This week sees a UK general election that is more contentious and with fewer clearcut options than I, for one, can ever remember. In this era of “fake news” we have come to expect that politicians and media types of all persuasions will play fast and loose with the truth, will invent or deny policy claims as it suits them, and create “facts” and “statistics” as required. And so it has been. On the wider world stage, leaders of some of the most powerful nations have generated in their audiences a cynical expectation of what has come to be known as implausible deniability, the naked lie whose immediate detection bothers its perpetrators not at all. Spire-admiring tourists, re-education facilities, “I don’t think I ever met the guy”. That kind of thing. All of this is despicable enough, but its insidiousness, extensiveness, and apathetic acceptance should not blind us to how awful it is. Over time it is corrosive and hugely damaging. This is how our world is becoming.
Within this territory of deceit, one interesting variant is the small, but deliberately engineered untruth which, one feels, is so unnecessary, could so easily be avoided, and which serves as an “own goal” when it goes wrong. In other words, the old fashioned but spontaneously synthesised porkie. Its identification confirms its vendor as a liar, with the inevitable corollary that if that person can lie about something which is so trivial, then surely they can lie about far more important matters. Thus – back to the election again - we were treated last week to the delicious spectacle of a certain Old Pretender being exposed in exactly this way by a smart female television interviewer.
This particular Pretender to the office of prime minister, who surely realises that his views on the monarchy are not vote-catchers with most of the traditional British public, was caught out when, quite unnecessarily, he claimed that he watched the Queen’s Christmas Day broadcasts in the morning. Unfortunately, and incredibly, unlike most of the adult population he didn’t appear to know that this broadcast is generally viewed through a post-lunch, sprout-flavoured, alcoholic haze at 3 o’clock on Christmas afternoon. That is the time when it is first broadcast. Watching him redden and squirm as he knew he’d been found out was a treat; it was one of those feedback things - he knew that she knew that he knew and that we all knew. He’d blown his credibility, and so needlessly. He could have just said that he didn’t watch the broadcast; we wouldn’t have been surprised or offended. Even the interviewer looked embarrassed for him, as he hastily tried to restore his halo by claiming that he visited shelters for the homeless at Christmas. Cringemas, more like it.
To err is human, but to deliberately invent “facts” which don’t need inventing is crass or downright weird. In my local library the other day I picked up a book called “Commuters”, by Simon Webb, published in 2016 by Pen and Sword Books of Barnsley. Glancing through it, I noticed references to the humour of suburban place names in such august sources of toponymic authority as “Python” and “Reggie Perrin”. My kind of book, I thought; absolutely spot on. However, settling into it, soon I was alarmed by the high incidence of typographical and other errors, the frequent repetition of the same themes, the intrusion of irrelevant padding reflecting the author’s views on, for instance, the theory of evolution, and much else that spoke of lousy editing and a lack of substantive content. A shame, because parts of the book are very readable, entertaining, and thoughtful.
I really started to prickle when I found that, referring to Reginald Perrin, the author claimed that the fictitious “Climthorpe”, where Perrin lives, is probably Surbiton. It isn’t, it’s Norbiton, and Norbiton station was used as a location in the TV series. Everybody knows that (as they say). All right, not tremendously important in the scheme of things – one or other of those very suburban places you can get to when South West Trains aren’t on strike. It doesn’t matter, it’s only fiction, only a sitcom. What is not fiction, however, but a peculiarly ghastly tragedy, was the Moorgate tube disaster of February 1975, which Webb goes on to describe later in the book. Forty-three people (Webb says 42) were killed when the train failed to stop at Moorgate, the last station on the line, and compressed itself at speed into a concrete wall at the end of a blind tunnel. What caused the 56-year-old driver, Leslie Newson, whose long experience and habitual cautiousness were widely known, to crash the train in this way, has never satisfactorily been established.
At that time, the so-called Northern City Line upon which the train was running had its northern terminus at Drayton Park, in Highbury, north London, close to where the Emirates Stadium now stands and not far from the older Arsenal stadium then in use. Formerly, this line ran from Finsbury Park, but since construction of the Victoria Line the route had been truncated and trains started instead from the next station down the line, Drayton Park. On page 103 of “Commuters”, Webb states that “Newson was driving Tube trains between West Drayton, a station near Heathrow Airport, and Moorgate”, and goes on to say that “On his fourth journey that morning, Newson took the train from West Drayton at precisely 8:39 am and set off on the three mile trip to Moorgate”.
However precise the time, West Drayton does not have a tube station, is not on the Northern City Line but on the main line out of Paddington, is way out in west London (as Webb says, not far from Heathrow), roughly ten miles from Moorgate. While some slip of the memory may cause one to recall “Drayton Park” as “West Drayton”, adding in the other details is beyond explanation. Most people, especially the author of a book on commuting, would, I imagine, know that Moorgate is in the City of London and that Heathrow is nowhere near there. It’s a total, needless fabrication of detailed nonsense that instantly destroys one’s confidence in everything else the author has to say.
I don’t know anything about Simon Webb, although a quick dip into Amazon suggests he has written a great many books on a wide variety of subjects. From one of the often repeated themes within “Commuters” one may deduce that he is a native of somewhere in the vicinity of Ilford, in east London. I am unable to fathom why he wrote as he did, but the important point is that, for anyone lacking the appropriate knowledge, what he says would be plausible, would be fact, would be “the truth”. I have a sneaking feeling that I’ve seen the same error somewhere else. Actually, I was hoping to establish a trail of the same ludicrous “detail” repeated across multiple publications, but I’ve been unable to do so. As far as I can tell the invention is Webb’s alone.
The worrying wider implication is that, without a degree of pre-existing knowledge, one is unable to detect seemingly unnecessarily fabricated falsehoods of this sort. One believes them to be true. This conclusion pertains in any area of subject matter, at any level of detail and specialisation. If you don’t know that the Queen’s broadcast is at 3 pm on Christmas Day you might conclude that the Old Pretender is an honest man. If you don’t know some basic geography of the London area you might well assume that Webb’s book is reliable. But if you do know these things you will proceed very cautiously. You may even decide that complete avoidance is the safest strategy, and be grateful that you have been alerted in this way. Thus can reputations be brought down, by people tripping themselves up, so needlessly. But thankfully, so revealingly.
