THE broadcaster Mike Graham has been suspended by TalkTV for offences real or imagined (past caring). This was always on the cards given the 24/7 diligence of the grievance junkies now in charge of the public and social media spaces.
It was only last week that Mr Graham was involved in an entertaining ‘dust-up’ with the genteel (some might say ‘precious’) journalist John Rentoul about this government’s habit of lying about everything, even when it’d be easier for it if it didn’t.
Mr Rentoul does not agree that words such as ‘lie’ or ‘liar’ should be included in the lexicon of sophisticated Westminster anthropology. Better to use words such as ‘mistake’ if you want to avoid going all Wetherspoons about things seems to be the suggested approach of the Independent’s chief political commentator.
Rest assured that Mr Rentoul welcomes any debate if conducted according to the established language and procedures of the commentator class and if designed to leave unexamined the Hampstead prejudices of that same class. He is a suitably donnish ambassador for the familiar status quoactivism of the tenured commentariat.
People have had it with this nonsense. They know that Starmer and his supporting troupe of grotesques(in politics, the media and the ‘charity’ sector) have turned lying into a pathology and not just a strategy. This Prime Minister invests time and emotional capital in his lies. It seems churlish to rebrand them as ‘mistakes’.
The government didn’t make a mistake when it told us that digital ID would deter all those 14-year-old bearded women from arriving uninvited on the Kent coast. It didn’t slip up and find itself with a superinjunction so that you and I weren’t told that 200,000 non-English speaking ‘Afghan interpreters’ had been distributed across the UK.
Had I known that lies could now be rebranded as mistakes by fiat because that’s the best way to have a debate, my divorce would have gone far more easily. I’m still pretty sure I committed adultery though.
John Rentoul presents as a very nice man, which is of course the problem. Niceness has become toxic and routinely runs cover for all manner of deeper nastiness. It’s as if the governing classes have turned the UK into one ghastly dinner party at which the guests (who don’t want to be there) are in fear of offending the hosts (who have put poison in the dessert).
It is because of niceness that we have allowed our moral language to become desacralised and have exchanged categories such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ for depressingly insipid counterfeits, not just to avoid giving offence but to be seen as the sort of person who doesn’t commit the last-sin-standing of judging anyone else.
The United Kingdom – England especially – is an eccentric thing: a ‘Christian country’ which has replaced the cross with the rainbow lanyard and thereby robbed itself of any spiritual defences against an alternative faith whose contemporary iteration is theologically and practically antagonistic to the Christian life.
Secularism, these days, has no interest in any religious claim. It is lazily and drearily reductionist, having severed any ties with its intellectually and morally superior Classical ancestry. The Greek philosophers knew a thing or two about moral education and the importance of making distinctions between emotions which on the face of it seem very similar to each other.
And they would point out that what is passed off as niceness is often false humility, or at best lack of moral seriousness.
Jesus wasn’t that nice by the way. It just so happens that I’m writing this after morning Mass at which the Gospel reading was from Luke 12. Our Lord came to bring division to the world as an essential precursor to peace. To follow Christ is to assent to a shocking revolution in the soul. Niceness by itself doesn’t cut it.
Which brings us back to lying and what’s wrong with it, which is that regardless of its consequences, and even if there are none, it corrupts and disfigures the soul of the liar. St Augustine (whose early life had a touch of a 4th century lothario about it) writes that even the smallest fib does spiritual harm which no earthly benefit could mitigate.
Not just the soul, as it happens. When the soul is corrupted it shows up in physicality, which is why the posthumous bodily decay of the Elder Zosima is used by Dostoevsky to imply that the priest had not been all that he seemed in life.
At the risk of being too personal (or perhaps for the sake of it), have you noticed how the sustained dishonesty of this current Cabinet has been flagged up in the way they look? If our Prime Minister has a portrait in the attic I wonder at the state of it.
So, Mr Rentoul, if somebody is lying it is an act of love to call them on it even if – especially if – there’s no way of being nice about it. It might coarsen the ‘debate’, but souls are in play.
This article appeared in Country Squire Magazine on October 24, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
