And so the story bloomed and sent out shoots through a gamut of online forums, Facebook pages and fake news sites. Alefantis’s social media pages and those of anyone associated with him – even if they had simply ‘liked’ his business’s Facebook page – were mined for suspicious material. Any photograph featuring a child was held up as evidence of nefariousness; customers who posted innocent family snaps found those photos reproduced across the Internet with their own children identified as the victims of the supposed paedophile ring. One photo circulated on Twitter of what was supposedly an ‘Enormous refrigerated room under Comet Ping Pong’ with the hashtag #Killroom. In vain did Alefantis protest that his restaurant didn’t even have a basement.
‘Everyone associated with the business is making semi-overt, semi-tongue-in-cheek, and semi-sarcastic inferences towards sex with minors,’ claimed one fervent believer. Before long, in a perfect example of people searching for deeper meanings where the most obvious ones would do, it was determined that whenever anyone connected to the pizza restaurant used the word ‘pizza’, they were actually using a code word for children trafficked for sex – as opposed to, you know, pizza.63 By the end of November, Alefantis and his staff were receiving so much abuse online and in phone calls and text messages that he hired security to protect his business. The police in DC were detailed to keep an eye on his restaurant.64
Enter Alex Jones, the bloviating broadcaster behind the Infowars website, which transformed conspiracy theorizing into a quite lucrative business. Jones, who sometimes stripped down to his XXL waist to deliver his wide-eyed right-wing rants to camera, had previously claimed that both the 9/11 attacks and the mass murder of elementary-school students in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, in 2012 were faked, inspiring his online supporters to shower hate mail down on the grieving relatives of their victims.65 But he is not some fringe character: his website gets around 3.9 million monthly views and his five-days-a-week radio programme is syndicated to more than one hundred stations across the US.66 In 2015 he had been given a huge credibility boost when Donald Trump himself appeared on his programme and told him: ‘Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.’67 And Jones did not let Trump down either. Just ahead of polling day he informed his followers that ‘Hillary Clinton’s ties to satanic rituals and the occult have been well-documented for decades’, that she had been a regular attendee at a ‘witch’s church’ during her husband’s presidency and that ‘many FBI agents consider Clinton to be “the Antichrist personified.” ’68
On 27 November Jones waded into the restaurant business. ‘Pizzagate is real,’ he barked on his show. ‘The question is: How real is it? What is it? Something’s going on. Something’s being covered up. It needs to be investigated…. You have to investigate it for yourself.’69
One self-confessed listener did exactly as he was told. On 4 December Edgar Welch, a twenty-eight-year-old father of two, drove 350 miles from his home in North Carolina to take a ‘closer look’ at the place he had read and heard so much about, in the hope that he would be able to ‘shine some light on it’.70 According to court documents, he decided somewhere along the way that he had a duty to rescue the children he was convinced were being held captive in the restaurant. In texts he sent to a friend, Welch said he was ‘raiding a pedo ring, possibly sacraficing [sic] the lives of a few for the lives of many. Standing up against a corrupt system that kidnaps, tortures and rapes babies and children in our own back yard.’71
He walked into Comet Ping Pong carrying an assault rifle and a handgun. Terrified customers – including a number of families with children – fled the building. Welch fired three shots, but surrendered to police when, in his own words, he had convinced himself that there was no evidence ‘children were being harbored in the restaurant’. He would later plead guilty to assault with a dangerous weapon and interstate transport of a firearm. The police report on his arrest made it clear that he had been following up nothing more than a ‘fictitious online conspiracy theory’.72
Alex Jones finally admitted the same in March 2017, issuing an apology to the beleaguered restaurant owner and admitting: ‘To my knowledge today, neither Mr. Alefantis, nor his restaurant Comet Ping Pong, were involved in any human trafficking…. I want our viewers and listeners to know that we regret any negative impact our commentaries may have had… we hope that anyone else involved in commenting on Pizzagate will do the same thing.’73 The following month, as part of a custody battle with his wife Kelly, Jones’s lawyers told a court in Texas he hadn’t really believed any of the ideas he had been aggressively pushing on his audience over the previous twenty years: ‘He’s playing a character. He is a performance artist.’74
But the story will not die. At its height in November 2016, bewildered staff at Comet Ping Pong counted five Twitter posts per minute with the hashtag ‘#pizzagate’.75 In May 2017, they were still running at twelve per hour – and that is just counting the ones from people pushing the conspiracy, not the few pointing out it has long since been thoroughly debunked.76
When no one believes anything any more, this is where we end up.
CONCLUSION
So what do we do? How can we stop politicians from lying? And how can we convince ourselves to start believing them again when they actually are telling the truth?
A few simple measures would at a stroke remove at least some of the motivations for dishonesty. Encouraging more independent candidates into politics at all levels would do away with the deadening disciplinary pressure to stick to a party line you might not believe in; it would also reward the public with more candidates with experience of the real world, as opposed to the current uninspiring crop of PPE-degree-and-four-years-as-aspecial-adviser fodder who dominate both sides of the House. Not only might independent MPs have something useful to say, but with less to lose career-wise, they would feel more free to say it. Fat chance, though. The party system is horribly, deeply entrenched. As one example, in 2012 a new layer of bureaucracy was created in the form of police and crime commissioners to oversee forces throughout England and Wales. No one really wanted them, but the coalition government claimed we did, and there is no reason on earth for such posts to be party-political. But of the forty candidates elected to the posts in 2016, all but three were representatives of Labour, the Conservatives or (in Wales) Plaid Cymru.
Okay, then, there must be other practical measures we could take. Doing away with the system of political donations would remove all possibility of wealthy individuals purchasing either policy or peerages – say, instead, every party was allotted a pound of public money per vote, according to their share of the ballot at the most recent general election. Relative to other public spending commitments, the bill would be tiny, and it would ensure that everyone would compete on, if not quite a level playing field, at least a terrain that was determined by the voters. It would also ensure that those of us voting un-tactically in constituencies where our chosen party stands no chance of winning still get to award them some tangible benefit. While we’re at it, can we flush out the House of Lords every five years and fill its benches with party peers elected according to the share of the vote, as opposed to the first-past-the-post system of the Commons? This would at least partially redress patently unfair situations like UKIP bagging 12.6 per cent of the vote in 2015 and getting just one elected representative in return. There wouldn’t even be any need for the current crop of peers to give up their jobs: they could put themselves forward again on an ‘additional member’ system like those in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh and London assemblies.
Naturally, these sort of measures are so straightforward and fair no government would ever dare try to push them through, for fear of disadvantaging themselves. Although obviously, they would lie and say that wasn’t the reason.
None of these measures would directly address the non-party financial motivations for lying, however. Here, sunlight is the best disinfectant, as the hygienically inaccurate saying goes.
The new rules for
registering MPs’ financial interests brought in by the parliamentary authorities in 2009, which did away with such meaningless declaration brackets as ‘up to £5,000’, were a big step in the right direction, but they should be extended yet further. Why should we be allowed to know that Boris Johnson earned £22,916.66 for ten hours’ work writing his columns for the Daily Telegraph in May 2015, but only that Baron (John) Prescott of Kingston upon Hull receives an unspecified ‘fee’ for his ones in the Sunday Mirror?1 Why, too, should openness not be extended to the people who really run the country, the senior civil servants, who are regularly flattered with freebies and smooched with sinecures – or at least the possibility of future ones – by the very firms to whom they award vast and remunerative public sector contracts? Journalists, and indeed proper human beings, are currently expected to jump through the multiple hoops erected by (and, more pertinently, despite of) the Freedom of Information Act in order to find out such things. Extending and strengthening its strictures would, if nothing else, serve the purpose of really annoying Tony Blair, who declared that this particular legislation was ‘utterly undermining of sensible government’ and called himself a ‘naïve, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop’ for introducing it.2
Oh dear, we’re not doing very well, are we? You will further note that the most recently elected President of the United States, where they have traditionally tended to be rather better at this openness thing than we are, is the first inhabitant of the White House since Richard Nixon not to release his tax returns or tax data.3
Well, let’s look on one bright side. We probably can’t solve the psychological problems of either the compulsive risk-takers or the wannabe Messiahs, representatives of whom we have met in these pages, but at least they may no longer feel forced to lie about who they choose to lie down with any more. The prudery that compelled politicians to disguise their sex lives seems to have all but faded away. Public morals have shifted so far that between 1997 and 2017 we went from a general election campaign where an official Conservative candidate felt free to describe his gay opponent as ‘Bent Ben’ (and claim that he followed a ‘sterile, disease-ridden, God-forsaken occupation’) to one where both major party leaders, who were openly Christian, felt duty-bound to declare they didn’t consider gay sex a sin before even getting properly on the stump.4
If we hope to change anything perhaps we have to start with ourselves. An awful lot of the fault for the current state of affairs lies with the voters, and our determination to assume the worst of those who put themselves forward for office, and as the last chapter showed, too many of us are willingly putting our critical faculties into cold storage. The much-vaunted democratization the Internet was supposed to create has in practice created a level playing field on which the BBC and Washington Post compete with professional lobbying groups, political parties both mainstream and extreme, the propaganda wing of the Russian government and whatever your racist cousin got cross about most recently. Each source assumes an equal authority as you scroll infinitely past them on your Facebook feed. It is not so much that everything has been elevated to paper-of-record status, as that everything has been lowered to the twenty-first-century equivalent of you’ll-neverguess-what-a-bloke-in-the-pub-just-told-me.
What we choose to take in appeals to our natural desire to believe the worst, and by doing so proclaim ourselves the best. In 2005 the American satirist Stephen Colbert coined the word ‘truthiness’ for the sort of things that feel right on a gut level – the sort of things that people want to believe. He was using the term to describe the way Bush and Blair approached the Iraq War, but it applies equally to nearly every ‘fact’ that was swallowed during the EU referendum campaign. And it applies to nearly every click and swipe of approval on whatever anonymous meme is doing the rounds today. Since the beginning of 2017, there has been growing consternation about the activities of a company called Cambridge Analytica and its role exploiting data on behalf of both the Brexit and Trump electoral campaigns. Those fretting the loudest about the topic push up its prominence by sharing articles about it online.5 We can’t really campaign about the nefarious actions of Russian hackers or sinister firms disseminating disinformation on the Internet when we ourselves are providing the means for their activities.
Look, I know I’m as guilty as anyone. In my darker moments I describe my job as ‘professional cynic’, and what have I been doing for the past three-hundred pages but been hammering home the message that many, though not all, politicians are appalling charlatans? But then again, you’ve been reading it, and at least I was willing to show my workings.
Asking a question is always more worthwhile than just emitting a snort of disbelief. (It probably exercises more facial muscles too, and it’s definitely better for the brain.) When the leader of the free world behaves like a spoilt toddler, the best thing we might do is follow the same path, and keep on incessantly asking our elders: ‘But why? But why? But why?’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Mike Harpley at Atlantic Books who, four days after the EU referendum, invited me to his office to listen patiently as I rambled about politics, the media and the general state of the world for longer than was really necessary, then quietly suggested a much better idea for a book. Thanks to my agent, David Smith, for helping me tease that idea out into a real plan. And thanks, too, to the friends and colleagues who have helped nurture that plan into the book you’re holding: Richard Brooks, Adam Curtis, Tristan Davies, Veneta Hooper, Jane Mackenzie, Patrick Maguire, Heather Mills, Sarah Shannon, Emily Travis, Imogen Wall, Francis Wheen and Camilla Wright. Michael Tierney kept me going, sane and fed throughout the writing process.
Robin Dennis, my editor, helped reshape and refine the material into a much better form. She helped me see the woods at a point where I was scraping my nose right up against the bark of the trees. Nearly everyone I talked to during the writing process made the same joke, that a book about political liars would be the longest one ever written; less amusingly, the version that went to Robin nearly was, and she showed great expertise and patience in whittling it down to more manageable proportions. Man, you should see the ones that got away.
Thanks too to Theresa May for finding out when my deadline for handing in the finished manuscript was and then choosing the very next morning to call a general election. Very funny. You got me. Although not, it turns out, as badly as you got yourself.
I have drawn on the hard work of many other journalists and authors for this book. The endnotes make that obvious, but there are several particular giants on whose shoulders I am not so much standing but crowd-surfing: Michael Bloch, Tom Bower, Michael Crick, Nick Jones, David Leigh, Ben Macintyre, Kevin Maguire, Charles Moore, Peter Oborne, Matthew Parris, Sonia Purnell, Andrew Rawnsley and Tim Shipman.
The errors, omissions and errant opinions I added all by myself.
NOTES
Introduction
1. Foges, Clare, ‘Foxhunting Carries a Toxic Scent for the Tories’, The Times, 15 May 2017, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/foxhunting-carries-a-toxicscent-for-the-tories-3hgqwqq7l
2. UN Security Council Resolution 1441, http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/documents/1441.pdf
3. Blair, Tony, A Journey: My Political Life, London, Penguin, 2011, p607
4. Ipsos MORI, ‘Veracity Index 2016’, 4 December 2016, https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/enough-experts-ipsos-mori-veracity-index-2016
5. ‘Labour Calls to Curb John Whittingdale’s Powers After Escort Relationship’, BBC News, 13 April 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ukpolitics-36031743
6. Taher, Abul, and Nick Craven, ‘MPs’ Porn Star Lover “Shown Cabinet Papers”: John Whittingdale in New Sex Scandal as Second Lover Reveals Affair’, Mail on Sunday, 16 April 2016, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3543701/MP-s-porn-star-lover-shown-Cabinet-papers-John-Whittingdale-new-sex-scandal-SECOND-lover-reveals-affair.html
1. Out of Deference
1. Conservative Party Television Election Broadcast, BBC, 1
6 October 1951, video available at http://blogs.bl.uk/thenewsroom/2014/07/why-is-thislying-bastard-lying-to-me.html
2. Colville, John, diary entry, 23 May 1952, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Never Despair: 1945–1965, London, William Heinemann, 1988, p731
3. Gilbert, p846
4. Ibid., p846
5. Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1940–1965, London, Constable, 1966, p408
6. Ibid., p406
7. Gilbert, p847
8. Moran, p409
9. Gilbert, p850
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., p851
12. Moran, p410
13. Quoted in Kynaston, David, Family Britain: 1951–57, London, Bloomsbury, 2009, p314
14. Colville, John, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries, 1939–55, London, Hodder, 1985, p669
15. Gilbert, p854
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p858
18. Jenkins, Roy, Churchill, London, Pan, 2002, p866
19. Quoted in Kynaston, p315
20. Gilbert, p857
21. Philby, Kim, My Silent War, London, Panther, 1969, p171
22. Macintyre, Ben, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, London, Bloomsbury, 2014, p150
23. Quoted in ibid., p154
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