Donald Trump was said to have exaggerated the numbers attending his inauguration. Shawn Thew / EPA
Donald Trump was said to have exaggerated the numbers attending his inauguration. Shawn Thew / EPA

Lies, damned lies and statistics: when does a fabrication become permissible?



Every November, a small village in Cumbria in northwest England holds the “world’s biggest liar” competition. It’s a piece of fun in which competitors have five minutes to tell the biggest and most convincing lies.

The rules bar two professions from taking part: politicians and lawyers. These professions are said to be too skilled in telling lies.

You might need no convincing on that point. The Washington Post estimates that in his first 400 days in office US President Donald Trump has made more than 2,400 misleading or downright false claims.

The New York Times went so far as to publish a long list of what it said were Mr Trump's lies and claimed he told six times more falsehoods in just a few months than Barack Obama did in all eight years of his presidency.

But what is striking is that, reading through the list of Mr Trump's lies, the president would not win the biggest liar competition. His efforts are so obviously, demonstrably, untrue.

He claimed, for example, to have been against the 2003 Iraq war. He publicly supported it. He boasts about the popularity of his inauguration when television pictures showed it was not well attended. He claimed Americans pay the highest taxes in the world. They don’t. He tweeted that North Korea “agreed to denuclearisation”. They haven’t, although let’s hope they do.

And his verbal contortions over his relationship with porn star Stormy Daniels would be laughable, if they were not so demeaning of the great office of the presidency.

But the bigger question is whether lying actually matters anymore. More than a third of American voters continue to support Mr Trump and presumably would do so even if he claimed he was the first man on the moon. (He wasn't, just to be clear.)

Chicago university professor John Mearsheimer is an expert on when lies matter and when they do not seem to do so. In his book Why Leaders Lie, Prof Mearsheimer divides the telling of falsehoods into three categories – lies, deceit and spin.

He quotes a 19th century British statesman, Sir Henry Taylor, as observing that “falsehood ceases to be falsehood when it is understood on all sides that the truth is not expected to be spoken”.

This seems to be an important observation. Lies may be permissible, even advisable, in some circumstances.

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Read more from Gavin Esler:

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Sir Winston Churchill once quipped that in war, the truth is so precious it must always be surrounded “by a bodyguard of lies”. I doubt many would criticise Churchill for that. Nor do we really expect a finance minister to give entirely straight answers about devaluing a currency or other market-sensitive information.

And so Mr Trump’s extraordinary political achievement appears to be that in carpet-bombing the world with his misstatements, when a blatant falsehood is uncovered, most of us just shrug and assume that deception is just the new normal in Washington.

Sir Henry was correct: in the White House, “the truth is not expected to be spoken” by Mr Trump, nor by his closest associates. His lawyer Rudy Giuliani more or less admitted as much when he said publicly that he was focusing on the law rather than the facts.

This might be an effective political survival strategy but it has profound consequences. Domestically in the US, it means Mr Trump and his allies need to blacken the reputation of courts, judges, journalists and the FBI.

Internationally it might encourage others to tell enormous lies too. There is considerable evidence that the Assad regime is blatantly lying about its use of chemical weapons in Syria. Russia also appears to be thoroughly deceitful over the attack on British soil using nerve gas. British politicians have been, in that wonderfully English phrase, “economical with the truth” over Brexit.

So when Mr Trump meets President Kim Jong-un, let us hope these two leaders do create a lasting peace on the Korean peninsula — but whatever they say, the normalisation of untruths in political life suggests we should be very sceptical of any deal they may produce.

As a friend in Washington once put it, reciting an old joke: “How do you know when a politician is lying? His lips are moving.”

But how about the rest of us? Do ordinary citizens often tell lies, bend the truth or act deceptively? Has deception become normal in our lives too?

Well, just remember the last time you bought something and came to the point where you had to tick a box saying you have read the terms and conditions. Have you ever – ever – read the terms and conditions? Neither have I. Some T&Cs stretch to 30,000 words, twice the length of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

So perhaps this November any of us could go to Cumbria and win the world’s biggest liar competition with a speech saying: “I always read the terms and conditions on every internet purchase”. Even Mr Trump would find that obvious falsehood hard to beat.

Gavin Esler is an author, journalist and television presenter

THE LIGHT

Director: Tom Tykwer

Starring: Tala Al Deen, Nicolette Krebitz, Lars Eidinger

Rating: 3/5

Where%20the%20Crawdads%20Sing
%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EDirector%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3EOlivia%20Newman%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EStars%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%20Daisy%20Edgar-Jones%2C%20Taylor%20John%20Smith%2C%20Harris%20Dickinson%2C%20David%20Strathairn%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ERating%3A%3C%2Fstrong%3E%202%2F5%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
The specs

AT4 Ultimate, as tested

Engine: 6.2-litre V8

Power: 420hp

Torque: 623Nm

Transmission: 10-speed automatic

Price: From Dh330,800 (Elevation: Dh236,400; AT4: Dh286,800; Denali: Dh345,800)

On sale: Now

UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
SPEC%20SHEET%3A%20APPLE%20IPHONE%2014%20PRO%20MAX
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Copa del Rey

Barcelona v Real Madrid
Semi-final, first leg
Wednesday (midnight UAE)

Specs
Engine: Electric motor generating 54.2kWh (Cooper SE and Aceman SE), 64.6kW (Countryman All4 SE)
Power: 218hp (Cooper and Aceman), 313hp (Countryman)
Torque: 330Nm (Cooper and Aceman), 494Nm (Countryman)
On sale: Now
Price: From Dh158,000 (Cooper), Dh168,000 (Aceman), Dh132,000 (Countryman)
Is it worth it? We put cheesecake frap to the test.

The verdict from the nutritionists is damning. But does a cheesecake frappuccino taste good enough to merit the indulgence?

My advice is to only go there if you have unusually sweet tooth. I like my puddings, but this was a bit much even for me. The first hit is a winner, but it's downhill, slowly, from there. Each sip is a little less satisfying than the last, and maybe it was just all that sugar, but it isn't long before the rush is replaced by a creeping remorse. And half of the thing is still left.

The caramel version is far superior to the blueberry, too. If someone put a full caramel cheesecake through a liquidiser and scooped out the contents, it would probably taste something like this. Blueberry, on the other hand, has more of an artificial taste. It's like someone has tried to invent this drink in a lab, and while early results were promising, they're still in the testing phase. It isn't terrible, but something isn't quite right either.

So if you want an experience, go for a small, and opt for the caramel. But if you want a cheesecake, it's probably more satisfying, and not quite as unhealthy, to just order the real thing.

 

 

COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Almnssa
Started: August 2020
Founder: Areej Selmi
Based: Gaza
Sectors: Internet, e-commerce
Investments: Grants/private funding
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
 
Started: 2021
 
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
 
Based: Tunisia 
 
Sector: Water technology 
 
Number of staff: 22 
 
Investment raised: $4 million 
COMPANY%20PROFILE
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WHAT ARE NFTs?

     

 

    

 

   

 

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are tokens that represent ownership of unique items. They allow the tokenisation of things such as art, collectibles and even real estate.

 

An NFT can have only one official owner at one time. And since they're minted and secured on the Ethereum blockchain, no one can modify the record of ownership, not even copy-paste it into a new one.

 

This means NFTs are not interchangeable and cannot be exchanged with other items. In contrast, fungible items, such as fiat currencies, can be exchanged because their value defines them rather than their unique properties.

 
Most%20polluted%20cities%20in%20the%20Middle%20East
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MOST%20POLLUTED%20COUNTRIES%20IN%20THE%20WORLD
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Armies of Sand

By Kenneth Pollack (Oxford University Press)
 

Dengue%20fever%20symptoms
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Volvo ES90 Specs

Engine: Electric single motor (96kW), twin motor (106kW) and twin motor performance (106kW)

Power: 333hp, 449hp, 680hp

Torque: 480Nm, 670Nm, 870Nm

On sale: Later in 2025 or early 2026, depending on region

Price: Exact regional pricing TBA