Why our politicians are never short of tall stories
Daily Express, 1st March 2004

It's the closest Tony Blair has gone to telling people that he feels their pain. The Prime Minister, we are told, spent one night sleeping rough. That, it seems, allows him to sympathise with Britain's army of tens of thousands of homeless people. This strange story, recounted by our First Lady at a reception for the homelessness charity Centrepoint, shows the extent to which modern politicians will go to come across as both ordinary and exotic. In this cult of celebrity, it is these tales that people most remember.

Strange, but is it true? According to Cherie Blair, 18-year-old Tony dossed down together with his home-made blue guitar, called Clarence, outside Euston station. He was spending his "gap" year in London playing at being a musician after leaving his posh Scottish public school, Fettes - also known as Eton in a kilt - and before beginning a law degree at Oxford University. Downing Street has confirmed the "event", so it will go down in political folklore.

Blair's life has been a curious mix of the relentlessly respectable and the little off-beam. His biographer, John Rentoul, claims that young Tony was such a handful at school that he came within an ace of being expelled. "He was more than happy to push the public school's rules to breaking point, and a little beyond, but he - mostly - stopped short at the stage where his defiance would inflict serious damage to either his person or his academic career," the book states. It also delves into the Prime Minister's time as a "weekend hippie" living virtually hand-to-mouth in London, promoting rock groups, which is presumably where Euston station comes in.

Ever since he took over as Labour party leader, coming up to a decade ago now, Blair has found it hard to resist spinning a yarn about himself. They all do it, all modern politicians, but he has taken it to new levels.

Who can forget the Jackie Milburn reminiscences - Blair sitting in the stand behind the goal at St James' Park watching his "teenage hero" score for his beloved Newcastle United? Trouble was his idol left the club when Blair was four and there were no seats behind the goal in those days.

Blair produced his first tall tale as early as December 1996 when he told Des O'Connor that as a 14-year-old he had run away to Newcastle airport and boarded a plane for the Bahamas: "I snuck onto the plane, and we were literally about to take off when the stewardess came up to me," he recounted. Quite how he managed this without a boarding card or passport was not explained. It certainly came as a surprise to his father, Leo, who is said to have exclaimed: "The Bahamas? Who said that? Tony? Never". It came equally as a surprise to authorities at the airport who pointed out that there has never been a flight from Newcastle to the Bahamas.

Even his erstwhile friend Robert Harris - the famous fiction writer - admits Blair's penchant for "reinterpreting reality... retailoring himself and his history to suit the moment". Many of us romanticise or reinvent our childhoods. That's human nature. The trouble begins when the small-scale invention or embellishment leads voters to ask themselves if they are being told a fib when it really matters, when serious politics intervenes.

Blair got into trouble on that score a couple of years ago when he informed a television audience during a Question Time programme that he had voted in favour of a Labour backbencher's plans to ban hunting, only for the legislation to be blocked by crusty hereditary peers. It soon became apparent that Blair had not voted for it, and the plans came to nothing not because of the House of Lords, but because Blair's own government had refused to give it time in the Commons. That tale coincided with the start of his trust problems. Since then, of course, there has been Iraq: the dossiers, bugging, legal justification for war, etcetera etcetera. Enough said? The truth has a habit of biting back.

And what of the other culprits? Iain Duncan Smith had already been dismissed as a no-hoper when he was exposed by the BBC's Newsnight. The former Conservative leader was forced to correct his claim that he had been to the prestigious University of Perugia in Italy. In fact, he spent a few months at a language school in the city.

Sometimes these politicians just try a little too hard to appear "interesting". In his early political years William Hague was remembered as the political anorak who had addressed the Tory conference as an awkward but ambitious schoolboy. Two decades later, when he tried his hand at being leader one of the first decisions of his media handlers was to grant an interview with the fashionable men's magazine GQ. Hague recalled working as a delivery boy for his father's drinks company. "Anyone who thinks I used to spend my holiday reading political tracts should have come with me for a week," he boasted. "There were crates of soft drinks and barrels of John Smith's bitter, and we delivered them mainly around the working men's clubs. We used to have a pint at every stop ... and we used to have about 10 stops in a day." Ten pints mysteriously became 14 pints, and Hague became a lager lout. To make matter worse, friends at the time reacted to the tale with incredulity.

Over the years the Americans have fared little better. One unfortunate Democrat was Senator Joseph Biden, who in 1987 was caught repeating, almost word-for-word, part of a speech he copied from the then Labour leader Neil Kinnock, especially the bits about hardships he had faced. He also borrowed emotional phrases from Robert Kennedy. Biden was forced to drop out of the primaries for the presidential race.

As for the encumbent in the White House, George W Bush, his problem is not playing down what he said and didn't do, but remembering exactly what he did do during his "forgotten year" of 1972. That is the year when he walked away from his pilot duties in the Texas Air National Guard. Absent without leave while the Vietnam war was still going on...

The man Bush "beat" in the 2000 campaign, Al Gore has also found himself in a spot of bother over the years. During the 1996 presidential race Gore claimed in his keynote speech that, after his sister died of lung cancer in his arms, he snubbed the tobacco industry and became a fervent crusader against smoking. He omitted to say that he continued to take campaign contributions from tobacco companies long after his sister died. The same Gore said not so long ago to a group of trade unionists that when he was a baby his mum lulled him to sleep by singing a song that had become synonymous with working-class solidarity, called Look for the Union Label. The song was written in 1975 - when Gore was 27 years old.

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned Bill Clinton...


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