One of the expedients of party to acquire influence, within particular districts, is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heart-burnings, which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those, who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.

I do not by any means want to deny that I and my fellow workers selected news and quotations following a certain tendency. It is the curse of propaganda during war that one works only with black and white. But to my knowledge it is a mistake to believe that in the Propaganda Ministry thousands of little lies were hatched out. If we had lied on a thousand small things, the enemy would have been able to deal with us more easily than was the case.

My backstory is pretty well-known to most people here, and to anyone who was interested in understanding US war policy in the early 2000s. I had a small role to play, in concert with a number of other truth tellers in media and in the national security bureaucracy. For every one of us, there were probably 20 to 50 people working beside us and around us, who understood a lot about what was happening, and who probably got a funny feeling about being in an organization where we all swore to uphold the Constitution, but in fact were engaged in promulgating lies of both omission and commission, mistruths and misdirection, aimed not at our enemies abroad but against the American people. We were lying, with the help of a compliant and war-supportive media, to patriots young and old. Millions of Americans were eager to enlist, to fight, to sacrifice their life and health – for a made-up government fairy tale.

One of the expedients of party to acquire influence, within particular districts, is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts.

Sometimes I thought Truth had vanished from the earth,” he cried bitterly. “Like everything else, it was rationed by the governments. I taught myself to disbelieve half of what I read in the papers.

When I came to consider what the Liberal quota of the Ministry was to be, I was confronted with the resolution carried by all the Liberal Ministers at a meeting to which I was not summoned, binding each and all not to serve under me. This decision was responsible for the disastrous split in the Liberal Party which diminished its influence, paralysed its energies, and distracted its purpose for all the years that have ensued since 1916. Even to this day it poisons relations between men whose cordial co-operation is essential to the well-being of Liberalism. It deflects judgment upon every issue. Yet however disastrous it was to the future strength of the Party, from the point of view of the efficiency of the Government as a war instrument, the decision arrived at by the official leaders of the Party to decline association with the new Government was an undoubted advantage.

When the war broke out I was silent about things that had gone wrong until, when at the front, I saw the lamentable spectacle of our men fighting the Germans not with shells but with their bare breasts. The public had been lulled into a sense of preposterous optimism by the lies of politicians who thought that the war would be over before the lack of provision was discovered. You will remember that I exposed what I called the tragedy of the shells. The public, thinking that the war was actually won, were greatly incensed and my newspapers were burned all over the country and banned from every club. Their sales fell by 100,000. I received some five thousand abusive letters a day and had to take measures for my personal safety. At that time Mr Asquith had the audacity to go to Newcastle and say that there was nothing wrong with our equipment. The tide speedily turned in my favour because wounded men from the front began to spread the facts throughout the land. As a result of my exposure of the shells tragedy, the Ministry of Munitions came into being.

Then came the political campaign of 1920 with its bitter personal feuds, as a result of which the real underlying issues were obscured by passion, misrepresentation and downright falsehood.

Shortly after I entered Parliament, it became clear to me that I had too many friends. What I needed was some enemies. There was no way that I was ever going to get across the message that I wanted to give to the people of this country if I used the soft, simple word, offending no-one and in fact being heard by no-one.

Another effect of the continual appearance of false and biased statement and the absorption of the lie atmosphere is that deeds of real valour, heroism, and physical endurance and genuine cases of inevitable torture and suffering are contaminated and desecrated; the wonderful comradeship of the battlefield becomes almost polluted. Lying tongues cannot speak of deeds of sacrifice to show their beauty or value. So it is that the praise bestowed on heroism by Government and Press always jars, more especially when, as is generally the case with the latter, it is accompanied by cheap and vulgar sentimentality. That is why one instinctively wishes the real heroes to remain unrecognized, so that their record may not be smirched by cynical tongues and pens so well versed in falsehood.

...the Conservative party found him an embarrassment because he was apt to criticize the party leader in public, the Liberals naturally wanted to defeat him, and the newspapers were out to get him. It was a dreadful campaign on his part, for he lost his head, bullied his electors when he should have wooed them, and got into a wrangle with a large newspaper, which he threatened to sue for libel. He was defeated on election day so decisively that it was obviously a personal rather than a political rejection.