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The Rise of Political Lying | 
 enlarge | Author: Peter Oborne
Publisher: Free Press
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy New: £1.50
You Save: £6.49 (81%)
New (24) Used (12) Collectible (1) from £1.06
Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 43213
Media: Paperback
Edition: New title
Pages: 317
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 1
ISBN: 0743275608
Dewey Decimal Number: 320
EAN: 9780743275606
ASIN: 0743275608
Publication Date: April 11, 2005
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: A Brand new copy. Mailed the same working day.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 Delusional hack pushes right-wing agenda September 15, 2007
Brother John (London, England)
1 out of 16 found this review helpful
Oborne completely misses that point in this book, accusing the Labour government of lying when he and everyone else knows that they are no worse than the Tories when they were in power.
What Oborne fails to admit is that the only reason politicians feel it necessary to 'manage' their pronouncements is that they know the news media will twist and stretch (spin...!) everything that is said in order to fit the agenda of the newspaper's owner and to create a 'juicier' story for the purpose of self-advertisement.
The real villains in this area are the newspapers and journalists who carry the 'sword of truth' but are instead terrible hypocrites.
Oborne is ultimately guilty of playing along with the general status quo, and this book should only be read if you are politically right-leaning and prepared to go along with the rubbish that passes for political journalism in this country.
 If you read the Spectator... January 30, 2007
Robert Whitaker (Liverpool, UK)
12 out of 26 found this review helpful
The way to judge if you will enjoy this book or not is to read the author blurb. Read the line "Peter Oborne is Political Editor of the Spectator" and let your response decide.
Oborne comes across as a cross between Boris Johnson and Harry Enfield's 'Tory Boy'. Oborne obviously had wet dreams about Thatcher, hence the notable absence of criticism directed to Mrs T and her administration. She only ever told two lies apparently.
Oborne sets off to praise the conservatives then completely shifts the goal posts for his attack on Labour. It almost leaves one having some sympathy for Labour. Where the Tories are vindicated for Bernard Ingham's invention of spin, Labour are then berated for the same tactics.
For a 'Political Editor' Oborne shows in this book that he has very little knowledge of British political events in the last 20 - 30 years, the book lacks depth in many areas, contains basic factual errors, and has some very bizarre interpretations of British politics.
It is true that Tony Blair and his Labour government have lied to the British public, and the world, more so than any other recent administration, and this is an important subject that needs in-depth analysis. However Oborne has cheapened the subject here by passing off his personal prejudices as balanced debate. Oborne has the makings of a good book here, but needs to remove himself emotionally from the subject and try again. And some reading up on recent British politics wouldn't go amiss.
 PLEASE PLEASE READ THIS BOOK ! January 18, 2007
K. Bates
10 out of 13 found this review helpful
Whether you are a student of contemporary British politics or just, like me, a citizen who is concerned about the deterioration in standards of public life in recent years, this book is essential reading. There is nothing new about politicians lying - sometimes it can actually be in the country's interest for ministers to fail to tell the truth - and Oborne gives several examples which pre-date the Blair government. But what this excellent book shows us is that deliberate lying is right at the heart of this administration, with Mandelson, Campbell and Blair himself being the leading culprits. They really do believe that the public cannot be trusted with the truth.
The consequences of this constant barrage of deception are:
1. A dramatic increase in public cynicism and voter apathy.
2. The war in Iraq, which has already claimed the lives of more than 100 British servicemen and countless thousands of Iraqi civilians. The evidence is compelling that we were deliberately misled by 10 Downing Street as to why we were going to war.
Some legacy, Mr Blair ! And thank you, Peter Oborne, for your research and for setting out the evidence so clearly for us.
 An Exercise in Half Truth September 22, 2006
John D. Andrews (grantham, lincs United Kingdom)
9 out of 14 found this review helpful
I've just finished reading `The Rise of Political Lying'. It's a fairly detailed study of how the Blair government has routinely lied to the British public throughout much of its time in office.
I don't know much about Mr Oborne, and I'm not sufficiently curious to find out more. My guess is he's fairly conservative. Given the fact that most of the political literature available in British bookshops is quite left wing, it's moderately interesting to read an attempt at intellectual comment from the right.
Whilst I don't question any of the content of Mr Oborne's book, it is quite ridiculous to accept his implied central thesis - that political lying in the UK is more or less an invention of the Blair government. I guess he half-heartedly tries to create the illusion of impartiality by taking a brief look at some Tory fibs, but rather blows his cover by suggesting that Margaret Thatcher was only guilty of two lies during her ten years in office, without mentioning at all her denial in the early eighties that the government intended to kill off the British coal industry, as accurately predicted at the time by union leader Arthur Scargill.
Mr Oborne also clearly laments the fact that Labour Party spin doctors enjoyed unprecedented controls over the civil service who, Mr Oborne appears to believe, are simply incapable of any form of artifice. British public servants, he seems to think, specialise in indifferent objective analysis and are solely motivated by pure and selfless duty to the queendom.
First and foremost Mr Oborne is wrong to suggest that political lying in Britain is a recent phenomenon, a creation of the evil monsters within the Blair government. It is highly questionable whether any British government has ever been truthful, or ever behaved with the welfare of the British people uppermost in its mind. If anyone would doubt this, they only need to ask themselves why all British governments classify so many of their documents as top secret, many of which are required to be kept secret for up to a hundred years.
The second farcical implication of Mr Oborne's is that the civil service is beyond reproach. The first thoughts that concentrate the mind of the Whitehall mandarin as he strolls into work are dreams of honours and titles to retire on, and the cushy and lucrative boardroom numbers that will certainly follow to boost the already substantial pension fund. The mandarin's second most vital duty is the enlargement of his own department. The bigger the department, the bigger the resulting salary, pension, knighthood and boardroom appointments. Two hundred years ago Dickens accurately observed, in Bleak House: `The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.' The same is exactly true of the British civil service.
So is Oborne's book completely useless? Well, no not exactly. It does give quite a nice account of the unquestionable deviousness of Blair and his cronies. The final chapter offers a couple of very sensible suggestions on how to improve matters (but is let down by his star struck faith in the integrity of civil servants). There are also one or two quite good general discussions around the subject of lies, half truths and spin; and in the final analysis I suppose you have to acknowledge that any book that helps to lift the fog from the eyes of the innocent as to how the world really works can't be all bad, even if the fog is only half cleared.
 Depressingly convincing account July 27, 2006
Marshall Lord (Whitehaven, UK)
28 out of 29 found this review helpful
I know from experience that there are still honest politicians around in both the Conservative and Labour parties. But this book is depressingly successful at showing how many others have set out to deceive the voters and why respect for politics is at an all-time low.
Oborne appears to have gone to considerable length to make only charges which he can substantiate - doubtless he would have been sued otherwise.
His book starts with an instance of a politician who told the truth and was accused of lying because of it. In 1994 William Waldegrave was asked whether it might ever be acceptable for a minister to say something untrue to the House of Commons, and he replied that in "exceptional circumstances" it might be. This was immediately portrayed as an example of tory sleaze, and various future Labour ministers who would have had to resign if they themselves were held to the standards they demanded, used Waldegrave's statement to condemn him and the government.
Peter Oborne admits to some feelings of guilt for having sprinted out of the room to file the story, which resulted in a media firestorm, because as he puts it "There was a great irony at work here. William Waldegrave was doing something very rare for a modern politician and trying to give an honest answer to an honest question. If anyone was lying, it was his Labour opponents, who set an impossibly high standard of truth telling, and one they had no intention of meeting themselves. It was Waldegrave's misfortune that his remarks played straight into the Labour Party strategy. Labour was determined to portray Conservative politicans as cheats and liars."
Any reader who deduced from this start that the book is not completely balanced and will mostly be an attack on New Labour politicians is absolutely correct. Oborne does devote the next ten pages to attacking lies and deceptions by the Thatcher and Major governments, and rogue individual tories such as Archer, Aitken, and Hamilton. Almost all the remainder of the book denounces New Labour.
But although the book is partisan in the sense that it concentrates on New Labour deceit rather than that by other parties, the details given of the spin, smears, character assassination of anyone who gets in their way, deceptions, double counting spending announcements, and outright lies, are extremely convincing in making the point that the leadership of the present government will say whatever they think they can get away with.
Oborne argues that the New Labour leadership has a "narrative truth" which is what they want to believe and want everyone else to believe, and that their statements about every subject relate to the greatest degree possible to that "narrative" rather than what is happening in the real world which the rest of us inhabit.
He compares and links the attitudes to truth and reality of the Blair government and the George W Bush White House, comparing the roles of Alistair Campbell and Karl Rove. Oborne quotes a senior adviser at the White House who told a journalist that he (the journalist) was part of what the spin doctors called the "reality based community" and added "That's not the way the world works any more. We're an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that new reality - judiciously as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities."
Oborne alleges that the people around both Blair and Bush do not believe in objective reality as most of us understand it, and instead see reality as something which can be shaped, not just by changing what is really happening in the world, but by changing what people think is happening.
The book concludes with six suggestions to try to improve the level of public honesty in Britain - things like establishing a "fact-check" in this country similar to the one which exists in America, making the national statistics office independent. Some of these ideas are quite good: others such as "make political lying a crime" would be very hard to define in such a way that they could effectively be enforced.
Where Oborne is undoubtedly correct is that there is far too much political dishonesty and that what we really need is a change of heart and a refusal to accept this.
Other books which might be of interest to anyone who wants to read more on this subject include "Lying in state" by Tim Slessor, "Dirty Politics, Dirty Times" by Michael Ashcroft, and "The Little Red Book of New Labour Sleaze."
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