Yesterday morning, Tony Blair insinuated in his most slippery tones that the outcome of the EU referendum - which he described as a 'catastrophe' - be quietly set aside. This from a man who undertook in 2004 to give the British people a referendum on a new European Union Constitution - a promise he later reneged on. Coming from any politician, such a suave rejection of a democratic decision would be controversial enough. But Blair was the leader who lured us into an illegal war in Iraq. He was roundly criticised in the recently published Chilcot Report for overstating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. If this untrustworthy man had any shame or self-knowledge, he would rightly consider himself unfit to play any further part in British politics — and keep quiet...
Project Fear, untruths on migration, dishonesty by BOTH presidential hopefuls and Blair deceiving us again: How politicians have always perverted the truth but never on this scale
By Stephen Glover for the Daily Mail
29 October 2016
Yesterday morning, the leader who has told more lies than any other in modern British politics went on the airwaves, courtesy of the BBC, to mislead and deceive the public yet again.
Tony Blair insinuated in his most slippery tones that the outcome of the EU referendum — which he described as a ‘catastrophe’ — be quietly set aside.
This from a man who undertook in 2004 to give the British people a referendum on a new European Union Constitution — a promise he later reneged on.
Tony Blair insinuated in his most slippery tones that the outcome of the EU referendum — which he described as a ‘catastrophe’ — be quietly set aside
Coming from any politician, such a suave rejection of a democratic decision would be controversial enough. But Blair was the leader who lured us into an illegal war in Iraq. He was roundly criticised in the recently published Chilcot Report for overstating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
If this untrustworthy man had any shame or self-knowledge, he would rightly consider himself unfit to play any further part in British politics — and keep quiet.
What is so breathtaking is his assumption, despite a long record of mendacity, that he has the right to speak out — a right the BBC is only too happy to indulge. It’s true the interviewer, Nick Robinson, mentioned some of Blair’s past mistakes, but he was generally treated as though his honesty and integrity had never been impugned. His rehabilitation is almost complete.
Welcome to the age of lies.
Politicians, of course, have always told falsehoods. The 16th-century Italian writer Niccolo Machiavelli devoted a chapter to the art of lying in his famous work The Prince.
His advice to rulers, though, was that they should be sparing in the lies they told. Above all, he counselled against the blatant and easily identifiable lie. Leaders over the centuries have largely followed his advice — until now.
We live in an era of shameless and often easily disprovable lies which are so widespread that they have sapped the confidence of millions of people in the political process.
Political pundits on both sides of the Atlantic try to make sense of the Trump phenomenon by arguing that his supporters feel left behind by globalisation and rising inequality
Our leaders take us to war on a lie, and shamelessly spout falsehoods in front of cameras and in their legislatures. In this country, one whopping lie has concerned mass immigration, which politicians have covertly encouraged in defiance of public opinion.
The wonder is that our rulers think they won’t be found out. And yet, equally wondrously, they usually survive exposure and blame. The major serial political liars of the past quarter-century — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and his twister-in-chief Alastair Campbell — are all prospering mightily.
L ook at what has been going on in America. Has there ever been such an ugly presidential campaign disfigured by so many barefaced lies? Politicians may have always deceived the public, but never before has mendacity been so pervasive, systemic and relentless.
Political pundits on both sides of the Atlantic try to make sense of the Trump phenomenon by arguing that his supporters feel left behind by globalisation and rising inequality. Similar theories are aired in this country to explain why so many Labour supporters defied their party’s instructions and voted for Brexit.
I’ve no doubt these factors have played a large role. But there is surely something more fundamental going on. I believe that in America, Britain and other western countries, people are rejecting the politics of the Establishment, at least in part, because they are angry that their rulers have lied to them again and again.
Of course, there have always been self-serving leaders who practise to deceive. In America, there was Richard Nixon, who lied over Watergate (pretending the White House had not been involved in the burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic Convention) and was finally forced to resign.
His predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson, also told lies. He once bragged that his great-great-grandfather had died at the Battle of the Alamo.
The major serial political liars of the past quarter-century — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and his twister-in-chief Alastair Campbell — are all prospering mightily
This was a vain fantasy, much in the mould of Tony Blair’s absurd claim in 1996 that as a child stowaway he had boarded a plane at Newcastle airport bound for the Bahamas before being removed.
As for Britain, we have had our fair share of accomplished political liars. Arguably the single most brazen political lie of the last century was Anthony Eden’s during the 1956 Suez crisis, which took place exactly 60 years ago. He concealed from Parliament that he had entered a secret pact with France and Israel to invade Egypt. Months afterwards he left No 10.
Yet somehow such falsehoods did not destroy public confidence in the general probity of politicians. People were more deferential, and ready to go on believing in the honesty of those who ruled them. For the most part they were probably justified.
All that has changed over the past couple of decades. In America, the rot began with Bill Clinton and in this country with his friend Blair. Even after both leaders had left the stage to devote themselves to amassing fortunes, the culture of mendacity fostered by them has persisted. The upshot has been rising distrust for Establishment political leaders.
Bill Clinton, of course, famously asserted that he had not had sex with Monica Lewinsky. Not many people believed the old goat, least of all Hillary. He was the first President of the United States to be impeached by the House of Representatives since 1868. One of the two charges was perjury — telling a lie in a court of law.
Clinton was followed by George W. Bush, who dealt in untruths of a different sort. After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre, he invented stories about Al-Qaeda terrorists being based in Iraq in order to legitimise the invasion of that country. It’s difficult to imagine a more pernicious lie, particularly as Saddam Hussein had been an enemy of Al-Qaeda.
Think of the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, including American and, of course, British ones, and the billions of dollars wasted.
And, as the whole world including Americans can now see, the legacy of that lie in Iraq and neighbouring Syria is death and suffering for millions of civilians, and the presence of real terrorists rather than the ones dreamt up by Bush.
Barack Obama has been accused by his opponents of many deceptions, but he is a novice in such matters compared to the likely next President of the United States, Hillary Clinton, who almost rivals her sleazy husband.
Bill Clinton, of course, famously asserted that he had not had sex with Monica Lewinsky. Not many people believed the old goat, least of all Hillary
During the 2008 presidential campaign, when she was challenging Obama for the Democratic nomination, Mrs Clinton claimed to have come under fire in Bosnia during an official visit after the end of the Balkan wars in the 1990s. Video footage of the alleged incident revealed a very calm scene. A silly, shallow lie.
More recently, Hillary insisted for months that she had done nothing wrong in using her own email server while U.S. Secretary of State, and that what she did was purely her private business. Many Americans suspect that those secret emails contain compromising information.
The terrible irony is that the man on whom many Americans are pinning their hopes is a sociopathic monster and gross misogynist who is far more untrustworthy than even Hillary Clinton. In almost every sentence, he invites people to trust him — a good indication that they shouldn’t dream of doing so.
So many lies spew out of him which are blindingly obvious or instantly disprovable. For example, he insists that President Obama founded the terror group ISIS, and repeatedly claimed that the President was not born in the United States. He subsequently retracted this lie without apology while falsely blaming Mrs Clinton for inventing the story in the first place!
Look at this man, with his childishly pouting lips and permanently angry countenance. What a bizarre specimen of humanity! The thought flashes through our minds that millions of Americans must be mad even to think of voting for such a creature.
But they’re not mad, of course. They are looking, after countless disappointments, for someone to deliver them from a political Establishment which has promised so much and given them so little — an Establishment which, whether Republican or Democrat, appears to operate largely for itself.
And so millions of voters cling in desperation to his probably baseless promises of controlling immigration and bringing jobs back to the United States and making the country great again — promises other leaders have made and broken. We shouldn’t blame the American people. The tragedy is that so many of them have been drawn to Trump.
Superior though we may feel when looking across the Atlantic, the truth is that our own political culture has also been corrupted by institutionalised falsehood. And, as in America, this has led to widespread disenchantment, and a revolt against Establishment politics.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, when she was challenging Obama for the Democratic nomination, Mrs Clinton claimed to have come under fire in Bosnia during an official visit after the end of the Balkan wars in the 1990s
Mendacity was stamped into Blair’s soul at an early age, and it is no surprise that he surrounded himself with untrustworthy lieutenants, of whom the most egregious was his spin doctor Alastair Campbell.
The Chilcot Report did not merely find that Blair had overstated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein — those much-hyped weapons of mass destruction. He had also sent ill-prepared troops into battle with ‘wholly inadequate’ plans for the aftermath.
Blair decided the lives of British servicemen would be put at risk long before consulting Cabinet colleagues and MPs, or telling the British people. Eight months before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, he made a secret pact with George W. Bush, saying: ‘I will be with you, whatever.’
As for Campbell, a man whose veracity was once impugned by a High Court judge, a list of his falsehoods could fill a book. Among his most shameless was his ‘dodgy dossier’ of February 2003.
Campbell plagiarised excerpts from a 12-year-old thesis by an Iraqi dissident, without attribution, about the extent of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. The dossier, essentially one long lie, was represented by Blair in the Commons as a fresh work produced by the intelligence services. This was a wicked thing for Campbell to have done.
David Cameron can’t have believed either his assertion before the referendum that he had secured significant reforms from Brussels, or his subsequent declaration that Brexit might lead to another European war
On account of this deception alone, he should have slunk out of public life and be atoning for his sins. And yet he pops up all over the place, with a self-satisfied smile on his face, and a revolting readiness to criticise the supposed moral shortcomings of others. The liar has become almost respectable. What does that say about our society?
The other great lie of the Blair years, of course, concerned immigration. Despite the obvious misgivings of the British people, New Labour embarked on a secret plan to boost mass immigration without bothering to tell us what was being done.
According to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Blair and Home Secretary Jack Straw, New Labour deliberately threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural country’.
When Poland and other East European countries joined the EU in 2004, the Blair government could have imposed immigration restrictions for the following seven years, but chose not to. It preferred to believe an academic report that forecast immigration to the UK would increase by between 5,000 and 13,000 a year.
Within five years, more than a million East Europeans had arrived in this country. Was the Government’s decision not to use EU-approved controls the result of pure naivety? It’s hard to credit. More likely, New Labour simply wanted more immigrants, and had no intention of discussing the matter in public.
The toxic effects of this act of betrayal were evident in the Brexit vote on June 23. Millions of people, who had been lied to and deceived for years over immigration, decided they had finally had enough.
Brexit, alas, was the forum for another blizzard of untruths on both sides of the argument. I don’t at all excuse the Leave camp, but the lies of the Remainers were especially damaging because they further undermined the Government’s already tattered reputation for veracity.
David Cameron can’t have believed either his assertion before the referendum that he had secured significant reforms from Brussels, or his subsequent declaration that Brexit might lead to another European war.
Nor was George Osborne being truthful when he informed us that a vote to leave would be followed by an instant recession. Yesterday, we learned that the economy grew by a respectable half per cent in the three months following the referendum, while the Japanese car-maker Nissan announced it will build two new models at its Sunderland plant.
There have been deceptions, too, over our cherished NHS. We have repeatedly been told that it is being starved of funds by a cruel Government. On Thursday, a General Medical Council (GMC) report claimed the ‘intense pressure’ created by a £2 billion black hole in hospital budgets was undermining medical morale.
Yet an analysis yesterday by the National Audit Office shows how these same hospitals are failing to claw back hundreds of millions of pounds from health tourists. Why can’t the GMC be honest about this?
Despite the obvious misgivings of the British people, New Labour embarked on a secret plan to boost mass immigration without bothering to tell us what was being done. Pictured, a crowded pavement on Oxford Street
All over Europe — in Italy, France, Germany and Greece — millions of people are turning their back on mainstream politicians to embrace alternative parties of the Far Left or Far Right. Doubtless they are partly driven by economic anxieties. But who can doubt they are also exasperated by being fed a constant diet of lies?
Some commentators, particularly on the Left, have written about ‘post-truth’ politics, suggesting that some voters want to hear lies from politicians which confirm their own prejudices. This is a devastatingly cynical and negative analysis.
Isn’t it far more likely that most of us yearn to be told the truth? And in a democracy shouldn’t we have a reasonable expectation that we will be? Despite the pressures of the 24-hour modern media, there is no God-given rule which says that politicians have to surround themselves with dodgy spin doctors, and enmesh themselves in falsehoods.
Somehow these politicians — the Clintons, Blair and the rest of them — emerged from the slime, and for a time we were hoodwinked. The self-satisfied Hillary Clinton, with her preposterous sense of entitlement, will probably be with us for the next four years.
But why can’t we have honest politicians? They do exist. I could name a few in this country and America. Until they make their mark, and reverse the corrosive effects of the past quarter-century, voters will continue to flirt dangerously with the likes of Donald Trump.
Project Fear, untruths on migration, dishonesty by BOTH presidential hopefuls and Blair deceiving us again: How politicians have always perverted the truth but never on this scale
By Stephen Glover for the Daily Mail
29 October 2016
Yesterday morning, the leader who has told more lies than any other in modern British politics went on the airwaves, courtesy of the BBC, to mislead and deceive the public yet again.
Tony Blair insinuated in his most slippery tones that the outcome of the EU referendum — which he described as a ‘catastrophe’ — be quietly set aside.
This from a man who undertook in 2004 to give the British people a referendum on a new European Union Constitution — a promise he later reneged on.
Tony Blair insinuated in his most slippery tones that the outcome of the EU referendum — which he described as a ‘catastrophe’ — be quietly set aside
Coming from any politician, such a suave rejection of a democratic decision would be controversial enough. But Blair was the leader who lured us into an illegal war in Iraq. He was roundly criticised in the recently published Chilcot Report for overstating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
If this untrustworthy man had any shame or self-knowledge, he would rightly consider himself unfit to play any further part in British politics — and keep quiet.
What is so breathtaking is his assumption, despite a long record of mendacity, that he has the right to speak out — a right the BBC is only too happy to indulge. It’s true the interviewer, Nick Robinson, mentioned some of Blair’s past mistakes, but he was generally treated as though his honesty and integrity had never been impugned. His rehabilitation is almost complete.
Welcome to the age of lies.
Politicians, of course, have always told falsehoods. The 16th-century Italian writer Niccolo Machiavelli devoted a chapter to the art of lying in his famous work The Prince.
His advice to rulers, though, was that they should be sparing in the lies they told. Above all, he counselled against the blatant and easily identifiable lie. Leaders over the centuries have largely followed his advice — until now.
We live in an era of shameless and often easily disprovable lies which are so widespread that they have sapped the confidence of millions of people in the political process.
Political pundits on both sides of the Atlantic try to make sense of the Trump phenomenon by arguing that his supporters feel left behind by globalisation and rising inequality
Our leaders take us to war on a lie, and shamelessly spout falsehoods in front of cameras and in their legislatures. In this country, one whopping lie has concerned mass immigration, which politicians have covertly encouraged in defiance of public opinion.
The wonder is that our rulers think they won’t be found out. And yet, equally wondrously, they usually survive exposure and blame. The major serial political liars of the past quarter-century — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and his twister-in-chief Alastair Campbell — are all prospering mightily.
L ook at what has been going on in America. Has there ever been such an ugly presidential campaign disfigured by so many barefaced lies? Politicians may have always deceived the public, but never before has mendacity been so pervasive, systemic and relentless.
Political pundits on both sides of the Atlantic try to make sense of the Trump phenomenon by arguing that his supporters feel left behind by globalisation and rising inequality. Similar theories are aired in this country to explain why so many Labour supporters defied their party’s instructions and voted for Brexit.
I’ve no doubt these factors have played a large role. But there is surely something more fundamental going on. I believe that in America, Britain and other western countries, people are rejecting the politics of the Establishment, at least in part, because they are angry that their rulers have lied to them again and again.
Of course, there have always been self-serving leaders who practise to deceive. In America, there was Richard Nixon, who lied over Watergate (pretending the White House had not been involved in the burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic Convention) and was finally forced to resign.
His predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson, also told lies. He once bragged that his great-great-grandfather had died at the Battle of the Alamo.
The major serial political liars of the past quarter-century — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and his twister-in-chief Alastair Campbell — are all prospering mightily
This was a vain fantasy, much in the mould of Tony Blair’s absurd claim in 1996 that as a child stowaway he had boarded a plane at Newcastle airport bound for the Bahamas before being removed.
As for Britain, we have had our fair share of accomplished political liars. Arguably the single most brazen political lie of the last century was Anthony Eden’s during the 1956 Suez crisis, which took place exactly 60 years ago. He concealed from Parliament that he had entered a secret pact with France and Israel to invade Egypt. Months afterwards he left No 10.
Yet somehow such falsehoods did not destroy public confidence in the general probity of politicians. People were more deferential, and ready to go on believing in the honesty of those who ruled them. For the most part they were probably justified.
All that has changed over the past couple of decades. In America, the rot began with Bill Clinton and in this country with his friend Blair. Even after both leaders had left the stage to devote themselves to amassing fortunes, the culture of mendacity fostered by them has persisted. The upshot has been rising distrust for Establishment political leaders.
Bill Clinton, of course, famously asserted that he had not had sex with Monica Lewinsky. Not many people believed the old goat, least of all Hillary. He was the first President of the United States to be impeached by the House of Representatives since 1868. One of the two charges was perjury — telling a lie in a court of law.
Clinton was followed by George W. Bush, who dealt in untruths of a different sort. After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre, he invented stories about Al-Qaeda terrorists being based in Iraq in order to legitimise the invasion of that country. It’s difficult to imagine a more pernicious lie, particularly as Saddam Hussein had been an enemy of Al-Qaeda.
Think of the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, including American and, of course, British ones, and the billions of dollars wasted.
And, as the whole world including Americans can now see, the legacy of that lie in Iraq and neighbouring Syria is death and suffering for millions of civilians, and the presence of real terrorists rather than the ones dreamt up by Bush.
Barack Obama has been accused by his opponents of many deceptions, but he is a novice in such matters compared to the likely next President of the United States, Hillary Clinton, who almost rivals her sleazy husband.
Bill Clinton, of course, famously asserted that he had not had sex with Monica Lewinsky. Not many people believed the old goat, least of all Hillary
During the 2008 presidential campaign, when she was challenging Obama for the Democratic nomination, Mrs Clinton claimed to have come under fire in Bosnia during an official visit after the end of the Balkan wars in the 1990s. Video footage of the alleged incident revealed a very calm scene. A silly, shallow lie.
More recently, Hillary insisted for months that she had done nothing wrong in using her own email server while U.S. Secretary of State, and that what she did was purely her private business. Many Americans suspect that those secret emails contain compromising information.
The terrible irony is that the man on whom many Americans are pinning their hopes is a sociopathic monster and gross misogynist who is far more untrustworthy than even Hillary Clinton. In almost every sentence, he invites people to trust him — a good indication that they shouldn’t dream of doing so.
So many lies spew out of him which are blindingly obvious or instantly disprovable. For example, he insists that President Obama founded the terror group ISIS, and repeatedly claimed that the President was not born in the United States. He subsequently retracted this lie without apology while falsely blaming Mrs Clinton for inventing the story in the first place!
Look at this man, with his childishly pouting lips and permanently angry countenance. What a bizarre specimen of humanity! The thought flashes through our minds that millions of Americans must be mad even to think of voting for such a creature.
But they’re not mad, of course. They are looking, after countless disappointments, for someone to deliver them from a political Establishment which has promised so much and given them so little — an Establishment which, whether Republican or Democrat, appears to operate largely for itself.
And so millions of voters cling in desperation to his probably baseless promises of controlling immigration and bringing jobs back to the United States and making the country great again — promises other leaders have made and broken. We shouldn’t blame the American people. The tragedy is that so many of them have been drawn to Trump.
Superior though we may feel when looking across the Atlantic, the truth is that our own political culture has also been corrupted by institutionalised falsehood. And, as in America, this has led to widespread disenchantment, and a revolt against Establishment politics.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, when she was challenging Obama for the Democratic nomination, Mrs Clinton claimed to have come under fire in Bosnia during an official visit after the end of the Balkan wars in the 1990s
Mendacity was stamped into Blair’s soul at an early age, and it is no surprise that he surrounded himself with untrustworthy lieutenants, of whom the most egregious was his spin doctor Alastair Campbell.
The Chilcot Report did not merely find that Blair had overstated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein — those much-hyped weapons of mass destruction. He had also sent ill-prepared troops into battle with ‘wholly inadequate’ plans for the aftermath.
Blair decided the lives of British servicemen would be put at risk long before consulting Cabinet colleagues and MPs, or telling the British people. Eight months before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, he made a secret pact with George W. Bush, saying: ‘I will be with you, whatever.’
As for Campbell, a man whose veracity was once impugned by a High Court judge, a list of his falsehoods could fill a book. Among his most shameless was his ‘dodgy dossier’ of February 2003.
Campbell plagiarised excerpts from a 12-year-old thesis by an Iraqi dissident, without attribution, about the extent of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. The dossier, essentially one long lie, was represented by Blair in the Commons as a fresh work produced by the intelligence services. This was a wicked thing for Campbell to have done.
David Cameron can’t have believed either his assertion before the referendum that he had secured significant reforms from Brussels, or his subsequent declaration that Brexit might lead to another European war
On account of this deception alone, he should have slunk out of public life and be atoning for his sins. And yet he pops up all over the place, with a self-satisfied smile on his face, and a revolting readiness to criticise the supposed moral shortcomings of others. The liar has become almost respectable. What does that say about our society?
The other great lie of the Blair years, of course, concerned immigration. Despite the obvious misgivings of the British people, New Labour embarked on a secret plan to boost mass immigration without bothering to tell us what was being done.
According to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Blair and Home Secretary Jack Straw, New Labour deliberately threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural country’.
When Poland and other East European countries joined the EU in 2004, the Blair government could have imposed immigration restrictions for the following seven years, but chose not to. It preferred to believe an academic report that forecast immigration to the UK would increase by between 5,000 and 13,000 a year.
Within five years, more than a million East Europeans had arrived in this country. Was the Government’s decision not to use EU-approved controls the result of pure naivety? It’s hard to credit. More likely, New Labour simply wanted more immigrants, and had no intention of discussing the matter in public.
The toxic effects of this act of betrayal were evident in the Brexit vote on June 23. Millions of people, who had been lied to and deceived for years over immigration, decided they had finally had enough.
Brexit, alas, was the forum for another blizzard of untruths on both sides of the argument. I don’t at all excuse the Leave camp, but the lies of the Remainers were especially damaging because they further undermined the Government’s already tattered reputation for veracity.
David Cameron can’t have believed either his assertion before the referendum that he had secured significant reforms from Brussels, or his subsequent declaration that Brexit might lead to another European war.
Nor was George Osborne being truthful when he informed us that a vote to leave would be followed by an instant recession. Yesterday, we learned that the economy grew by a respectable half per cent in the three months following the referendum, while the Japanese car-maker Nissan announced it will build two new models at its Sunderland plant.
There have been deceptions, too, over our cherished NHS. We have repeatedly been told that it is being starved of funds by a cruel Government. On Thursday, a General Medical Council (GMC) report claimed the ‘intense pressure’ created by a £2 billion black hole in hospital budgets was undermining medical morale.
Yet an analysis yesterday by the National Audit Office shows how these same hospitals are failing to claw back hundreds of millions of pounds from health tourists. Why can’t the GMC be honest about this?
Despite the obvious misgivings of the British people, New Labour embarked on a secret plan to boost mass immigration without bothering to tell us what was being done. Pictured, a crowded pavement on Oxford Street
All over Europe — in Italy, France, Germany and Greece — millions of people are turning their back on mainstream politicians to embrace alternative parties of the Far Left or Far Right. Doubtless they are partly driven by economic anxieties. But who can doubt they are also exasperated by being fed a constant diet of lies?
Some commentators, particularly on the Left, have written about ‘post-truth’ politics, suggesting that some voters want to hear lies from politicians which confirm their own prejudices. This is a devastatingly cynical and negative analysis.
Isn’t it far more likely that most of us yearn to be told the truth? And in a democracy shouldn’t we have a reasonable expectation that we will be? Despite the pressures of the 24-hour modern media, there is no God-given rule which says that politicians have to surround themselves with dodgy spin doctors, and enmesh themselves in falsehoods.
Somehow these politicians — the Clintons, Blair and the rest of them — emerged from the slime, and for a time we were hoodwinked. The self-satisfied Hillary Clinton, with her preposterous sense of entitlement, will probably be with us for the next four years.
But why can’t we have honest politicians? They do exist. I could name a few in this country and America. Until they make their mark, and reverse the corrosive effects of the past quarter-century, voters will continue to flirt dangerously with the likes of Donald Trump.