and Thatcher, and who first pioneered this kind of politics, is nowhere to be found. In fact, as William Davies has pointed out brilliantly, the distain for objective knowledge, expertise and civil society forces was pioneered by Hayek, who fetishized abstract, wild, spontaneous "market forces" with its almost semi-mystic worship of the price form as the source of all knowledge, against what he saw was the attempt by planners to use facts, data and rationality to plan economies (Thatcher had a copy of his book in her handbag).
Because he has no understanding of neoliberalism, or more broadly capitalism, he cannot understand the broader dynamics that create Johnson. He berates him for being a project of the rich, of the press barons, but also the finance elites who took over parties' funding and let him in. Who allowed capitalism to reign unstrained in this country? Who allowed the rich to behave like second rate gods and rape all democratic procedures? Thatcher. He venerates a conservatism that is incompatible with the capitalism he values. Truth cannot exist under capitalism, as capitalism only values what is marketable and sellable, not truthful. The "marketplace of ideas" metaphor is so silly for precisely this reason. As the YouTube video essayist Peter Coffin rightly points out "in the marketplace of ideas attention is the currency". Neoliberalism is therefore incapable of valuing truth at all. If he wanted to destroy the power of the tech monopolies’ capacity to utterly destroy democracy he could support the nationalisation of them, turn them into public services subject to a binding charter of responsibilities, regulations and rights (like the BBC is, supposedly, bound to). But then that would clash to heavily with his own antiquated and deluded one-nationism. The institutions he venerates as pillars of conservatism (the civil service, church, family etc.) are impossible to sustain under the barrage of neoliberalism's relentless project of atomisation. Neoliberalism creates shoppers out of voters and consumers out of citizens. It is a cancer which has destroyed out societies utterly. Until one is opposed to it, all this blather about good old conservatism is sheer nonsense that is deflecting the truth of the situation.
However, I feel it would be remiss to dismiss him entirely. He is surely right to point out that Tories of old were, in fact, decent. I have tremendous respect for Harold Macmillan, whose administration actually built more houses than the previous Labour administration (his condemnation of Thatcher's "selling the family silver" being a case in point, and I have huge respect for Ted Heath, who was an old school believer in social stability and reform, unwilling to crush the labour movement out of memories of the effects of mass unemployment in the 30s was sincere in his speaking and beliefs and utterly contemptuous of spin and bullshit, disdainful towards the American alliance favoured by everyone today, and genuinely quite committed to social democracy . They are now long gone, and hearing their sincerity and genuine commitment to civil life (Heath, lest we forget, dumped Powell is seconds for his racism, concerned by his effect of society) is almost tragic to see in retrospect when looking at the current creatures paraded to lie on TV.
He is, after all, right to denounce Johnson on the things he does and says. No one can take qualms with the raw analysis of the book. He is right to upheld the principles of the civil service and of a commitment to truth telling. As much as I hate and loathe the British state, and think its history is appalling, what Johnson is doing is clearly far, far worse. We look set for brutal years of Torysim, without even the threadbare level of genuinely sincere liberalism to hold onto, which, at least in days past, did provide some means of access for forces of civil society to fight back. As with the global rise of right wing neo-fascist populism the left must find itself in the unenviable place of actually having to defend the basic principles of liberalism against right wing populism, for if the COVID crisis has shown us nothing is that right wing populism will send us all to utter hell. Neoliberal technocracy is terrible. Neo-fascist populism is unliveable .The politics of Johnsoniasm are a barrier to any leftist hopes in Britain, and it's continued success renders our goals ever the more harder. In that sense, Oborne should be cheered for at least, however naively, in trying to return this country to some sense of sanity.
April 8, 2021
Very disturbing book! I commend it to all who want to remain free from fear. Our democracy is threatened by a collapse of trust. Some good action recommendations included, we’re all involved!
February 10, 2023
I’m surprised to find myself reading a book by a noted Telegraph and Daily Mail journalist, and even more surprised to find myself agreeing with much of it. It was not an easy read, even if it is written in an accessible and easily digestible style, mostly because it lays bare the sheer scale of the cynicism of the Boris Johnson Conservative government. In truth however, and this narrative makes this conclusion abundantly clear, Johnson’s government has little if anything to do with traditional Conservatism. It is a new, and decidedly distasteful creation. A deformed chimera of neoliberalism and populism.
Even I, about as cynical an observer of Johnsonian antics as could possibly be conceived, found myself frequently shocked at the outright venality and mendacity of Johnson and his cronies. This most of all, made this book difficult to read. And witness how corruption at the head infects and corrupts the entire body. Hard reading indeed.
I can’t fault Oborne, even if he is a dyed in the wool Tory, and has sometimes unpalatable ideas. He has clearly tried to be fair, and at times he comes across as generous. I think that most of all, he is at a loss as to how things have got so bad, though he makes a brave attempt to explain it, and I cannot disagree.
At the end, he makes some suggestions as to how to respond, but these seem sadly redundant, just two years after publication. The zeitgeist has changed. We are in a post truth era, where even access to information is jealously guarded, and substituted by, not even ideological opinion, but outright editorial designed to facilitate political advantage.
As a result, I finished the book feeling it was more of a forlorn wail into the abyss of political expedience, than a call to arms, and consign this polemic to the sad but true category of narratives. It’s sad because it’s true, but that hardly means we should expect anything to change. The rubicon has been crossed and lying is just part of the background now. Thanks Boris.
Even I, about as cynical an observer of Johnsonian antics as could possibly be conceived, found myself frequently shocked at the outright venality and mendacity of Johnson and his cronies. This most of all, made this book difficult to read. And witness how corruption at the head infects and corrupts the entire body. Hard reading indeed.
I can’t fault Oborne, even if he is a dyed in the wool Tory, and has sometimes unpalatable ideas. He has clearly tried to be fair, and at times he comes across as generous. I think that most of all, he is at a loss as to how things have got so bad, though he makes a brave attempt to explain it, and I cannot disagree.
At the end, he makes some suggestions as to how to respond, but these seem sadly redundant, just two years after publication. The zeitgeist has changed. We are in a post truth era, where even access to information is jealously guarded, and substituted by, not even ideological opinion, but outright editorial designed to facilitate political advantage.
As a result, I finished the book feeling it was more of a forlorn wail into the abyss of political expedience, than a call to arms, and consign this polemic to the sad but true category of narratives. It’s sad because it’s true, but that hardly means we should expect anything to change. The rubicon has been crossed and lying is just part of the background now. Thanks Boris.
May 16, 2023
I think everyone that has ever heard of Boris Johnson associates him with lies. Oborne, who is an established veteran political journalist, in this relatively brief text, exposes the extent of the former Conservative Prime Minister’s almost total aversion to the truth. He reckons Johnson has told over thousands of lies and although the scope of the book is not to document every single lie and prove it is a lie, it just gives a brief overview of some of the worst and most notorious of these lies, especially those told in Parliament. Oborne believes and I think quite justly that by undermining the integrity of Parliament where under the Ministerial Code of Conduct it clearly states the rules with regard to any false information being given by an MP to be a serious breach. The problem of policing this is brought into question and the lack of proper discipline seems to have only encouraged Johnson to continue to bring the whole institution of government into disrepute.
In an act of political neutrality Oborne compares Boris’ lies with those told my Tony Blair, especially regarding the second Iraq war. He also mentions that Bill Clinton was a proven liar. Angela Merkel fairs more favourably with her poor East German background, hard-working ethics, and scientific rigour contrasting with Johnson’s privileged, elitist Etonian, comedy gaff brush-offs and aloofness. Donald Trump is seen as a mentor and the Atlantic relationship seems to have been convenient for both in their endless quest for omnipotent control of media and disregard for traditional political values, even those values inherent in their own parties. Oborne acknowledges the extremism of Trump but equates Boris’ vile lies to be on a par, if somewhat disguised within the bounds of British society.
When illustrating an example of a lie, Oborne is careful with regard to defamation laws, to provide footnote examples and often internet links with proof of the lie. He often refers to his own extensive website that documents more fully the comprehensive voluminous curriculum vitae of Boris Johnson’s lies.
I won’t spoil the book for the reader in this review to give examples of the many lies. Suffice it to say there are the obvious ones you probably know already plus some that escaped the radar of many including me. I don’t think it’s anything for Boris to be proud of and it will most probably be a long time before the integrity of Parliament and trust of the voting public is regained. A shameful legacy for a Prime Minister.
In an act of political neutrality Oborne compares Boris’ lies with those told my Tony Blair, especially regarding the second Iraq war. He also mentions that Bill Clinton was a proven liar. Angela Merkel fairs more favourably with her poor East German background, hard-working ethics, and scientific rigour contrasting with Johnson’s privileged, elitist Etonian, comedy gaff brush-offs and aloofness. Donald Trump is seen as a mentor and the Atlantic relationship seems to have been convenient for both in their endless quest for omnipotent control of media and disregard for traditional political values, even those values inherent in their own parties. Oborne acknowledges the extremism of Trump but equates Boris’ vile lies to be on a par, if somewhat disguised within the bounds of British society.
When illustrating an example of a lie, Oborne is careful with regard to defamation laws, to provide footnote examples and often internet links with proof of the lie. He often refers to his own extensive website that documents more fully the comprehensive voluminous curriculum vitae of Boris Johnson’s lies.
I won’t spoil the book for the reader in this review to give examples of the many lies. Suffice it to say there are the obvious ones you probably know already plus some that escaped the radar of many including me. I don’t think it’s anything for Boris to be proud of and it will most probably be a long time before the integrity of Parliament and trust of the voting public is regained. A shameful legacy for a Prime Minister.
October 9, 2023
I barraged through this in an adrenaline-fuelled 24 hours. It is one of the most revealing non-fiction books I’ve ever read. I especially recommend it to people who hate vile, intolerant cancel culture: it is by no means solely a preserve of the left! Peter Oborne proves how absolutely rampant it is on the right.
The main case this book makes is that Boris Johnson is not a case of an otherwise hardworking politician making a few errors that got blown out of proportion. Nor was he just a bumbling fool (as I mistakenly assumed).
Boris Johnson has been an extremely manipulative and deliberate liar. He lied all the way through the Brexit referendum (no, we were not spending “£1 billion extra” on the EU per month), and got sacked from previous jobs for lying, and lied through his teeth about how he was handling Covid, particularly re: care homes. The book chronicles countless examples with rigorously cited sources.
Above all, Peter Oborne promotes a better view of politics more in line with the Nolan vision: selflessness, accountability, integrity, prioritising fact above personal gain, and the defending of freedom of speech and thought with a dedication to TRUTH and transparency. He inspires you, as all non-fiction writers should.
The main case this book makes is that Boris Johnson is not a case of an otherwise hardworking politician making a few errors that got blown out of proportion. Nor was he just a bumbling fool (as I mistakenly assumed).
Boris Johnson has been an extremely manipulative and deliberate liar. He lied all the way through the Brexit referendum (no, we were not spending “£1 billion extra” on the EU per month), and got sacked from previous jobs for lying, and lied through his teeth about how he was handling Covid, particularly re: care homes. The book chronicles countless examples with rigorously cited sources.
Above all, Peter Oborne promotes a better view of politics more in line with the Nolan vision: selflessness, accountability, integrity, prioritising fact above personal gain, and the defending of freedom of speech and thought with a dedication to TRUTH and transparency. He inspires you, as all non-fiction writers should.
October 1, 2021
Truth matters. Oborne shows this is especially true in any liberal democracy and charts the demise of truth in our current political arena. Focussing on Boris Johnson and Trump he shows how both have manipulated a complicit media to get lies into the mainstream using pithy catchphrases.
Oborne mentions that government used to be like this but in Victorian era society was changed primarily by evangelical Christianity. He fails though to join the dots between our move into a post Christian world and many of the standards Christianity brought are no longer taken for granted. With this in mind, the methods that Oborne sets out for dealing with this crisis will fail. The only hope is a change in society that only Christianity can bring.
Oborne mentions that government used to be like this but in Victorian era society was changed primarily by evangelical Christianity. He fails though to join the dots between our move into a post Christian world and many of the standards Christianity brought are no longer taken for granted. With this in mind, the methods that Oborne sets out for dealing with this crisis will fail. The only hope is a change in society that only Christianity can bring.
October 3, 2021
Overall, this book was a fascinating to read. I was aware of Boris Johnson’s lies, but not to such an extent. His referencing makes his argument incredibly powerful. At times, it was a bit long-winded, but this was only due to Oborne’s desperation to make people understand the truth about our politics. Even if you aren’t necessarily “into politics” I really recommend you give this a read. You don’t need to have read anything about it before, just educate yourself and wake up to the lies.
Read
February 12, 2021A good analysis of Boris Johnson and his government and the role played by an uncritical and compliant media.
April 9, 2021
An essential read.
April 2, 2022
This exposes how modern politicians are constantly stretching the truth when they aren't deliberately lying but is somewhat spoiled by the sense that the author feels mistreated by his former employers, who employed one of his targets. Over half of the book is actually footnotes which suggests the writer is trying too hard to establish his central thesis
April 8, 2022
An honest look at a dishonest man. Needs to be on every college reading list.
April 24, 2022
Interesting. Nothing I haven’t read before, quite superficial and the ebook finishes at 60% so not really very much depth.
January 8, 2024
Interesting enough. We all know that Boris and Trump lied a lot, bit depressing to list all the lies out. Interesting points on how we as a society allowed it to happen (spoilers: we’re cowards).
September 16, 2024
extremely biased but very informative
March 2, 2021
This book is a short rant, sometimes repetitive, but mercilous and meticulously researched with references to justify its ethical message: Johnson is corrupt and the media has colluded with him. That Johnson has more than a passing similarity with Trump in his pursuit of power at any price and his (past) conspirators like Cummings helped him in his mission.
Peter Oborne admits he effectively lost his job and successful career in defence of his own stand point. His own moral compass is one of traditional, pre-Thatcherite conservatism which he argues Johnson has trampled over. He firstly sets out how lying in parliament is understandably contemptible and the price is resignation. He then paints a picture of Johnson as having a history of lying that cost him two jobs, going back to Eton, combined with a dubious ethical outlook that justifies his behaviour.
All the lies that Peter Oborne exhibits as evidence are out there in the public domain: 40 new hospitals when it was actually six; 20,000 new police officers when in fact there will no net gain. Then there are the attacks that are pure fabrication: £1.2 trillion Labour manifesto that had not even been published. His attacks on Corbyn during the election were vicious – the reference to “Kulaks” was unacceptable and went unchallenged. Then there were lies about Brexit and the trade barriers with Northern Ireland. But all these were not casual cover ups. Oborne points the finger at the Conservative Research Department with its campaign brief of false claims. Finally, there are the lies during the COVID pandemic about successful we are and going to be when we were not. Britain has made a string of mistakes (care homes) yet this Government is too narcissistic and vein to be honest to the public about them.
It is the shamelessness and systematic way that Johnson goes about his lying that provoked Peter Obrone to write this book. The book does not cover competency in power or in statecraft. The point is how Boris has used lies and untruths in pursuit of his hold on that power. Why the media (he gives examples of the BBC and Sky News) has not sought to challenge Johnson is never fully explained despite being a huge part of the problem.
The allegation about the use of lies to gain power are in plain sight – the string of untruths about his boasts about the NHS are shocking. Oborne goes so far as to say that Johnson has taken over the Conservative party from what it traditionally was. This has strong parallels with how Trump gained control of the Republican party but, to me, Boris is “Trump Light.”]
Oborne touches lightly on the Johnson/Cummings attack on the Civil Service. Change is one thing the Civil Service urgently needs but, under this cover, Johnson removed high level staff, in the same way he undermined ministers (Hammond), undermining the integrity of our institutions – the ‘public domain’ - in pursuit of creating an apparatus the pushes through decisions using political advisors, without robust testing. This is now manifesting itself with cronyism as seen by contracts during the pandemic going to friends of the Tory Party.
What shocked me internally is, as Peter Oborne points out, that whilst the media had their targets – Corbyn and Remainers – that they attacked remorselessly, they had little interest in firstly unpicking Johnson’s lies, and secondly a lack of journalist instinct to check that some of the attacks that came out of Johnson’s office were actually untrue. Previous examples of abuse of power – Arms to Iraq – led to the Nolan inquiry to correct wrongs. Oborne also uses the example of Blair and Labour of a party and leader who were believed lying was a necessary prop to power as their mission was virtuous. But Oborne argues Johnson lacks such an ideology – however the chapter describing his career doesn’t get underneath Johnson’s ideological leanings. The suggestion is Johnson used his brilliant gonzo journalism skills to good effect in his political rise to power.
The evidence stacks up so why has Johnson been given a free ride? Oborne is well placed to reflect on the populist success of Johnson but gives little room for analysis of the reasons beyond his personality. The fact is British political was in a difficult place with Brexit and the May administration. The nation was, and still is, divided in so many respects that Johnson has sought to repair with levelling up beyond the red wall. The sense that he has a partisan press and a voter base prepared to look the other way to pull the nation out its psychotic state is there but missing in the book. With the COVID pandemic and the cost of it, stagnant economy and the need to deliver on levelling up there are questions about how long the public and press will continue to tolerate Johnson riding roughshod over acceptable behaviour.
Peter Oborne admits he effectively lost his job and successful career in defence of his own stand point. His own moral compass is one of traditional, pre-Thatcherite conservatism which he argues Johnson has trampled over. He firstly sets out how lying in parliament is understandably contemptible and the price is resignation. He then paints a picture of Johnson as having a history of lying that cost him two jobs, going back to Eton, combined with a dubious ethical outlook that justifies his behaviour.
All the lies that Peter Oborne exhibits as evidence are out there in the public domain: 40 new hospitals when it was actually six; 20,000 new police officers when in fact there will no net gain. Then there are the attacks that are pure fabrication: £1.2 trillion Labour manifesto that had not even been published. His attacks on Corbyn during the election were vicious – the reference to “Kulaks” was unacceptable and went unchallenged. Then there were lies about Brexit and the trade barriers with Northern Ireland. But all these were not casual cover ups. Oborne points the finger at the Conservative Research Department with its campaign brief of false claims. Finally, there are the lies during the COVID pandemic about successful we are and going to be when we were not. Britain has made a string of mistakes (care homes) yet this Government is too narcissistic and vein to be honest to the public about them.
It is the shamelessness and systematic way that Johnson goes about his lying that provoked Peter Obrone to write this book. The book does not cover competency in power or in statecraft. The point is how Boris has used lies and untruths in pursuit of his hold on that power. Why the media (he gives examples of the BBC and Sky News) has not sought to challenge Johnson is never fully explained despite being a huge part of the problem.
The allegation about the use of lies to gain power are in plain sight – the string of untruths about his boasts about the NHS are shocking. Oborne goes so far as to say that Johnson has taken over the Conservative party from what it traditionally was. This has strong parallels with how Trump gained control of the Republican party but, to me, Boris is “Trump Light.”]
Oborne touches lightly on the Johnson/Cummings attack on the Civil Service. Change is one thing the Civil Service urgently needs but, under this cover, Johnson removed high level staff, in the same way he undermined ministers (Hammond), undermining the integrity of our institutions – the ‘public domain’ - in pursuit of creating an apparatus the pushes through decisions using political advisors, without robust testing. This is now manifesting itself with cronyism as seen by contracts during the pandemic going to friends of the Tory Party.
What shocked me internally is, as Peter Oborne points out, that whilst the media had their targets – Corbyn and Remainers – that they attacked remorselessly, they had little interest in firstly unpicking Johnson’s lies, and secondly a lack of journalist instinct to check that some of the attacks that came out of Johnson’s office were actually untrue. Previous examples of abuse of power – Arms to Iraq – led to the Nolan inquiry to correct wrongs. Oborne also uses the example of Blair and Labour of a party and leader who were believed lying was a necessary prop to power as their mission was virtuous. But Oborne argues Johnson lacks such an ideology – however the chapter describing his career doesn’t get underneath Johnson’s ideological leanings. The suggestion is Johnson used his brilliant gonzo journalism skills to good effect in his political rise to power.
The evidence stacks up so why has Johnson been given a free ride? Oborne is well placed to reflect on the populist success of Johnson but gives little room for analysis of the reasons beyond his personality. The fact is British political was in a difficult place with Brexit and the May administration. The nation was, and still is, divided in so many respects that Johnson has sought to repair with levelling up beyond the red wall. The sense that he has a partisan press and a voter base prepared to look the other way to pull the nation out its psychotic state is there but missing in the book. With the COVID pandemic and the cost of it, stagnant economy and the need to deliver on levelling up there are questions about how long the public and press will continue to tolerate Johnson riding roughshod over acceptable behaviour.
May 30, 2021
Very good analysis on BJ and why the current situation is so serious. The closeness of the government and the media is the most worrying of all, imo. Oborne is clearly very cross but this doesn't affect his clarity one bit.
April 15, 2021
A must read. Fascinating insight into the establishment of political lying by Boris Johnson as a strategic instrument of government eroding the very foundation of British institutions and values.
February 13, 2021
Despite not agreeing with the centre-right politics of the author, this was still a pretty cathartic takedown of Boorish(haha) Johnson. Unfortunately, it doesn't end with the suggestion that we storm 10 Downing Street, spit-roast him and then eat him.
May 9, 2021
In “The Assault on Truth”, Oborne argues that, far from Blair having taken the art of untruth to its logical limit, the Johnson Government has created a new and unprecedented rise in mendacity that has led to the electorate being unsure what to believe. Peter Oborne writes "I have been a political reporter for almost three decades and I have never encountered a senior British politician who lies and fabricates so regularly, so shamelessly and so systematically as Boris Johnson".
“The Assault on Truth” sets out to examine “how, under Boris Johnson and his soulmate Donald Trump, lying has become endemic in political culture”. Whilst it may have taken Oborne until 2019 to start commenting on the untruths of the Johnson regime, his condemnation of lying is consistent and he is calling out Johnson and his Government for that.
Oborne’s catalogue of Johnson’s mendacity is clear, precise and compelling. Many of the untruths he covers are historic and well recognised: the “bendy bananas” whilst at The Telegraph and the “£350m per week to the EU” Leave Campaign nonsense. This establishes Johnson’s long history of falsehood for advancement. This “scathing insider’s analysis” should be required reading for aspiring politicians and civil servants.
“The Assault on Truth” sets out to examine “how, under Boris Johnson and his soulmate Donald Trump, lying has become endemic in political culture”. Whilst it may have taken Oborne until 2019 to start commenting on the untruths of the Johnson regime, his condemnation of lying is consistent and he is calling out Johnson and his Government for that.
Oborne’s catalogue of Johnson’s mendacity is clear, precise and compelling. Many of the untruths he covers are historic and well recognised: the “bendy bananas” whilst at The Telegraph and the “£350m per week to the EU” Leave Campaign nonsense. This establishes Johnson’s long history of falsehood for advancement. This “scathing insider’s analysis” should be required reading for aspiring politicians and civil servants.
February 24, 2021
I enjoyed reading this book simply because it's an easy read but it's disappointingly short. If you follow the news closely, you probably won't learn much from it but it's good to be reminded of some of the times that Boris Johnson has behaved badly.
Peter Oborne tries to explore some of the reasons why Johnson has got away with this. Whilst the reasons he gives may be valid, he almost completely ignores the role of social media.
I am a similar age to Oborne and I share his view of how standards in public life have deteriorated and how this is detrimental to the running of government and the country in general. Not so long ago, a minister would resign after a minor mistake; now they are happy to knowingly lie to parliament and expect no repercussions.
Peter Oborne tries to explore some of the reasons why Johnson has got away with this. Whilst the reasons he gives may be valid, he almost completely ignores the role of social media.
I am a similar age to Oborne and I share his view of how standards in public life have deteriorated and how this is detrimental to the running of government and the country in general. Not so long ago, a minister would resign after a minor mistake; now they are happy to knowingly lie to parliament and expect no repercussions.
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