Tory Twitter factcheckUK row is media hyperbole
For the duration of last night’s ITV leader’s debate, the CCHQPress Twitter handle rebranded itself as factcheckUK with the tagline “Fact checking Labour from CCHQ”.
One of the tweets it sent out read as follows: “Jeremy Corbyn won’t be honest with the British people about his Brexit policy. If he wins we will have months of dither and delay followed by two referendums – one on Brexit and one on Scotland. We should #GetBrexitDone in January and move on #BackBoris.”
The move provoked a pretty astringent set of reactions. Lewis Goodall of Sky News responded on Twitter: “This isn’t funny or “banter”. It’s disingenuous and grim.” The New Statesman’s Sarah Manavis responded in similar terms: “We should all be furious about it,” she wrote.
In an interview with James Cleverly, the Conservative party co-chair, Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis referred to the move as “dystopian.” “You dressed up party lines as a fact-check service.”
Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat education spokeswoman, said the tactic was “straight out of Donald Trump or Putin’s playbook.”
Politicians do indeed have a responsibility to make their claims intelligible to the listener – they should speak in plain language and make sure all the age-old tricks of the politician’s trade, rhetorical flourishes designed to produce an emotional effect, for example, are exercised in a spirit of sincerity and good faith.
The art of politics, however, is more complex than that and makes very different demands on the political personality. Effective politicians know that the mask of power is kept in place by the occasional bit of sharp practice – the creative use of statistics, outright lying and expansive hypocrisies. In John Webster’s Jacobean drama, The Duchess of Malfi, the cynical (but approving) Bosola says of a Machiavellian Cardinal: “This great fellow were able to possess the greatest devil, and make him worse.”
Boris may be not be quite as diabolical as the archetypal amoral politician (Ian Richardson’s Francis Urquhart is the 20th century equivalent), but he is a political animal. It’s a slippery quality, married to a mischievous streak, that has allowed him to repackage the bulk of Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement as a brilliant tactical victory to the hard Brexiteers in his party.
The problem with the prat fall “FactcheckUK” gambit is not that it is an abuse of the democratic process, or that it represents a Putinesque power grab. And, by the way, Layla Moran should be ashamed of that comparison given Putin’s recent history of organising extra-judicial killings in this country (famously, Alexander Litvinenko who, just before his death, had accused Putin of arranging the murder of the journalist Anna Politovskaya). The problem is that it is crap politics, takes the casual observer for a fool and obscures what was a fairly hum drum night for Boris with no obvious calamities.
Just as politicians are seen to have a responsibility to communicate properly, journalists must understand that they have a responsibility to avoid hyperbole. They do not have to put on the mask of power, or win people’s votes, or indeed new followers on social media. After a while, hyperbole and perpetual outrage, drains things of their meaning, for everyone, making it far harder for the casual observer to register whether they should find something important or not.
This was sharp practice and nothing more – or “daft” as Laura Kuenssberg put it and well within the normal scope of political chicanery. Politicians sometimes lie. They’re often hypocrites. They push the boundaries. For some of them, it’s the reason they do it. It’s also part of their job.