The 2019 general election in the United Kingdom was arguably more pivotal, engaging, and important than any other in recent history. In the first major televised debate, ITV’s Julie Etchingham asked of Boris Johnson: “Does the truth matter in this election?”. Despite being met with laughs and jeers from the studio’s audience (highlighting the aforementioned interest in this ballot from the public), the election’s ultimate victor maintained that truth indeed was of great importance (ITV News, 2019).

Clearly, in the context of an election and politicians’ deliverances upon their promises, truth is a matter of high gravitas. To ensure the effectiveness of, and public confidence in a democracy, a government’s veracity and transparency must be sustained.

There is, however, a distinction to be made. Although a politician’s (and their civil servants’) satisfaction of campaign pledges are a key issue, there is a great deal more to their public role than simply fulfilling promises. The electorate must appoint candidates based on not only an understanding of their pledges but also in their confidence in the candidate’s decision-making processes and abilities. The country, the world, and people are dynamic – and so should be a politician’s decisions. There is an adverse effect to be had from acting with absolutist regard to the policies established on the campaign trail.

In essence, it may be acceptable for politicians to deviate from past promises in the face of unexpected complications. But we now arrive at the subject matter, which regards the importance of truth. In a similar way that new issues can arise that challenge a politician’s perspective, could a new issue merit a politician’s withholding of information? Or, more acutely, the deliberate misleading of the public?

There are fundamentally two circumstances in which this might be permissible: where the revealing of the truth would lead to the worsening of issues; and where the deliberate misleading of the public (either in the short-term or the longer-term) would be in the public interest.

As this essay is being written, the world faces a grave challenge from the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic. British supermarkets, despite having no significant supply chain issues, have struggled to keep up with demand through March, as “panic buying” has set in among many of the public (The Guardian, 2020).

In a national emergency such as this, it may be appropriate for politicians to take extraordinary steps to mitigate the effects of and ultimately resolve this crisis.

If, say, a minister was to become aware that there would continue to be a moderate level of stock shortages among the supermarkets, might it be appropriate for that minister to deliberately mislead the public into the belief that this was not as significant an issue as it were? If the public were to be convinced by their public servants that the issue at hand was not substantial, the effects of this “panic buying” may be reduced. Contrarily, the minister’s truthfulness, in this circumstance, would likely lead to a worsening of the issue.¹ This example, therefore, would seem to satisfy the first of the two circumstances that this essay sets out.

The aforementioned circumstance is one in which a politician can quite easily and lucidly offer exaggeration or under-exaggeration without presenting a distinct mistruth, but other circumstances may arise in this crisis and in other crises where such a presentation may, in the view of the government, require a greater divergence from the truth.

An important avenue that deserves exploration is one in which an explicit act of deceit is carried out, rather than just a meagre misrepresentation. However, the current global pandemic does not offer any particularly adequate opportunity for such an action to be consciously done. One definite example where such an action might be realised, however, is in the event of a war. It could come about that a country’s leaders decide to mislead their citizens to, therefore, mislead the enemy through the medium of that enemy’s spies and foreign intelligence reconnaissance.²

This is a highly treacherous area of politics, and there certainly exists examples of the public being misled for reasons that do not meet the criterion of public interest.³ However, there are also other examples where the public interest argument is quite clearly satisfied.

Although well documented now, the British government conducted a monumental operation during the Second World War that was kept highly secret – operation Ultra. Alan Turing, along with fellow codebreakers at the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park, had created a machine capable of decrypting the high-level enemy communications of the Axis powers, affording them knowledge of when enemy attacks would be carried out. The operation was managed by MI6, with cover-stories being developed to mask the truth from government officials, the public, and, crucially, the Germans of how this intelligence was actually being gathered (Harjung, 2014). Indeed, “[m]ost government officials and British naval officers believed the vital information was coming from an MI6 master spy named ‘Boniface’ […]” (The Guardian, 2020).

The secret service and senior members of the government had to make difficult decisions about whether to act upon certain elements of intelligence, and whether doing so would raise suspicions. As a result, decisions with grave consequences had to be made, such as the one not to warn the people of Coventry of the oncoming Luftwaffe bombing. Prime Minister Churchill’s decision to “better sacrifice a city than to compromise Ultra” led to over five hundred civilians being killed.

Operation Ultra is a clear example of transparency being sacrificed in favour of the common public interest – minimising lives whilst maximising the longevity of this avenue of intelligence. Whilst the public are unable to, even retrospectively, scrutinise the individual details of the decisions made, it is likely agreeable that the government and MI6’s deliberate misleading of the public in this instance was a positive act, making this rather extreme deviation from the truth an example that satisfies the second of the two circumstances set out by this essay.

Ultimately, where the choice is made to mislead the public to a degree, the decision-making about this should not rest upon a single person.⁴ Nor should it be a decision that rests upon a single elected politician and their unelected advisers. A decision to deviate from or to evade the truth in order to benefit the public should always be a decision shared among, at the very least, a group of senior elected politicians.⁵

Under normal circumstances, truth is of utmost importance in politics – perhaps even its most important matter – arising from the necessity of ensuring accountability and transparency in a democracy. However, whilst it is typically wrong for a politician to convey an outright lie, in exceptional positions it may be permissible for them, with the support of fellow elected politicians, to misguide the public, if it is considered to be for the common good. In this manner, ‘truth’ matters, but not always in an absolutist way.

Footnotes

1) Indeed, the UK’s Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Matt Hancock has stated that the government is “confident” that food supplies will not run out – whilst an unnamed supermarket executive has reportedly told the BBC that he was unsure of the accuracy of this guarantee (BBC News, 2020).

2) It is for this reason that the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic is not an applicable host to this hypothetical example: the adversary is a virus, which of course does not establish strategy based upon its targets’ actions. Of course, there may be some more minute examples within this crisis wherein there is a sense of country-versus-country “rugged individualism” – e.g. the USA’s competitiveness with respect to protective mask supply (The Washington Post, 2020). However, this example has weak relevance to the subject matter of the representation of the truth to the public.

3) For example, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which is now understood to have largely been a fabrication and misrepresentation by the US government, allowed the Johnson administration to justify a war against North Vietnam (The Guardian, 2014).

4) This argument, therefore, may not be naturally compatible with a presidential democracy because, to stress the point, a decision such as this should not rest on a single person.

5) It is, however, permissible and even advisable that expert advisors are aware of and influential in such matters.

Bibliography

BBC News, 2020. Coronavirus: Supermarkets won’t run out of food, vows Matt Hancock. [Online] Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51764225

Harjung, E. C., 2014. Turing: His significance in operation Ultra at Bletchley Park. 20 06.p. 2.

ITV News, 2019. Johnson v Corbyn: The ITV Debate | ITV News. [Online] Available at: https://youtu.be/9kEB5pqWpJw?t=1493

The Guardian, 2014. When presidents lie to make a war. [Online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/02/vietnam-presidents-lie-to-wage-war-iraq

The Guardian, 2020. Britons made 80m extra grocery shops in less than a month. [Online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/31/coronavirus-britons-made-80m-extra-grocery-shops-in-less-than-a-month

The Guardian, 2020. The Imitation Game: how Alan Turing played dumb to fool US intelligence. [Online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/nov/28/imitation-game-alan-turing-us-intelligence-ian-fleming

The Washington Post, 2020. White House scrambles to scoop up medical supplies worldwide, angering Canada, Germany. [Online] Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/03/white-house-scrambles-scoop-up-medical-supplies-angering-canada-germany/