‘WHEN I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’
You can’t lie your way out of a credibility crisis any more than you can spend your way out of a debt crisis. Keir Starmer is learning both these lessons; we’ll focus on the first.
Our Diary of a Nobody prime minister has recently been called a liar by Andrew Neil and suffered a corrective scolding by Community Notes on X. This is not a great look. A sitting prime minister has been called on his lies by a highly trusted and credible truth-seeker. And also by Andrew Neil.
I can’t remember off the top of my head what that correction was for, only that it happened last week, and that it was very funny. As with migrant arrivals, the number of lies Starmer tells on a given day will vary according to the weather, but also, as with those arrivals, the overall trend is relentlessly upwards.
It could have been to do with those invasion statistics come to think of it. Or was it the most recent Net Zero doublethink? Or perhaps was it a casual untruth concerning the cost of the bafflingly crazy Chagos affair? It’s difficult to disaggregate the rubbish now being flown in from Starmer Fantasy Island.
At this point, given the level and output of his government’s mendacity, perhaps the details shouldn’t trouble us. No itemization is necessary or even possible. Starmer’s lies are like grains of sand: countable only by God himself.
This isn’t just about breaking manifesto promises, it’s also to do with the creation ex nihilo of policies nobody even dreamed of, and which seem designed to maximise national self-harm. Whatever is presented in an election manifesto is nonsense; we know it’s nonsense, and the politicians know we know it’s nonsense. That’s the etiquette. Breaking a manifesto promise is like lying about how good the food tastes at some ghastly dinner party – it’s just something you’re expected to do.
But the deal has always been that when you move from opposition to government you at least keep something of the spirit of what you said to get there. Praising the food is one thing; thanking the hostess by asking her to order you a Dominos is quite another.
Starmer’s shamelessness reflects the new culture of politics and journalism: a postmodern Humpty Dumpty universe in which words mean what the regime class want them to. Take, for example, The News Agents, a podcast adored by the sophisticatedly stupid. For the presenters of this clown show, the world is not a place in which things happen. There are no events as such, just ‘narratives’ whose grammar and overall aesthetic can only be understood viathe heuristic practices of polite Hampstead intellectualism.
The News Agents offers not so much an analysis of real life as an alternative reality, impenetrable and baffling to any normal person unfortunate enough to stumble into it. This is not to say it serves no decent purpose, just not now. Along with its inbred cousin, The Rest is Politics, it could usefully be put in a glass case so that future generations can study how people with influence were able to describe a world nobody lived in. I suspect they’d be baffled these people were ever taken seriously.
Unfortunately, they are. Starmer is just an uncomfortable ambassador from this strange postmodern world in which language doesn’t try to describe reality but to cast spells on it, using words in a way that turns men into women, for example.
‘To thine own self be true, and thou canst be false to no man’ – Shakespeare was astute when it came to the tragedy of self-delusion, the worst of all forms of dishonesty, as those who practise it go mad. Starmer’s lies seem to have that texture, that sense of being more pathological than just a bad habit. If he says that something is true, it must be true by virtue of him saying it is, and only a madman, or a member of the ‘far right’, would disagree.
I think it was Kierkegaard who said that the most effective revolutions leave the buildings intact. The journo-political class, leftist in worldview, has incubated its revolution in language. It’s hard to speak out against this except by using the same language ourselves. Every time we say ‘misinformation’ instead of ‘lie’, or ‘unacceptable’ in place of ‘evil’, we collaborate in their war on truth. This is how ‘gaslighting’ works: by exploiting the post-truth conceit that there is no more to how things are than how they are described.
Starmer is entitled to fake his way into madness, but not to take us with him. When the lies keep coming, it’s tempting in the end to go along with them. Perhaps the best way to stay sane is to double-down on the stuff that really annoys the anarcho-tyrants of the governing class: tell the truth even when – especially when – it offends the permanently aggrieved, take long car journeys when unnecessary and buy more cigarettes, preferably on the black market.
It is in these minor but cumulatively significant transgressions that we might get some pushback against Starmer’s Alice in Wonderland, a place where no sane person stays that way for long.
