Boris Johnson is a liar – it’s the thing that we can be most certain about when it comes to our current Prime Minister. He has twice lost jobs specifically for lying – first for inventing an academic’s quote about 14th century royalty when working at The Times (leading the academic – his godfather – to complain); he was later fired from the Tory Shadow Cabinet for telling his party leader Michael Howard that he wasn’t having an affair.
In between the two sackings, Johnson built his first career on telling tall tales about the European Union in his role as The Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent. He is widely credited with originating a genre of comically exaggerated reporting which depicts the EU as loony and out-of-touch, such as the mythical ban on bendy bananas. In fact Johnson may have created the most famous example of the genre he created – a colleague remembers hearing Johnson have a “hilarious exchange” with a spokesman over how bendy a banana would be allowed to be, and he did write about the introduction of a ‘banana police force’.
The European Commission website has a lengthy section dedicated to refuting the genre of misreporting that Johnson inspired, and his time in Brussels inspired a rival correspondent to pen a satirical poem beginning “Boris told such dreadful lies/It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes…”
Despite his lifelong commitment to lying, the 2019 election appears to be a new low for Johnson. Tory Party statements on the NHS are the best way of demonstrating this.
On 29 September Johnson tweeted a video in which he claimed “I’ve been launching our programme to build 40 new hospitals in this country, as part of the biggest infrastructure investment in the NHS for a generation.” The following day Health Secretary Matt Hancock claimed in a speech that “over the next decade we will build, not ten, not twenty, but forty new state of the art hospitals.”
Despite the wiggle room that “over the next decade” gives the government, Full Fact weren’t able to find evidence of plans to build any “new hospitals”, “state of the art” or otherwise. Instead it appears that six buildings will receive ‘upgrades’, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that a hospital which does not currently exist will be brought into existence. There doesn’t seem to be any possibility of more than six being upgraded before 2025. The think tank Health Foundation welcomed the £3 billion in repairs that the six hospitals would receive, while commenting that the NHS has “a backlog of maintenance and repairs that amounts to more than £6bn – much of which threatens patient’s safety”.
The deceitful use of numbers is even more blatant on figures of nurses Johnson and Hancock have promised to hire. In their election manifesto, the Tories pledged to hire “50,000 more nurses” – a phrase which appears three times without a more detailed breakdown.
Internal NHS documents suggest that there are currently 100,000 vacancies of various types, 40,000 of them for nurses. Leaked government estimates suggest that the shortfall in nurses could increase to 70,000 in five years.
Details later given to The Nursing Times broke down the 50,000 manifesto figure:
- 14,000 nursing undergraduates and postgraduates
- 5,000 nurse apprentices
- 12,500 internationally recruited nurses
- 18,500 nurses either remaining in the profession or convinced to return.
Recruiting 12,000 more nurses from overseas could be difficult, as the Tories have also announced plans to increase the ‘immigration health surcharge’ on every non-EU adult and child coming to live in the UK from £400 a year to £625, on top of taxes they pay into the NHS. As the Guardian has pointed out, this means that the surcharge for a married couple with two children will increase from £1600 a year to £2500, which will both make it harder to recruit new nurses from abroad, and risk driving current immigrant nurses away from the UK. After Brexit the surcharge will apply to EU citizens for the first time.
Either you measure the 31,000 figure against the current 40,000 vacancies and get a shortfall of 9,000 – meaning that there will be 31,000 more nurses in 2025; or you measure the 50,000 figure against the 70,000 expected vacancies and get a shortfall of 20,000, and conclude there will be 20,000 more nurses in 2025. There is no way to massage the Tory figures into saying what they want them to say.
Professor Alison Leary, a respected researcher on nursing workforces, has accused the Tory Party of “stretching the definition of the word more”, adding that their policy is “really just papering over the cracks,” and commenting that “as no demand modelling has been done how do you know it’s enough?”
The obvious truth is that for nine years Tory-led governments have been underfunding the NHS, and they have no intention of making anything but minor adjustments to their course. It seems that the Tories have adopted a ‘£350 million’ strategy – stretch figures to arrive at an eye-catching number that doesn’t bear up to scrutiny, but to then repeat those figures endlessly until a large number of voters accept them as truth.
Days after the 50,000 figure had been exposed as misleading former Tory Party chairman James Cleverly tweeted that “currently there are 280,000 nurses. By end the next parliament there will be 330,000 nurses” – a calculation that assumes that up to 18,000 nurses will literally be doing two jobs. (A diversion into the figures – the Tory Party say that the 50,000 ‘more’ nurses will cost £897 million. The lowest wage for a fully qualified nurse is £24,000 a year, which works out at just over 36,000 nurses’ wages, assuming that there’s absolutely zero extra administrative costs. So basic calculations suggest that at least 14,000 nurses would be doing two jobs under Cleverly’s calculations.)
The Tory campaign of lying isn’t restricted to the NHS – that’s merely where it’s most tangible. The website First Draft used the Facebook Ad Library to look at adverts the Tory Party was sending out, and found that 34% contained statements already debunked by Full Fact, with a further 54% linking to websites with debunked claims. By comparison, First Draft were unable to find misleading claims that Labour had used nationally but did criticise one statement made by Labour candidate Liz McInnes.
Boris Johnson’s father has claimed that members of the public who don’t agree with his son’s claim that thirty-one is fifty are “illiterate”.
A member of Matt Hancock’s campaign team briefed to the press that a staff member had been assaulted by a Labour protestor, though video footage later revealed that the staff member had walked into an outstretched arm while the protestor was looking in the other direction.
Tory MP Michael Fabricant shared an already debunked meme claiming that the image of a young boy treated on the floor of Leeds Hospital was faked, asking his followers “IS. THIS. TRUE???”. (The original tweet was deleted while I was writing up this blogpost, but was live for over 24 hours, helping the misinformation to spread.)
When Jeremy Corbyn publicised trade negotiation documents which had been leaked to Reddit a month earlier, Tory MPs Christopher Hope and Cleverly (again) tried to mislead their readers into thinking this was some sort of security leak.
It’s a truism that politicians lie, but surely not on this scale? Not on the scale where the party in power can claim that 31 is 50 and 0 is 40, pump out election materials that are 88% lies, and still be favourites to return to power? I’ve always been cynical about politics in the UK, going back to my childhood when Tony Blair’s New Labour were known for their spin and lied their way to war. This feels like it must be something bigger, broader, more blatant, more shameless. It feels outright Orwellian.
Many voters know and accept that Johnson is a liar, untrustworthy on a number of subjects, but are planning to vote for him because of their views on Brexit. Maybe they’re right. Maybe a desire to leave the EU is the one issue where Boris Johnson can be trusted to be honest and principled. After all, in his own words, “I am a raving Euro-Federalist… a Pro-European of the most violent, dyspeptic and incurable disposition.”
Building Order from Chaos 
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