There is a weird sort of pause in the Brexit saga at the moment. A time to catch our breath ready for the next new low point in what is turning out to be the biggest disaster we have faced for at least seventy years. There's not a lot happening so I want to have a look at the correction which The Telegraph was forced to print last week (HERE) for one of Boris Johnson's columns in January. I don't know about you, but this was a shock to me. Personally, I would have thought they would be printing corrections every week.
The Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) responded to a complaint that it was inaccurate of Johnson to write:
"Of all the options suggested by pollsters - staying in the EU, coming out on Theresa May's terms, or coming out on World Trade terms - it is the last, the so-called no-deal option, that is gaining in popularity.
"In spite of - or perhaps because of - everything they have been told, it is this future that is by some margin preferred by the British public."
The watchdog said the article, published on 7 January, failed to provide accurate information with "a basis in fact" as he was unable to do, since it wasn't true. They ordered a correction to be printed.
What was laughable was The Telegraph's defence. They shamelessly argued it was "clearly comically polemical" - whatever that means. In other words BoJo didn't need a basis in fact for his claims, essentially he could just make them up. Polemical means strongly critical or disputatious writing or speech by the way (I looked it up).
The man whose ambition is matched only by his vaulting incompetence, genuinely thinks leadership candidates should write articles in newspapers which are total fiction. As Oscar Wilde once wrote of someone else, "facts flee before him like frightened forest things". BoJo doesn't bother to check anything at all. When he wants to make a point he invents an authoritative poll or a report to back himself up and convince his readers that what he is saying has some basis in truth when it doesn't.
Lord knows how he would manage if he ever got to No 10 and the real world intruded into the fictional one in his head. Faced with a contentious decision he would simply reach for a 'fact' or two, boldly waiting at the back of his mind, ready to be pressed into service and used to buttress whatever argument he was losing at any moment.
I've met people like him. You can't win because he has his own 'facts' that nobody else has access to.
The story attracted me because of my post last Tuesday (HERE) about another column where Johnson claimed "this country leads the world in battery technology" something which I am sure is not true since China, South Korea and Japan produce 90% of the world's lithium-ion batteries, which is what the article was about. Perhaps I should write to IPSO myself?
From the man who would be King to a man who actually is a King. I'm talking of Mervyn King or more properly Lord Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England. He was the person at the helm when the 2008 financial crisis hit but didn't see it coming. Lord King is also a Brexiteer.
In an interview (HERE) he describes the current Brexit position as an 'awful shambles' although he said the word 'shambles' is not adequate enough. I think we call agree with that. In fact perhaps the word brexit will eventually be used to describe something worse than a shambles, who knows? When the apocalypse hits we can say, "crikey what an absolute brexit this is" and everybody will understand how terrible things are.
But Lord King uses the ludicrous analogy he has used before, likening our negotiation to buying a car from a dealership and going in saying we're going to buy a car from you no matter what. He clearly thinks taking no deal off the table is wrong. He said:
"MPs have behaved as if they were going into a car dealer on a Saturday afternoon and saying 'I'd like to know what your best offer is but I can assure you that we're not leaving this showroom without buying one of these cars'.
"It is really hopeless. We could end up moving towards a position in which we end up with the worst of all worlds.
"We don't get the benefits of being in the EU where we influence or shape the rules and regulations that govern the UK but we don't get any benefit from leaving it because we still align ourselves to the rules and regulations of the rest of the EU.
"None of this makes any sense."
But his analogy only works if you can walk away without inflicting serious damage on yourself. Let's imagine a more realistic scenario. The dealer is the only one for miles around, he knows you have a desperate need for a car because he watched you deliberately trash the one you arrived in. The dealership closes in half an hour. It's chucking it down with rain and you have your wife and five kids in tow. He has one seven seater available. Now try asking for a 'good deal'. It's not quite so easy is it?
Last December (HERE) he described May's deal as a 'betrayal' in an article for Bloomberg and wrote:
"Preparations for Brexit based on trade under WTO terms should have started in 2016, immediately after the referendum, as I said at the time. Britain needed a fall-back position — it is foolish to negotiate without one — and that was the form it should have taken"
We can all see where he's coming from but then he says:
The U.K. is a European country, and always will be. Trade and contacts among the nations of Europe can and should continue much as before. And I have no doubt they will do so.
King is another 'have cake and eat it' man just like BoJo. He made clear (HERE) in 2016 he wants to leave the single market and the customs union in a hard Brexit but he wants to carry on trading with Europe 'much as before' - when we were IN and had the benefit of the single market and the customs union.
He just doesn't say HOW this miracle is to be achieved.
