“History,” declared Napoleon, “is a set of lies, agreed upon.” Except he didn’t. The quote was more like, “historical truth is a commonly accepted fable,” and Napoleon himself said he was only repeating it. But the first version is pithier, especially in translation, and attributing it to Napoleon gives it a certain je ne sais quoi. Does it really matter? You could say that either way it has an essential veracity.
For sure, long before the obsession with accuracy, plagiarism and peer review, history has been in a constant state of revision. When, in the second century, for example, the Greek geographer Pausanias came across Ovid’s story of Narcissus, he was incredulous that a grown man wouldn’t recognise his own reflection. That just wasn’t rational. So in his version, he invented a dead twin-sister who Narcissus was pining for as he sat by the pool, mesmerised.
Perhaps Pausanias was just anticipating the role of Nadine Dorries in the Partygate saga. You’ll recall that before the opera-obsessed warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin hogged all the headlines with his impertinent crack at a coup d’état, the media in June were obsessed with the pantomime in which MPs finally realised Boris Johnson was a shameless liar. The resignation of his twin-soul Dorries – regrettably yet to be acted upon – in protest at the findings of the Privileges Committee, precipitated that of the self-styled Big Dog himself, who glimpsed away from his own reflection just long enough to realise his pants were on fire.
The problem with poking the finger about lying of course is that we’re all at it – we all tell porkies, big or small, at home, at work and in our business and social dealings, on a regular basis. Psychologists have shown that our ability to manipulate others’ perceptions of the truth for our own purpose – such as fibbing about having done our homework – is a natural part of the human condition, established by the time we start school. Often, we even manage to delude ourselves.
That’s why, as Napoleon suggested, the histories we tell are often apocryphal. In his 2021 book Fake History, Otto English (not, incidentally, his real name) makes a hoo-ha about the popular notion of plucky British day-skippers in their little ships, rescuing soldiers from Dunkirk and ferrying them home, being largely an invention – not the evacuation itself, but the manner of it. The fact that few civilians were involved has long been established, but their fictional gallantry remains etched in the public psyche. Again, does it matter? Haven’t humans always had a need for stories, myths and archetypes that help make sense of our insignificance in the face of a seemingly vast and uncaring cosmos? And sometimes, can’t a well-judged untruth help soothe over a conflict, or shield someone we care about from more information than they can handle?
What really repulses us isn’t the lies, but the lack of integrity in their telling
If the magnitude of political mendacity is measured by body bags, you could argue that the fibs told over Partygate were grubby but inconsequential. Do they compare to the lies told when George Bush and Tony Blair were in power, which led to the deaths of countless thousands in Iraq? Or the cover-ups under Nixon, exposed during Watergate, which saw the same in Vietnam? Indeed, were not the misrepresentations about the pandemic itself, and the science behind the measures to combat it (see Laura Dodsworth , Talking back to Big Brother) – not to mention the criminal profiteering from the PPE scandal – the more devastating and sinister deceits?
And yet it’s all too easy to understand, as Jonathan Lis writes in our cover story (Doubt truth to be a liar), the anger and disgust of those who couldn’t be with their dying loved ones because of the harsh lockdown rules, at Johnson and his entourage who partied on in utter contempt of the law, and then, when busted, thought only of protecting their own skin. What really repulses us isn’t the lies, but the lack of integrity in their telling (see Simon Heffer, Mucking out the Tory stables). If lying comes naturally, we must understand that trust only comes from telling the truth when it matters. It’s a value that’s instilled, along with others we might struggle to uphold such as tolerance, forgiveness, and faithfulness. These essential threads of our relationships and of society itself are more instinctual than logical, matters of the heart rather than the head. Trust isn’t won by a rigid adherence to stating facts alone, but by taking care to maintain the integrity of the ties that bind us to others.
The more we put ourselves in positions of power, be it as partners, parents or politicians, the greater those responsibilities are. Telling your parents you weren’t at a party when you were is a normal part of growing up; telling the electorate the same thing during a moment of national crisis when gatherings were illegal subverts a very different duty of care. The actions and statements made over a sustained period by Johnson, and those around him, were deliberately designed to deceive, shift blame and abnegate responsibility, and so utterly failed the integrity test. In years to come, history might well record different versions of the Partygate saga, but the upshot will be the same: at a time when we all needed to pull together, it eroded the already-fragile trust between those in power and the rest of us.
