The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism

An excellent and fascinating book that reveals the truth regarding the behavior of some politicians. A true must read in the world we inhabit.

Brought this for my brother in law. He did say it was a good read and very topical.

Wow!This is 175 pages of compulsive, explosive reading. You can't put it down.The great Czech writer Milan Kundera (whose books you can also buy from Amazon) said:'The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.'This book will help you to remember the verbal chicanery that Boris and his ministers have been using during the Covid response, BREXIT and in previous careers - just in case you have turned off recently.Our prime minister appears to have told a lot of porkies, although Oborne reassures us that there are too many for a book this size, and maybe any book.Oborne still has a dig at the Left (thus asserting his traditional Tory values) and gets all misty eyed about past Tory Governments; he revisits very briefly what he wrote about Blair. However he mostly spends his time diligently exposing the lack of the value in truth our current Government displays so casually. Oborne is also very fair - he even points out where Boris has been less than truthful about Corbyn of all people.My only criticism of the book is when Oborne tries to lump Johnson and Trump together - he sort of loses the thread of this tack and does not quite carry it off for me.Wow#2!! Oborne is that rare commodity - a thoroughly decent Tory chap! Bask in his warm glow I say - there's not many of his type left.However, the most damning part of the book comes in towards the end. It is the abject failure of our institutions and checks and balances (the Nolan Committee standards, rules for Civil Servants and MPs, and Parliament itself) that seem to be mute about the inveterate fibbing that has been going on. This is the most chilling and troubling aspect of all that Oborne highlights. It has huge repercussions for the country and its future. Oborne calls this a 'moral emergency'.And Oborne is brave and right to point this out. Who controls a Government when it gets out of hand or refuses to bow to scrutiny? What recourse do we have? That is the big question at the end of this book. And its a huge one for such a small book.Highly Recommended.

Up until 2015 I assumed (wrongly I now know), that our politicians were relatively honest. I was completely dismayed by the government and the British press coverage of the Brexit debate. As a voter I expect better of the people who make our laws, but over the last 11 years have showed themselves to be shallow, dishonest and disrespectful of the British people. If an ordinary person cheated the way they do we would lose our jobs and be in fear of the consequences. However the blame also lies with the people who voted them in without reading around the subject and looking at it from different points of view. Before Boris was elected I asked a friend what she thought of the possibility of Boris running the country, her reply was “oh but I like him” - my reply “how can you like someone who tells lies”! She wouldn’t have put up with this in her school!They say Mary Tudor went to her grave with Calais on her heart, I wonder what will happen when Boris has finished destroying the union, wrecking peace in Northern Ireland and finishing off all the small businesses throughout the UK. I suppose they’ll just use COVID as an excuse to hide their incompetence, lies and greed.

This is a pretty important book - firstly as it is written by someone with excellent journalistic credentials, who is not part of the left; secondly, because it is extremely well documented (there are more notes and web followup than actual text in the book - actually this is good as the main text is therefore short and punchy, and not cluttered with too much detail, but you can always go and find that later - or may well be aware of it already).The conservative party has deliberately designed their public communications to undermine the idea of truth. They collude with (much of) the press, and media, and, in the end, with us, the public.This is not just a smoke screen. It is a strategy to make it very hard for voters to know what actually is true (e.g. about opposition policy, or just about anything, really). It is a bit more subtle than Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, but in the end, more effective.At the time of writing this review, a number of actual cases of fairly serious corruption are starting to come to light (even in the aforesaid culpable media), and yet Johnson;s government continues to receive leading poll figures. Given people have died (Grenfell, Windrush, Pandemic etc), this is an extraordinary testament to the success of Johnsons team's approach. And who has resigned? Not bullying ministers, but bullied civil servants, whose very job was to maintain probity in government, pushed out because they might slow the rot. Who is next? The judiciary?Right near the end, Oborne suggests some ways to push back, and to regain the moral high ground - write to your MP - if they don't respond with the correct information, complain to the Committee on Standards in Public Life. If it directly concerns you, sue.Given the US has now had a course correction, we (the UK) are the last old democracy that has lost sight of how truth underpins fairness, and its lack undermines our ancient rights.We have been warned.

The author's thesis is that Johnson has broken all norms for the conduct of a Prime Minister. He has deliberately and shamelessly lied whenever it has suited his purposes. Parallels with Trump are occasionally drawn, although the inclusion of Trump on the front cover is a little misleading, since he is very much a subsidiary character in the account.Contained within the book is not only a (perhaps excessively) lengthy set of examples, but weblinks for the reader to verify these. (Alas, whilst these would have worked wonderfully on Kindle, but - at least at the time of my purchase - the book was available in hard copy only.)I should also praise the construction of the book. The eight chapters each set out a specific objective of demonstration and the examples given match these objectives well.Thus, we have the makings of a 4* or 5* book. Alas, the telling of this story is simply tiresome. The two points which irritated me most are:(i) The incidence of first person singular pronouns is not just over the top, but so much so that reader is perhaps even more conscious of the author's amour propre than of his intense contempt for Johnson, and(ii) He talks past the sale in a way which causes one to wonder about his impressive reputation as a journalist. The relentless tone of the writing in this book reminded me of an episode of Frasier in which he offers to drive a prospective romantic partner on an eight-hour drive to enable them to get to know each other better. Barely have they set off, when she reveals herself to be a religious fanatic and he is going to be subjected to her attempt to convert him over the whole trip.This important analysis could (and should) have been devised as an essay of perhaps one-third of the length of book.

Excellent summary of how low the standards in British public life have fallen