Lies, spin and deceit

Tony Blair is now routinely referred to as a liar by commentators, his political enemies and by many in his own party. Most of the evidence for this charge flows from his determination to join with the US in the invasion of Iraq in March 2003—and the failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the main reason adduced by Britain for going to war. Though it is by far the most serious allegation against Blair, it is also one of the least convincing, as I will show. There have been other, better, reasons for doubting the prime minister's veracity at times. But the reason why Blair has become Bliar is because he decided to take a hand in deposing Saddam Hussein.

There have been many attempts to portray the Blair premiership as representing a step change in modern political deceit. All, however, have had to turn a blind eye to much of Britain's 20th-century political history. Winston Churchill greatly exaggerated the immediate threat to Britain of Nazi Germany in the 1930s (see Norman Stone's Hitler), and Anthony Eden lied continually about the Suez canal invasion. Though Margaret Thatcher probably did not lie about the danger presented by the battle cruiser Belgrano to the British action in the Falkland islands, she did severely economise with the truth over the Westland helicopter affair, hiding behind her officials to deny charges that she had authorised a leak.

Greater powers have greater liars: John F Kennedy lied about the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, Lyndon Johnson was constantly at odds with the known truth in Vietnam and Ronald Reagan told a series of lies about members of his administration selling arms to Iran in order to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. And, of course, there was routine cover-up of private peccadilloes, especially in the Kennedy White House—still a widely admired US administration. JFK was wholly insouciant about doctoring the record: he personally pressured the reporter Joe Dineen to remove any mention of his father's antisemitism from a book—The Kennedy Family. More admirably, Kennedy lied continually about his health and his dependence on painkillers and cortisone. He was never as blatant a liar as Bill Clinton ("I did not have sex with that woman") only because he never had to be.



Churchill's exaggeration of Hitler's direct threat to Britain is matched by Franklin D Roosevelt's pledge, during his third election campaign in 1940, that he would not lead American boys into a European war. Yet he was always planning to do so. Both of these leaders told "lies" in order to prime their countries for war; to reinforce their deep belief that the totalitarian threat offered by Nazism was one which had to be challenged before it could consolidate, and before it posed an immediate threat to either Britain or the US. History has blessed both of these "deceits," though the very substantial appeasement/isolationist lobbies in Britain and the US did quite the opposite at the time.

The different responses to the in-office womanising of Kennedy and Clinton, some 35 years apart, reveal something of what has happened to public life and its representation in the news media. The mixture of deference to power, respect for private life, assumptions that powerful men could behave—if discreetly—as they wished, has now disappeared in the Anglo-Saxon media, and is fading in cultures that have held it longer, such as the French and German. In its place, in Britain at least, a media-political culture has emerged which puts huge emphasis on discovering lies, or at least misrepresentations—and has helped to generate the aggressive/defensive reaction from politicians that we now call "spin."

The contrasting examples of Harold Wilson and Edward Heath point up two very different kinds of political deceit from the pre-Blair era. Wilson was caught in a perpetual "lie": between an (erratic) social democratic programme which he tried to implement, and a socialist programme to which he appealed, at least on labour movement occasions. An example, of which Tony Benn has made much in his memoirs, was Wilson's rhetorical endorsement of Benn's plans at the beginning of the 1974-76 Wilson government, for a National Enterprise Board that would take more of British industry into public ownership. Wilson called it the biggest leap forward in economic thinking since the war—then, as it passed through the Commons, he worked hard to emasculate it. Wilson's governments, especially his last, were built on the fiction that they were doing socialist things as far as the party was concerned, doing social democratic things as far as the voters were concerned and acting pragmatically as far as business was concerned. Wilson's reputation for slipperiness arose, in part, from his need to keep together a party that contained powerful currents from Marxism to social liberalism, and depended on support from unions that were increasingly left-led.

The alternative to the perpetual, low-level ideological lie is the grand single-issue lie: the deception of colleagues or the electorate, or both, in order to achieve an end for the good of the country that the country does not (yet) see. Edward Heath's successful negotiation of British entry into the common market in 1972 was of that order. To secure British membership, he suppressed, as far as he could, the desire of other European states to move to an ever-closer union, consistently described the community as a "trading agreement" and assured parliament that "there is no question of Britain losing essential national sovereignty"—a statement which, at best, depends heavily on what is meant by "essential." Crispin Tickell, one of Heath's advisers, said of the policy afterwards that it was governed by the rule: "Don't talk about this in public."

There is a political answer to all of this: that a giant step such as the joining of the EU cannot be fully appreciated by the electorate, that an enlightened government must proceed, in part, by stealth, and that the ultimate benefits will justify the duplicity. In the end, if the electorate cannot be brought to believe it acted for the best, the government can be voted out at an election. Those were the rules of representative democracy as it was then conceived. Heath's manoeuvring was not seen by the opposition (itself split over Europe) as mendacious, but as wrong. A political move met a political opposition.

Tony Blair, like Margaret Thatcher, has been free of the ideological lie. The party was heading away from socialism before he joined it. Blair's excision, in 1995, of the party's clause IV (on common ownership) and its replacement with a clause that endorsed the market (unique among left-of-centre parties) marked a move from social democracy towards social liberalism. Blair has never had to lie about his socialism, because he explicitly renounced it. But his enemies make a different charge: Blair's governments have not engaged in intrinsic ideological lying but in lots of very particular lies about policy (and a very big one in the case of Iraq) that have deceived the British people through "spin."

No one has written more about spin than former BBC political correspondent Nicholas Jones. As he describes it in four books—Sultans of Spin, The Control Freaks, Soundbites and Spin Doctors and Trading Information—spin is the shaping of words (or figures) to give a favourable interpretation of your own actions, or an unfavourable one to the actions of others. As such it is as old as politics itself. But such shaping undoubtedly achieved a new level of professionalism under New Labour. The shapers of its presentational policy—Peter Mandelson, Philip Gould, Chris Powell and later Alastair Campbell—were seized of one imperative above all: to control the agenda before the opposition, other hostile forces or the media did so first. They believed that the new media had become much more predatory and increasingly mixed facts with opinion. As Alastair Campbell put it: "We came to power as a number of trends were becoming more obvious. One was an almost total fusion between reporting and comment—not just in the tabloids, not just in the broadsheets, but even among some of the broadcasters… with 24-hour news, you must must fill the airwaves… the media constantly feed off each other, and a report in a newspaper, which may be true or false, is rolled around for hours until something else comes up."

Moreover, as governments and oppositions have had to struggle harder to get their message across in the face of a more sceptical media, they have also been losing other means of addressing the public. Until the last 30 years, they could count on the more or less automatic allegiance of their own, mass, parties, and on a range of movements, associations and corporations which were more or less committed to their cause. Two generations ago, these institutions, coupled with the greater hold of a settled ideological position on most voters, gave political life both a greater coherence and a certain breathing space: accounts of a middle-aged Roy Jenkins MP enjoying (in opposition) a life of journalism and lengthy conversations over long lunches, or of Harold Macmillan, when prime minister, reading Jane Austen between appointments, are from another age.

The media now set the terms of public politics and are almost the monopoly carriers of political messages—their only competition comes from the universe of entertainment. Politicians have nowhere to go other than to a presenter's microphone or a reporter's notebook. As Labour MP Graham Allen puts it: "It is now the media, not the party, which are crucial to securing electoral victory. They must therefore be kept on-side and serviced at all times."

Tony Blair's trip to see Rupert Murdoch and his executives this summer was widely criticised, yet he has little choice. What medium does he have—apart from the media? In David Cameron, the Tory party has a man chosen, as his lieutenants admit, for being young, attractive in manner and willing to shape his party into a liberal-centrist grouping that will achieve media favour—as New Labour did. This does not mean that the media rules; it does mean that the presentation of both Cameron and his policies is heavily conditioned by the way the media winds blow.

This is how society has developed, how the news media have willed it, and how the politicians have adapted. Spin is the reaction of politics to a more aggressive and opinionated news media. It is an expression of the fact that governments (and oppositions) have had to become much more active advocates of their own case. Spin promotes policies, interpretations and analysis by a government or party, and the better it does it, the better democracy is served. But, of course, it has a darker side too: it closes in to protect and to obfuscate when a policy or a politician is in trouble; it caricatures the opposition; it inflates figures; claims credit where it is not due; evades difficult questions. The way in which New Labour has practised it has ranged from the efficiently proactive to the downright misleading, coupled with a tendency to leak policies and announcements to those journalists judged most friendly—in many cases, before a policy has gone to parliament. One of New Labour's largest communications sins has been to agree implicitly with the news media that the latter were more important than parliament; a grave and apparently conscious weakening of the country's central deliberative institution.

There is a further consideration here. Tony Blair is an unusual mixture of the amiable and the steely. The steeliness is presently most evident in the battles over his departure date but has been clear in prosecution of the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as in many bruising domestic struggles. His amiability is more of a personal tic: a desire for agreement, a need to make his interlocutors leave his company with the feeling that he has agreed with them, a personable and jocular public style. It seems evident that whatever the precise terms of the so-called Granita agreement between Blair and Gordon Brown, part of Blair's decision to cede vast powers to his chancellor was predicated on a desire to placate a man who had been a teacher as well as a friend. Such impulses show a good heart, but have led to the breaking of at least implicit promises.

Two book-length accounts of political lying have recently been given. One, The Lying Ape by Brian King—endorsed by the broadcaster John Humphrys—has a chapter called "Read my lips," which contains this passage: "as one cabinet minister privately admitted to me, the collective responsibility to government policy that all ministers must accept, means that they often have to defend decisions they don't agree with. And that means lying." This is nonsense. Cabinet collective responsibility is a means to coherent government: without it, politics would be a matter of competing baronies, unable to reach decisions. A minister enters a cabinet with agreement to its decisions being given in advance—until a resignation or a dismissal. To put cabinet discipline on the same level as a lie to the House of Commons is absurd.

The other, weightier, book is Peter Oborne's The Rise of Political Lying. In it, Oborne chronicles a series of political—largely New Labour—lies, in pursuit of proof for his contention that this government has raised mendacity to new levels. Some of his examples are serious—especially in the area of figures on spending, where large numbers destined for headlines are, on closer examination, matters of double counting or misleading additions (much of that in the first phase after 1997 was the responsibility of Brown through his press officer Charlie Whelan). Other examples chronicle election pledges that have been broken—pledges not to introduce tuition fees, and not to privatise the National Air Traffic Services. Then there are the personal integrity scandals, such as the Bernie Ecclestone affair, when Blair said that the boss of Formula One had been promised nothing in return for the £1m he gave to Labour, even though Ecclestone's organisation was initially exempted from a ban on tobacco sponsorship of sport. Did Blair lie? Possibly, but nobody knows for certain. Oborne is at least relatively forensic and detailed on New Labour, but he is weak on comparisons with previous governments. It is hard to believe that New Labour touched a lower point of deceit than the Conservative government during Suez, the Wilson governments of the 1960s and 1970s (stretched as they were between socialist rhetoric and monetarist realities), or even the Heath government of 1970-74, struggling to cope with entering the EEC, a vast surge of violence in Northern Ireland and a U-turn on economic policy.

In a recent book, The Broken Branch, the American writers Thomas E Mann and Norman J Ornstein argue that US politics has become "one long campaign." Mann told me: "The old practices of compromises, reflection and agreement all tend to suffer. There is huge pressure on legislators not to be legislators but to be activists and advocates. And much of the advocacy is banal, lacking in honesty about the choices available. Thus it's no wonder that the media adopt an adversarial style. This sets in train a cycle of great distrust. We are in a zero-sum game."

We in Britain are not yet at this stage—in part because of our parliamentary system. However, there are enough parallels for alarm: the spin culture, on both the political and news media sides, does indeed set up a zero-sum game of mutual distrust. Still, the spin culture and the attendant lies or misleading statements are small beer compared to the "big lie"—Iraq. Blair has been charged with a much bloodier version of the Heath "lie" over Europe: that he lied knowingly about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in order to convince the British electorate to go to war in 2003.

Tony Blair wanted to go to war on Saddam Hussein very much. From the first year of his premiership, he identified the Iraqi leader as one who could no longer be appeased or managed. This was of a piece with his energetic commitment to stopping Slobodan Milosevic's campaigns of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo—commitments that irritated the more cautious Bill Clinton, and gave force to Blair's landmark speech in Chicago in April 1999. On that occasion, still a relative novice in foreign affairs, he adopted the most interventionist view of any world leader.

Many of Blair's detractors saw him as a naive moralist who characterised the struggle against Milosevic as a "battle between good and evil." Roy Jenkins, a former mentor, remarked of Blair during a debate in September 2002 in the House of Lords that, "the prime minister, far from lacking conviction, has almost too much, particularly when dealing with the world beyond Britain. He is a little Manichean for my perhaps now jaded taste, seeing matters in stark terms of good and evil, black and white, contending with each other." Blair did indeed think of Saddam in these same terms. In his diaries, Paddy Ashdown quotes from a conversation he had with Blair in mid-November 1997, in which the prime minister said: "I have seen some of the stuff [intelligence] on this. It really is pretty scary. He [Saddam] is very close to some appalling weapons of mass destruction… The world thinks it's just gamesmanship. But it's deadly serious." As Peter Riddell notes in his book Hug Them Close, Robin Cook, then the new foreign secretary, took the same line, quoting "reports showing that Saddam continued to produce enough anthrax every week to fill two missiles."

To say that Blair was independently sincere in his hatred of Saddam relieves him of the charge that he made up reasons for the war in order to poodle along behind America. It does not, of course, prove anything at all about how truthful he was in pursuing that war: indeed, his enthusiasm for prosecuting the war could give an extra impetus to lying about it. But at least Blair is lying for what he believes to be the long-term security interests of his country.

That Blair did indeed lie (for whatever reason) is a trope so common as to be beyond remark. It is repeated almost daily by commentators, who assume they do not have to explain why they make the charge. Though the current mayhem of Iraq has nothing to do with whether or not the truth was told to get Britain into the war, it can be, and is, wrapped up into a package labelled "disaster." In such an atmosphere, unpicking a lie from a misjudgement is regarded as not worth the trouble.

Yet the fact remains: not one report on the run-up to the war and the use of intelligence has produced any evidence that the government was anything other than sincere in its belief that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD. Reports from the foreign affairs and intelligence and security committees of the House of Commons; the Hutton inquiry into the "Investigation into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly"; and the Butler committee's "Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction" have all concluded that no lies were told. Those concerned with assessing the evidence on WMD—Butler above all—stress the mountain of analysis that pointed to their continued possession and development.

The reports by the former US weapons inspector David Kay, and the subsequent Duelfer report (an investigation into Iraqi WMD begun by Kay's Iraqi Survey Group, ISG, and continued by another former weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer) found that Iraq's main goal was to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute WMD production. It is true that the report also found that the country had no deployable WMD of any kind at the time of the US invasion in March 2003 and, since the early 1990s, no significant biological or nuclear weapons programme. But no senior Iraqi official interviewed by the ISG believed that Saddam had forsaken WMD forever. According to the ISG, Iraq had intended to restart all banned weapons programmes as soon as multilateral sanctions against it had been dropped, a prospect that the Iraqi government saw coming soon. And until March 2003, Saddam convinced his top military commanders that Iraq did indeed possess WMD that could be used against any US invasion force, in order to prevent a coup over the prospect of fighting the US-led coalition without these weapons.)

Britain went to war on the strict grounds of Iraq's possession of WMD—and not on the more generalised cause, that of regime change in Iraq. Blair had been advised that regime change could not constitute a legitimate reason for going to war; possession of WMD, and thus flouting earlier UN resolutions, was. However, George W Bush was openly for regime change and Blair gathered at an early stage that the US was determined to press ahead. He did wring from Bush the promise to go through the UN, but he was aware that Bush had little faith in this route.

So, in order to win House of Commons and, if possible, UN approval, Blair had to show that Saddam and his WMD were a threat. That imperative lay behind the publication of the September 2002 dossier, "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: the Assessment of the British Government." The document attracted even more attention than it would otherwise have done because of the report on 29th May 2003 by the Today programme's defence correspondent, Andrew Gilligan. He asserted that Blair had knowingly lied, specifically in having a claim that missiles could be fired within 45 minutes inserted into the document. Gilligan's claim was shown to be false, but rather than being corrected, it was then defended by the BBC, triggering a prolonged series of events that "outed" David Kelly and culminated in his suicide, and that later caused the resignations of the BBC chairman, Gavyn Davies, and director general, Greg Dyke.

However, what the Hutton inquiry showed, thanks to the unprecedented access to emails passing between Blair's aides and the questioning of secret service officers, was that the dossier was made more emphatic for presentational reasons than it would have been had it been presented by the intelligence services to the prime minister. The document was "sexed up." Caveats were withdrawn, language strengthened and the 45-minute claim—which was genuine, from a proven reliable source—was rendered meaningless because it was not specified if the missiles were ballistic or battlefield and was probably inserted, as the Butler review put it, "because of its eye-catching character." Butler also faulted the report for including a passage on Iraq's possession of aluminium tubes that could have been used to construct a centrifuge as part of a revived nuclear programme—because the report did not include the warning that such use would have meant substantial re-engineering, for which there was no evidence. However, Butler concluded that, "In general, we found that the original intelligence material was correctly reported in joint intelligence committee assessments. An exception was the '45 minute' report. But this sort of example was rare… We should record in particular that we found no evidence of deliberate distortion or culpable negligence."

The dossier was one element in Blair's long campaign to prove that Saddam should be removed. To that end, he had produced a dossier that was an argument as well as an intelligence assessment—and that certainly changed its nature.

Blair was caught, as most leaders are at times, in a series of positions that became conflicting. These included his wish to rid the world of Saddam; to stay close to the US; to bring the main European states along with the US and Britain; to involve the UN; to focus the issue on Iraqi WMD; to convince the British of the need for an armed intervention that would lose British lives; and to get across that, since 9/11, the world had moved into an era of—in Alan Dershowitz's phrase—"mass-casualty suicide terrorism," fuelled by a new kind of Islamic extremism. That in moving between these various aims, and seeking to prosecute them all, he should at times have misled is not admirable, but neither is it surprising. The true argument is whether or not he was wrong in his overall assessment of the particular Iraqi threat, and is wrong about the general radical Islamist threat. It is that which, to a very large extent, the arguments on "lying" tend to obfuscate.

Further, the dossier grew out of a political culture that most of the news media had judged corrupted by years of spin—hence Gilligan's casual assumption. And of course, the dossier was spin—or to put it less pejoratively and more accurately, advocacy. It was the product of a government, and above all a prime minister, who was straining to bring his fellow citizens up to his level of concern about Saddam Hussein.

In the end, the judgement on this, the "big lie," will be coloured by an estimation of the rightness of Blair's push to rid Iraq and the world of Saddam. But that should not be the decisive factor. Blair did not "lie" about Iraq, in any sensible meaning of the term: if the term is so used of Blair, it must be used of almost all politicians, and other leaders, seeking to make a case, all who juggle different priorities and goals, all who are proactive in their policies and all who seek to inspire citizens to assent to a difficult course of national action. The important issue is free and informed judgement by the electorate on the weight and substance of the advocacy itself. That is the responsibility of democratic citizenry: it can't be lightened by indiscriminate charges of lying.