Peter Oborne
London: The Free Press
(Simon and Schuster), 2005, £7.99, p/b
Before his minutely detailed account of some of New Labour’s lies Oborne gives us a potted history of lying in the past 25 years to show us how relatively truthful New Labour’s predecessors were. This old nag won’t run. For example, he merely examines Mrs Thatcher’s lies, not Conservative lies of the period. (Just think of all the lies told about Labour-controlled local government in the 1980s!) Nor does he mention Northern Ireland. Starting his historical sketch in 1979 he can omit the biggest post-war domestic lie, Heath’s claim that the EEC was merely a free trade area, and the events of the 1973-77 period (whose effects were still felt in the 1980s) when the Tory right, briefed by a section of the British spooks, believed that the Labour Party and the unions were a Communist conspiracy and were thus ‘a legitimate target’. Oborne’s idea of ‘political’ simply does not encompass activities by the state, let alone the secret state.
In one sense the new media-political relationships that have accompanied New Labour were going to happen any way as the media and PR grew in importance. New Labour’s encounter with Bill Clinton’s election campaign techniques and the availability of the money from Michael (now Lord) Levy merely speeded things up. In another sense it is just the political parties adopting the methods of the psy-ops people in the state. The intimate relationship between a Peter Mandelson and certain journalists is a facsimile of the relationship that the state’s disinformation people IRD most notably had with journalists all the way through the Cold War.
Oborne tells us that New Labour’s mendacity amounts to a ‘new epistemology’, a kind of post-modernist relationship with the truth. It’s a nice idea but it is far too generous to the people concerned. They just told a bunch of porkies which the media have been dumb enough or corrupt enough to print.
Oborne’s account of the history of political lying may be incomplete and his outrage at New Labour may be partisan but this is a handy compendium of New Labour lies and the media’s complicity in most of them.