Opinion

Bimpe Archer: Lying is almost becoming par for the course in public life

Bimpe Archer
Bimpe Archer Bimpe Archer

THE bigger the lie, the more likely you are to get away with it.

I know this to be true. I once told the most outrageous lie, and I mean THE most outrageous lie.

I literally never lie now. It’s too exhausting. Even small white lies to spare someone’s feelings are essentially like planting a minefield that you then have to cross yourself – trying to keep track of what you said, where you were supposed to have been, what fake ailment you were suffering from.

Real life is tricky enough to navigate without planting potentially explosive traps for yourself.

Obviously as a child I used to fib all the time in an attempt to avoid the consequences of whatever scrape I had got into. But, even then, it induced that heart-catching fear of being caught out.

Not so THE lie. I had no compunction telling it and I look back with a certain degree of pride at my audacity with that one.

It’s probably important to understand my peculiar relationship with my books in my mid-teens.

I worshipped them. I spent all my money on books, carefully inscribed my name and the date they were purchased on the flyleaf and that was it – not another single sign that they had been touched by a human hand. I managed to read them all without ever cracking the spine.

Then I lent one of my favourite books to a schoolmate. Not even a particular friend, just a fairly random girl in my class.

Suffice it to say no one sent her the memo about me and my books. My horror at the state of `my precious’ when it was finally returned still makes me wince.

At that point I determined never to part with any of them ever again.

And so, when another fairly casual acquaintance (this time the daughter of my father’s friend) sat in my book-lined bedroom one evening and asked me to recommend something to read to her, I calmly looked her in the eye and said:

“I’m sorry, I wouldn’t really know. I don’t have any books.”

And here’s the thing, when you tell an outrageous lie, even though the person you are telling knows it is a lie, it’s almost impossible to confront it. You’ve broken one taboo, but for them to call you out on it seems like an even greater taboo.

I think knowing that has helped me do my job, especially in the current climate. People will tell barefaced lies and most of the time they will not be challenged on them – because those who know the truth are filled with doubt in the face of such absolute certainty.

Challenging them is a journalist’s job.

When they are people in positions of power then puncturing the lie requires hours, days, weeks, months of forensic research, gold-plated, trusted sources, legal proofing and, at the bottom line, bravery to publish knowing you are going up against someone who is all in behind their incredible lie.

The `Big Lie’ had achieved an almost mythic status, “a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”.

Described as such by Hitler in `Mein Kampf’ during his diatribe against Jews, but interpreted as the Nazi’s own methods, it was the original switcheroo – shouting loudly that your `enemy’ was deploying a tactic which in fact you are.

It was mythic in the sense that it was so tied to a left-behind past that it might as well have been a unicorn for all the relevance it had.

Yet here it is today, only now they are calling it `fake news’.

If I had been called on my ridiculous bluff of course I wouldn’t have called my house guest a liar and thrown her out of my house.

But that has become par for the course in public life today, from the president who refuses to answer a legitimate question from reporters by attacking the integrity of their employers to the government minister who makes public his resignation letter containing an easily disprovable lie because, well, why not?

We all know that a lie is halfway round the world before the truth can get its shoes on.

The good news is no lie has ever indefinitely withstood the truth.

And luckily we can run in heels.