Peter beresford writes that sometimes the telling of lies is necessary - to help the poor and powerless.
Is lying the new rock and roll? The imprisonment of Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken before him appears to argue against this. But as with Robert Maxwell, perhaps the lesson really is dishonesty is OK - unless you get caught. After all, Private Eye pursued Archer for more than 30 years. It was Private Eye too, which first broke the story of the Bristol paediatric heart surgery catastrophe - another tale of dissimulation, deceit and cover-up, as well as incompetence.
Sleaze and dirty tricks have figured disproportionately in UK political life since the mid-1990s. Commentators ridicule our politicians for saying one thing in opposition, and another in office, about privatisation, arms sales, asylum seekers, crime and workfare. They are not convinced by ministers' protestations that it is circumstances, not they, that have changed. The sense that truth is now excess baggage seems to be one of the reasons underpinning the public alienation from politics highlighted by recent research.
A measure of the importance of an idea is the number of words used to describe it. There have never been so many words for lying - blagging, bending, massaging, being economical with and glossing over the truth. What is "spin" if not lying and telling things in the most self-serving way?
On the other hand, it's all very well for Keats to write "Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that's all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know". But a crisis-ridden politician or policy maker required to reconcile "not in my backyarders", determined user group, trade union and budget, knows there's a bit more to it than that.
If lying is not telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, there are also greatly increasing pressures to lie in health and social care. Insurers' advice, the compensation culture and commercial considerations all push in this direction. Yet we have heard the same story over and over again in recent cases of people wronged in accidents and public care. "If they'd just admitted it and said sorry. It wasn't the money we wanted."
When service users are asked what they want from social care workers, one of the key concerns, emerging in study after study, is for honesty and openness. It is the relationship with the worker that is central and people want one based on trust, equality and respect.
That does not mean lying does not come into it. One social work trainee once said to me that his approach was based on a "ducking and diving" model of practice. He meant operating as skilfully and sometimes unconventionally as was necessary to maximise the small space he had in his agency to support service users.
Every social care worker knows that this sometimes means telling lies to allow service users to access the benefits and services they should have. Here the issue is doing this in a way that is not demeaning or patronising, rather than keeping to the letter of the law. Maybe that is the bottom line for us all; to tell truth to the powerful and, wherever helpful, tell lies for the powerless.
Yvonne Roberts in on holiday.
