Lies and Misrepresentations from Johnson to Starmer

We want to build a website which will record, sift and analyse the numerous lies, falsehoods and misleading statements of Boris Johnson and his colleagues. The website will also chronicle the role of the British media in aiding and abetting the culture of mendacity in Downing Street.

Ahead of the 2019 general election we set up a website to make a record of the exponential rise in public lying by government ministers and spokespeople which followed Boris Johnson’s appointment as prime minister in July 2019. It was a full time job. However, we were obliged to give up that work at the end of 2019 because it was too time consuming and expensive in terms of resources and money.

Since then, we estimate that Boris Johnson and his senior colleagues have been responsible for a further 300 to 400 false or misleading statements and lies. We have been keeping a loose record of these lies but we now want to scrutinise them more carefully and then publish a record of them. This means bringing the earlier website up to date. This will involve a serious amount of work by a committed team of journalists and researchers. Once we are up to date, we aim then to keep an ongoing record as each new lie, falsehood or misrepresentation enters the public domain. We will be holding to account not just the prime minister and senior colleagues, but also journalists who either fail to question or repeat these lies without scrutiny. We will give full credit to those journalists and others who expose government lies. We will also record and expose lies of opposition politicians.

The team so far consists of Peter Oborne and Millie Cooke and we plan to assemble a small group of paid fact-checkers and researchers. The amount of work is formidable and to begin with the amount we are attempting to raise is approximately £12,000 by crowdfunding. If you do feel you could make a contribution we would be extremely grateful.

Ultimately we believe that political lying, particularly on the extraordinary scale practised by the Johnson government, poses a serious threat to democracy.