The Assault on Truth : Boris Johnson Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism

In The Assault on Truth, a short and powerful polemic, Osborne shows how Boris Johnson lied again and again in order to secure victory so he could force through Brexit in the face of parliamentary opposition. Johnson and his ministers then lied repeatedly to win the general election in December 2019. The government's woeful response to the coronavirus pandemic has generated another wave of falsehoods, misrepresentations and fabrications. Osborne has brought the book fully up to date, to the end of Johnson's time in No 10.

The scale and shamelessness of the lying of the Johnson administration far exceeded the lying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and other issues under Tony Blair. This book argues that the ruthless use of political deceit under the Johnson government was part of a wider attack on civilised values and traditional institutions across the Western world, especially by Donald Trump in the USA. The Johnson and Trump methodology of deceit is about securing power for its own ends - even when they get exposed for lying, they shrug it off as a matter of no consequence. Osborne assesses whether their time in power has tainted their successors.

It matters because all Western institutions are built around the idea of integrity and accountability. This means that an assault on truth is an assault on the rule of law, state institutions and the fundamental idea of fairness, and even democracy itself.