Cathy Dobbs: Lip reading's a mug's game in politics
“How can you tell when a politician is lying?” the old joke starts. The answer: “Their lips are moving.”
We saw it with Tony Blair over his Iraq weapons of mass destruction debacle. His decision to go to war was based on patchy and limited information. However, he told us all that he had intelligence that was extensive, detailed and authoritative.
I once interviewed Edwina Currie and while politicians knew salmonella in eggs was making people ill, it was covered up. She lost her job for telling the truth – that’s how much Westminster hates politicians being honest with us plebs.
So, why do I feel like the only person in the country that wasn’t surprised about Boris’s Partygate? What did we all expect?
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Did you notice how careful I was with my pronouns in that last comment? Rather than use ‘his lips’ for the old joke I used ‘their lips’ – after all, we no longer only have male politicians.
