Thou shalt not bear false witness – unless thou art prepared for a slapped wrist

This time four years ago, my wife and I flew back to the United Kingdom from a holiday in South-East Asia. As it turned out, we were just ahead of the first wave of the COVID pandemic. Within a couple of weeks the country was in lockdown.

We’ve done that trip a few times since then. Last week, we arrived home from Singapore bedraggled and somewhat ratty after a 14-hour flight. We don’t watch much TV when were out of the country, so we missed Breathtaking, a three-part drama documentary about Britain’s COVID experience. It’s based on one doctor’s recall of life in a busy public hospital as the virus took hold. Watching the first episode was quite a queasy experience. Not only the sight of doctors and nurses struggling to come to grips with a new virus that was willfully refusing to behave in the manner prescribed by the public health “guidance” at the time, but also in its recall of the time when we all dutifully watched the live broadcasts from Downing Street by ministers and civil servants. A time when we were hoping for Churchillian inspiration, but ended up with Boris’s bombast.

It also recalls the growing realisation by health service staff that they – and as a consequence we – were being lied to by the authorities. Thus the changes in “guidance” which downgraded the level of protective equipment required when treating COVID patients – against the evidence seen by front-line staff every day – was the result not of the considered deliberations of distinguished scientists and epidemiologists. They were required because the UK was running out of equipment. The lies were considered justifiable because the powers that be didn’t want us to panic.

No doubt all of this stuff will be covered by the ongoing public inquiry into the pandemic. And actually, I saw nothing I hadn’t already read about in Dr Rachel Clarke’s recall of that traumatic time. I also have my own resources to fall back on as a reference while watching the series. From the middle of March 2020, as things started going distinctly pear-shaped, I started writing a diary of the pandemic in this blog. I ended up writing what was effectively a daily lockdown column for 135 days in succession. By my reckoning that was quite an achievement. Whereas newspaper columnists often have teams of dedicated researchers to feed them stories and background information, I had only me. But then again, like most of us who spent our days confined to quarters, the one thing I had in abundance was time.

When I look back at what I wrote then, much of the negative stuff about how we, or more specifically the government, handled the pandemic, was clearly evident, and was being written about by people, including Rachel Clarke, who were far more qualified to comment than me. But what continues to make me go green around the gills is the ease with which the lies issued forth from so many mouths – as though the truth or otherwise of what Johnson and his gang were telling us was more or less irrelevent. Much of the same, of course, was happening in the United States at the time, except that with Trump at the helm, the response to the pandemic descended into the theatre of the absurd.

Whether Breathtaking will end up being as consequential as Mr Bates vs the Post Office , the other British docudrama that hit our screens at the beginning of this year (which I wrote about here), remains to be seen. That seems unlikely, because we all went through the pandemic. Breathtaking will be a dramatic accompaniment to the COVID Inquiry report, just as the Navalny documentary was a compelling backdrop to the sombre commemorations in Moscow. The ITV series on the Post Office prosecutions caused the whole scandal to blow up in a welter of outrage. It was already known about before the series, but only by a small minority of the country.

I’m not sure whether the pandemic has any more surprises in store for us, unless definitive proof emerges on the precise origin of the virus and the cause of its escape. But the Post Office scandal keeps on giving.

The row between Henry Staunton, the Post Office chairman, who was brought in just over a year ago to help clean up the mess, and Kemi Badenoch, the minister who fired him, has become quite spectacular. In each side’s version of the circumstances of the firing, someone was clearly lying. Was it the vastly experienced corporate leader whose reputation was previously impeccable and who, you might think, had little reason at the age of 75 to lie about what appeared to be the final assignment of his career? Or the ambitious minister, tipped for the top job, for whom, in an earlier age, the consequences of lying in her statement to the House of Commons would be fatal to her political career?

But when was that era of unimpeachable rectitude, when a minister caught lying risked instant career death? I was going to write a few words lamenting its passing. But then I thought further, and realised that it probably never existed.

The period I was thinking about ran from the end of the Second World War to the late 1990’s. You could make a case for saying that, in the UK at least, a population exhausted by war, revolted by the lies spouted by the Nazis, but also weary about being lied to by their own side for “reasons of national security”, developed an intolerance for political lies. Hence, in 1963 John Profumo, the War Minister at the time, was booted into obscurity when he lied about his relationship with Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old model.

The unforgivable started becoming survivable when New Labour turned political communications into an art form, and after the turn of the century the social media wrested control over methods of mass communication away from traditional outlets such as press and TV.

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the like made lying with impunity not only feasible but highly desirable. From then onwards, political impropriety, when discovered, continued to be frowned upon, yet many of those who were caught with their trousers down managed to find a way back into power. And if they didn’t achieve political resurrection, they still had other options for cashing in on their notoriety – books, reality shows, podcasts, or a nice little earner with Russia Today. More recently, Boris Johnson lied blatantly and regularly while holding the highest office in the land. Allegations of influence peddling, corrupt fast-track procurement and dubious honours for wealthy contributors have eroded public confidence in the integrity of politicians and public servants. We no longer believe their words, but, more fundamentally, we don’t trust their motives.

So on one level, Badenoch and Staunton can’t win, whichever of them is actually telling the truth. There will be one constituency ready to believe that Badenoch is a lying politician whatever evidence exists to the contrary, and another easily convinced that Staunton is a greedy corporate bandit taking revenge for the fact that his last little earner has come to a premature end.

My experience is that whatever the material consequences, a reputation can take the blink of an eye to shatter and a lifetime to rebuild. And that reality applies as much to an organisation as it does to an individual. Which leads me to wonder why so many people are prepared to risk their good names on flimsy lies. Are they arrogant enough to believe, like Trump, that they can get away with it? Or are they just stupid?

And what of the liars of yesteryear? Did the political villains of the 50s and 60s lie just as barefacedly because there was a decent chance that their colleagues and employers would be willing to cover up for them? Or were the print and broadcast media less prepared than now to expose the wrong-doers – especially on the grounds that “there but for the grace of God go I”? Perhaps the reality of the post-war decades was that political malefactors managed to hide their behaviour more effectively than they can today because in those days there was still a high level of trust in public servants. Kim Philby was never suspected of espionage by those who should have unmasked him because he was “our kind of person”. John Le Carre had much to say in his books on that subject.

I have no answers to these questions, but I do wonder whether we have reached peak deception – the point at which the atmosphere of public discourse is so polluted by untruth that it will never again be easily breathable.

All I know is that many people, myself included, find themselves mistrusting individuals and organisations whose honesty we would never previously doubt. Who would imagine that the Post Office, of all creatures, would turn on and harass so many of its employees without exploring all the possible causes of the allegedly missing funds?

“Trust no one” has become our default attitude. That includes our leaders, our neighbours, our parents, our children and just about everyone else we encounter in our daily lives. Is there a road back from this pervasive paranoia? I’m sure there is, but perhaps we need to develop a different kind of intelligence to protect ourselves.

Which will probably be the subject of another post in the not too distant future.