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.”
