The Conservatives were jubilant. More shockingly, the opposition also agreed. The Labour leadership ordered its troops to vote in favour of a motion to activate one of the get-out clauses sneakily built into the 2011 Act, just as they had gone along with the government a few months earlier in the vote in favour of triggering Article 50 and committing the UK to leaving the EU. The Lib Dems, who with just nine seats must have figured they had little to lose, did the same. The Scottish Nationalists abstained. Only thirteen MPs voted against. And thus was the strangest, most dishonest and most downright unnecessary general election campaign in the history of the country kicked off.
And, against absolutely everyone’s initial expectations, it ended in disaster for May, destroying her majority, her authority and her credibility. To paraphrase Wilde, to lose one prime minister to a reckless gamble on a completely unnecessary vote may be regarded as misfortune; to lose two really does look like carelessness.
9
WHOSE TRUTH IS IT ANYWAY?
As G. K. Chesterton definitely never said, once people stop believing in politicians, the problem is not that they believe nothing – but that they believe anything. And that is what seems to be happening today.
More and more young voters are searching for new, outsider voices in which to place their faith, and failing to spot that they are turning to the same old career politicians who will only let them down. But they are not alone. Even seasoned voters are grasping for straws and strawmen, throwing themselves behind various fringe figures who have somehow ended up dictating the show from the sidelines. Political certainties that had coalesced around the centre are crumbling away as new movements emerge from the far left and right – although these new movements, on close inspection, look very like the old movements, rebranded and with better online operations. Strange coalitions of the two extremes are spawning in the fertile ground of the Internet: left-wing groups that have always championed human rights are marching alongside Islam’s most conservative campaigners; ‘campus fascists’ of the left are shouting down feminists and in turn being denounced by Marxist Milošević fans writing in the Murdoch press; the most right-wing flank of the US Republican Party appears to have formed an election-winning alliance with the Russians.
This is the age of both the nonsensical conspiracy theory and the covered-up reality that is too awful to be true. Blatant fictions are meme-ified and circulated without question, while inconvenient truths are denounced as ‘smears’ or ‘fake news’. Intellectualism, investigation and even knowledge itself have all somehow come to be mistrusted. As Michael Gove put it at the height of the nakedly dishonest Brexit campaign, ‘people in this country have had enough of experts.’1
In the absence of such authoritative voices, we are left to construct our own realities. And within our individual bubbles, we are increasingly choosing to believe some very odd things indeed.
* * * * *
‘David Cameron made a secret visit to Shetland to see this important field. But the visit was hushed up along with the latest results of test drilling, which are rumoured to reveal even more oil…. It has even been suggested that workers on the field stand down till after the referendum.’
Joan McAlpine, Daily Record, 25 August 2014
As the referendum on Scottish independence loomed in the summer of 2014, an extraordinary conspiracy theory started doing the rounds among campaigners for a ‘yes’ vote: oil giant BP had discovered new reserves worth £1 trillion in the Clair Ridge oilfield fifty miles off the Shetland Islands, but had been ordered to keep it a secret. Several bloggers and online activists claimed that workers had been ordered home on full pay until after the referendum. They had apparently been instructed to keep quiet, because the find would ensure Scotland had sufficient oil reserves not just to support itself after an independence vote, but for every man, woman and child to live in the lap of luxury. And the dastardly regime in London – government, BBC and press, they were all in it together – were not prepared to let them know anything about it.
How had the news leaked out? Well, as one graphic shared on social media summed it up, no less a figure than David Cameron ‘sneaks into Shetland, the First PM in 34 years to visit…. The Prime Minister’s plane was photographed when it landed’. Blurred shots of a small plane touching down, and a figure that was undeniably the prime minister strolling across a runway, accompanied the text.2 You could actually get a much clearer photo of Cameron visiting Shetland from the prime minister’s own Twitter account. The snapshot showed him stroking a tiny horse and was captioned: ‘I enjoyed seeing some Shetland ponies with two children who are on holiday here.’3 So ‘sneaky’ had his July visit been that he had made a speech in Lerwick Town Hall, laid a wreath at a war memorial and posed for press photographers on the deck of a fishing boat, outside a lighthouse and with the helicopter crew of the local search and rescue service. It had been widely reported throughout the Scottish media.
These inconvenient facts did not deter the conspiracy theorists. ‘Questions over why a recent visit to the Shetland Islands by Prime Minister David Cameron was kept secret from the Scottish public and media, have been met with silence from Number 10 Downing Street,’ roared the reputable-looking ‘independent politics and current affairs site’ Newsnet.scot on 7 August. It did, however, manage to wangle a response out of a bemused spokesperson at BP about the supposed trillion-dollar discovery. ‘None of those statements are based on any fact…. The Cameron visit to Shetland had no connection to BP at all…. No crew… have been sent home on full pay….’4
Despite such reassurances, the rumours made their way into the mainstream a few weeks later when Joan McAlpine – an SNP member of the Scottish Parliament and a former journalist who really ought to have known better – used her weekly column in Scottish paper the Daily Record to air them.5 The party’s then-deputy leader Nicola Sturgeon told BuzzFeed: ‘I have no evidence that there is any ongoing attempt to cover up discovered oil, but Westminster governments have, almost since North Sea oil was discovered, attempted to downplay it to the people of Scotland.’6
A Number 10 official who had been on the trip offered a slightly different take, saying the story was ‘bollocks… the closest we got to an oil well was a trip around the harbour.’7 A BP spokesperson pointed out that if the prime minister wanted to meet oil company executives, he would probably do it in London. No one even tried to explain why, even if the company had found extra oil in the area, Cameron would want to personally travel eight hundred miles just to look at the sea on top of it.
The government had given BP the go-ahead to exploit Clair Ridge in 2011. Platforms were due to be installed in 2015 and production scheduled to begin the following year. The company had long since announced that even with a proposed extraction rate of 120,000 barrels per day it would take them forty years to get out all the oil in the Clair Ridge area, which was itself an extension of the Clair field discovered way back in 1977. In the three years after the independence vote of 2014, the company did not announce any extra oil in the field (although they did manage to spill quite a bit of it in October 20168). By that point the price of oil per barrel had dropped to forty-eight US dollars – less than half the level it had been at when Sturgeon made her own visit to Shetland the month before the referendum and predicted a looming ‘oil boom’ for a soon-to-be independent Scotland.
‘Nick has been spoken to by experienced officers from the child abuse team and from the murder investigation team and they and I believe what Nick is saying is credible and true.’
Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald, appeal for information, 18 December 2014
A hysterical atmosphere gripped Britain following the revelations about royal intimate and friend of Mrs Thatcher, Jimmy Savile. Police, politicians and the press were all seized with guilt that they had looked the other way for so long; suddenly the pendulum swung and everyone saw paedophiles everywhere. Celebrity after celebrity had their reputations dragged through the mud over allegations dating b
ack decades, only for police to drop all action, or for trials to end in acquittal. Some – Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall, Fred Talbot, Max Clifford – had their depravity exposed in court and went to prison.9 The decades-long cover-up of the late Cyril Smith’s sexual and physical abuse of boys and young men at Cambridge House hostel and Knowl View school, both in his constituency of Rochdale, came spilling out into the open.10 Eventually, a joint report by police and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children revealed that Savile’s abuse had been on a scale that was scarcely imaginable.11
There was still more collateral damage. The BBC, which had failed to identify the predator hiding in their midst for several decades and then missed the chance to expose him even after his death, rushed to suggest that former Tory treasurer Lord McAlpine had been involved in a notorious abuse scandal centred on care homes in North Wales. In their reports the BBC had relied on a deeply damaged victim whose unreliability as a witness had been exposed in an earlier libel trial, and they hadn’t bothered with the most rudimentary checks on his claims, which he almost instantly withdrew. The mistake cost the broadcaster, and others who had promulgated the accusations, dearly.
Into the middle of this arrived Nick. Or rather ‘Nick’ – as someone who claims to have been the victim of sexual abuse he is entitled to anonymity for life. Nick was a middle-aged man who said that, as a child, he had been abused by a paedophile ring which included his stepfather. He decided to get in touch with Exaro, a website-cumnews agency which had filled a gap in the market no one knew existed by making itself a one-stop shop for stories about high-profile child abusers. An Exaro staffer accompanied Nick when he made the first of five complaints to police between October 2014 and April 2015. By the end of the process his story had escalated: he now claimed to be able to positively identify several of the men who had abused him. ‘Some of them were quite open about who they were. They had no fear at all of being caught, it didn’t cross their mind,’ he told the BBC in one of the media interviews he was conducting alongside those with the police.12 One, he alleged, was a former prime minister, Ted Heath. Another was a past home secretary, Leon Brittan. A third, he said, was their fellow MP Harvey Proctor, outed as gay by the tabloids in 1987. Others included in Nick’s allegations were the chief of the defence staff, other senior military figures and the then heads of both MI5 and MI6. VIP paedophiles did not come more VI than this.
It sounded too extreme to be true – especially when it came to the details of what Nick claimed had happened to him. On one of many occasions when he claimed he had been raped in the Dolphin Square apartment block, close to Westminster and home to many political figures, Nick said that Proctor had taken out a penknife and been about to cut off his genitals before Heath intervened; the more junior politician had changed his mind and decided to give the boy the penknife as a souvenir instead.13 Nick apparently also accused Proctor of murdering two other child victims who he stabbed, beat and strangled.14 Nick also said that he had witnessed another boy being deliberately run down in the street in Kingston upon Thames by members of the paedophile ring.15 ‘They amount to just about the worst allegations anyone can make against another person,’ Proctor said when he bravely went public to deny all the claims about him in the summer of 2015. ‘It is unbelievable because it is not true. My situation has transformed from Kafkaesque bewilderment to black farce incredulity.’16
But Scotland Yard were taking it very seriously indeed. An entire police investigation, Operation Midland, was set up based on Nick’s allegations. Twenty-seven detectives and six civilian staff were seconded to work on it; it ran for sixteen months and cost £2.5 million.17 Just one month in, the man in charge, Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald, announced publicly that what Nick had told his officers about the three murders was not only ‘credible’ but – in unequivocal, black-and-white terms – ‘true’.18
It may have been credible to some, but it was not true. No one ever came up with any corroborating evidence for Nick’s claims. Police searches of the homes of Nick’s alleged abusers turned up nothing. The most basic of checks into the story about the hit-andrun killing established there was no evidence of any such incident ever occurring. Proctor ‘is an innocent man, as indeed are all the men named by “Nick”,’ concluded Sir Richard Henriques, the retired judge who was brought in to review the whole sorry affair and identify the ‘significant failings’ in the police’s conduct of the investigation.19 ‘It is difficult, if not impossible, to articulate the emotional turmoil and distress that those persons and their families have had to endure.’20
Nick is, at the time of this writing in May 2017, under investigation by a different police force to see if he should be charged with perverting the course of justice. Henriques noted that there exists ‘an important category of complainant, distinct from the deliberately untruthful, namely, “troubled people often have something that happened in life, even if it is not what they’ve reported”.’21 One of the tragedies of child abuse is that it can screw you up so much it makes you an unreliable witness as to what has actually happened to you. Publicity over high-profile cases prompts false memories as well as long-buried true ones.
In the meanwhile Exaro – which published reams of dubious claims about celebrity sex abusers and used to boast that Operation Midland ‘only happened as a consequence of evidence that we found’ – has gone out of business.22 Newspapers which queued up to buy Exaro’s exclusives, or which breathlessly chased claims made under the cover of parliamentary privilege by MPs such as Tom Watson, Zac Goldsmith and Simon Danczuk, now pour scorn on the police for their credulity.
Many of the rumours they’d fallen for had been doing the rounds for years. Brittan was in the headlines by 2014 for supposedly losing a ‘dossier’ on child abusers given to his department by an MP in the early eighties.23 (The nudge-nudge coverage harked back to old allegations about Brittan’s sex life that had been thoroughly debunked by journalists and blamed on what Private Eye called ‘MI5 spooks and loonies who object to having a Jewish Home Secretary’.24) Tales of depravity at Dolphin Square had been aired in the early nineties, along with allegations about Lord McAlpine, in the notoriously unreliable Scallywag (which you may recall spreading inaccurate rumours about John Major in chapter 4). They had been circulating around dark, conspiracy-minded corners of the Internet for much of the intervening two decades.
The difference was that, by this time, people were ready to believe them.
‘A distinguished Oxford contemporary claims Cameron once took part in an outrageous initiation ceremony involving a dead pig. His extraordinary suggestion is that the future PM inserted a private part of his anatomy into the animal’s mouth.’
Daily Mail,20 September 2015
One of the first things journalists should do when somebody tells them something is consider why. Why are they telling me this? What’s in it for them? How might they benefit from the story emerging? Do they have a grudge against the subject? Neither payoff nor payback is necessarily a reason to distrust the information, but any half-decent hack will keep a source’s motivations in mind. Of course the very top priority, it should go without saying, is to establish whether what they are telling you is true or not.
When the Daily Mail blared the juiciest bit of former Conservative treasurer Lord Ashcroft’s ‘unauthorized biography’ of the prime minister from its front page in September 2015, it was pretty upfront about the first possibility: the headline was ‘REVENGE!’ ‘Today we lift the lid on the extraordinary feud between David Cameron and a billionaire Tory donor that has triggered the most explosive political biography of the decade,’ the paper chortled. Ashcroft, who to refresh your memory from chapter 3, had never stood for office and had massively embarrassed the party by finally fessing up to his dubious tax status just ahead of the 2010 General Election, had been deeply offended when the new PM only offered him a relatively junior post in his government right after it. ‘I regarded this as a declinable offer,’ he whinged in
his book. ‘It would have been better had Cameron offered me nothing at all.’25 So, in a vengeance plot straight out of the school playground, he decided to spread a rumour that the prime minister shagged pigs. Or rather, that when Cameron was at Oxford University, he had ‘inserted a private part of his anatomy’ – the book didn’t specify which one, but it was pretty obvious – into the mouth of a dead one at a drinking society party.26
Ashcroft’s source was another MP who was at Oxford at the same time. (David and Samantha Cameron apparently had a pretty good idea which one, and also blamed him for spreading hurtful rumours about their disabled son Ivan, who died at the age of six.) But even this person didn’t claim to have witnessed the incident personally. As Ashcroft put it in his breathlessly bad prose: ‘Lowering his voice, he claimed to have seen photographic evidence of this disgusting ritual…. The MP also gave us the dimensions of the alleged photograph, and provided the name of the individual who he claims has it in his keeping. The owner, however, has failed to respond to our approaches.’ Ashcroft didn’t even seem to believe it himself. ‘Perhaps it is a case of mistaken identity. Yet it is an elaborate story for an otherwise credible figure to invent.’27
It was the sort of story that would be slapped down in seconds by the least experienced editor on a local free sheet. But because Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre hated Cameron almost as much as Ashcroft did, he was quite happy to run it on his front page. It probably didn’t hurt that as a billionaire, Ashcroft had deep enough pockets to defend the paper from any ensuing libel claim. He had been quick to rush to the courts when baseless stories about his own behaviour were published, and nor was this the first occasion when he had taken his revenge by literary means. After suing The Times a decade previously he had not only written and published a book about the affair but sent free copies of it to MPs and libraries throughout the country. He is – and to be clear, this is just vulgar abuse and therefore unactionable – a very weird little man.
The Lies of the Land Page 24