Morning, Saturday class. Settle down. Now. What do Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Panorama and Rachel Reeves have in common? Don’t all answer at once. Yes, quite right, everyone. They’ve all been caught out lying, or lying by omission, or at the very least being economique with the actualite, as the late Alan Clark MP might have oh-so-silkily put it. So what ELSE do they have in common?
Correct again. We no longer believe them – or believe IN them, rather. Trust, once forfeited, is almost impossible to recover. Andrew first. Sure, there was plenty of scepticism about his hokey Newsnight denials of ever meeting Virginia Giuffre, let alone having sex with her when she was 17 (remember the rhyme doing the rounds in Westminster: “The grand old Duke of York, he had 12 million quid, he gave it to someone he never met, for something he never did”)?
But for all the derision and mockery, no one could actually prove Andrew a liar. Until emails emerged establishing beyond doubt that he was in touch with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein many months AFTER he had sworn to Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis that he’d broken off contact for good.
Andrew and Epstein discussed Giuffre’s social security number, DOB and rumours (false) that she had a criminal record. So much for Andrew “having no memory” of the poor woman. Caught in a barefaced lie, Andrew lost the trust of even his brother, the King. Along with his titles, home, and any remaining shreds of his reputation.
Now, Panorama. Did you hear the programme’s trails this week about its “exclusive” on SAS death squads that once operated in Afghanistan? Did you find yourself raising a quizzical eyebrow?
Last month’s revelation that Panorama lied through its teeth about President Trump’s speech on the day of the Capitol Hill riots, dishonestly editing it to make it appear he explicitly called for violence, has horribly compromised the programme.
Once, I would have accepted the veracity of a Panorama “scoop” without question. Now? I’m not quite so sure. The trust’s gone.
As for Reeves… what a track record for misrepresentation (a polite way of putting it) that woman has. Accused of plagiarising large chunks of other people’s work for her book on female economists.
Doctoring her CV to suggest she’d been a leading economist at the Bank of England when in fact she was a minor functionary. Claiming she didn’t realise she needed to buy a licence before letting her home, even though she knew one was required.
And now, the biggest whopper of the lot – telling us she had to use tax rises to fill a financial black hole that she’d been formally told didn’t exist.