Tell Me Lies

If you had bumped in to me around twenty years ago, the chances are that after hearing my apology for knocking your shopping bags flying all over the escalator, you would have chatted as we picked up your Anne Summers lingerie, we may have shared a Creamola foam or two in a cafe and then, as we parted, you would have said something conciliatory like “That’s a nice sun tan. Where did you get it?”.

I would have replied with a smile saying “Tenerife”, and you would have left assuming that I had been with the hooped earrings brigade comparing tattoos and exchanging pills in the Canary Islands. Technically, I would have been telling you the truth but your conclusion about my tan would have been wrong.

Why? Well because I said I’d “technically” told you the truth. Of course it wasn’t the truth at all and my deception would have placed me half way across the river Humbug on the way to the darker side of the river reserved for politicians. All MPs get economical with the truth and, like a cat with a field mouse, play around with it until it dies of exhaustion.

Although Tenerife was the true answer to the origins of my sun tan back then, what was missing was my full explanation that it was the name above the door of a seedy tanning bed salon near Glasgow where you could peek over the partitions at whoever’s white bottom was burning next door. Technically I really had been to Tenerife to get the tan but I had got there by double decker bus. In political terms, though, I’d told the truth.

I reckon that anyone elected as a politician should be funded and provided with an attached voice over man, an unemployed theatrical luvvie perhaps, who follows them around all day like a shadow to avoid the “Tenerife” moments and translate what they’re saying in to the full truth. For example, the politician may say to the camera or voter “I’m going to tell you a true story” but voice over man would then boom “That’s as soon as I make one up”. Or when Clinton said “I did not have sex with Miss Lewinski”, voice over man would have completed the sentence with “on more than a few occasions”.

Telling the whole truth is a sign of maturity which is something that, sadly, doesn’t always come with age. When Damian McBride resigned as the Prime Minister’s adviser last week after making up stories about rival politicians having sex with the devil and liking Tesco Value fishcakes eaten off male belly dancers in Turkish take away shops, the Media rang around to get quotes. Thinking they had got hold of Derek Draper, the Labour sympathiser who was going to use the email for a web site dedicated to anti Conservative stories, ITN News recorded an interview with him in which he admitted to behaving appallingly in soliciting the lies, expressed the desire to apologise profusely, and then offered to consider his position by dangling the possibility of resignation.

This was broadcast to the nation before someone recognised that it wasn’t Draper’s voice going out at all but rather his opponent who ran a Conservative web site and had been rung in error. He had impersonated Draper, landing him right in it.

But, lest you feel sympathy, Draper himself has had his own Tenerife moments, saying in his biography that he gained his degree “with an MA in clinical psychology, spending three years in Berkeley, California”. Of course Berkeley University is one of America’s most prestigious places of learning but he had, I fact, studied at the much more anonymous and unheard of Wright Institute in Berkeley, California. So he wasn’t telling a lie, just being creative, a bit like me saying I’ve been to Oxford but leaving out the bit about it being a daytrip on a coach with the church choir.

Making up stories is an old tradition, older even than JM Barrie making up the name Wendy and inventing Peter Pan and the lost boys, but when it’s done to score points rather than to entertain then you better not get caught.

To test how long it would take for a completely fabricated story to go around her place of work and then become repeated as fact, my wife Debbie once made up a rumour with a colleague on BBC’s Breakfast Time about another presenter. They decided together to tell as many people as possible that their colleague was, in fact, a test tube baby who had been adopted. People listened open mouthed and, three days later, someone in another department, on another floor, of TV Centre sat down for a coffee with Debbie and said something like “Guess what?”, and repeated the story as gospel truth.

She confessed to object of the story a few years later and he laughed as he knew she was not trying to score points or hurt anyone, just proving a point about gossip. So I’m left believing that made up stories are great fun and can be a source of entertainment, but they are too serious and precious to fall in to the wrong hands.

If politicians want to make up stories then let them work on tabloid newspapers. At least then I could laugh along while reading them in Tenerife, near Glasgow.