Why suddenly telling the truth is damaging politics

It’s better that Labour figures are starting to tell the truth in public about the Brown-Blair infighting years than if they were continuing to claim they’d always got along fine, government had never been hindered and Blair loved the idea of Brown becoming Prime Minister.

However, telling the truth is, I fear, coming at a considerable cost to the reputation of politics. Because we’ve now got a succession of people saying, in effect, ‘Don’t bother with what I told the public at the time. Of course that was nonsense. The truth actually was the opposite’. That fits right with the very worst stereotypes people have of politicians who’ll say anything and can’t be trusted.

If you look back at some of the previous denials that were made, they read utterly bizarrely now. Take this book review by Stephen Pollard for the New Statesman of Jim Naughtie’s 2001 book The Rivals in which he criticises Naughtie for making a blunder by saying that Alastair Campbell keeps a diary:

There are too many factual errors, such as repeating the notion that Campbell keeps a diary (“my pension”, as he supposedly calls it). After Peter Oborne made the same claim in his biography, Campbell went ballistic and flatly denied keeping any sort of diary. Unless he is a barefaced liar, the story is wrong.

Life has moved on rather, hasn’t it?

The moral of the story? Tell the truth in the first place. But the frustrating legacy for people still active in politics is that they’ll be left to tackle the consequences as a cohort of politicians exit the stage, contradicting as they go so much of what they said before.