Rishi Sunak’s claim that Labour would cost every family two grand was debunked almost as soon as it was out of his mouth. You could say it was undermined just by the panicky look in the prime minister’s eyes, but to be real, it is hard to say at the moment exactly what he’s panicking about. The civil service disavowed the figure, and factcheckers everywhere disputed it. Still, it kept coming: Penny Mordaunt, on fighty form, repeated it in Friday’s debate – not in the manner of an accident that slipped out of her mouth under the pressure of the studio lights, but as a bold and deliberate attack she’d planned in advance.
The weekend passed. Surely everyone, everywhere, knew by now that this wasn’t true? Nope, here’s Chris Philp saying it again to Nick Ferrari on LBC. He’s minister for policing, so you’d hope he’d be even more honest than the average minister. Just kidding.
What can possibly have possessed them all, if they know this isn’t true, to keep on saying it? It’s partly precedent: the £350m for the NHS during the Brexit campaign has passed from dubious, through disproven, into political lore. Burger King has a jokey advert about a whopper on the side of a bus. The lesson that’s been learned isn’t just that lies work: it’s that lies have no consequence except that they work; you pay no electoral penalty; you can still move freely in the realms of the non-liars; you’ll still be invited on Question Time, much more often, in fact, than people who tell the truth. You’ll go down in history as someone who risked it all, through dispensing with tedious probity, and won big. Society will simply adapt to the negative consequences of your lie, with only itself to blame.
Two thousand pounds is also a devilishly canny number. For vast numbers of people, it is simply unimaginable to be that much poorer; forget choosing between heating and eating, £2,000 is the entire budget for both, and you’re getting to the point where choice is just a memory. But even for those who are not technically struggling, two grand is the difference between having a holiday and not. There aren’t many people who could shrug it off. So even the most rigorous among us, those who know this is probably dodgy, even those who are plenty apprised of how much a Tory government will cost, one way or another, find it hard to discount the risk that it might be true. It’s fair to say that someone other than Sunak arrived at the figure; he’s probably one of only a handful of people in the country who doesn’t know what it means.
There is a massive collective memory fail, which is fair enough from the younger voter, but surely cynical or idiotic from the older; the cliche that Labour governments will always find a way to cost you money is tenacious. No amount of “actually, tax credits were quite redistributive and everything felt cheaper when public services weren’t broken” can dent this truism. The Conservatives have found a soundbite that sounds truth-y, and they’re going to keep on saying it until it sounds even truth-ier.
It would have been good to learn something from the experience during and after the referendum: endless factchecking and rebuttal doesn’t work. It speaks to the people who would already have taken the “fact” with a pinch of salt, and either bores or entrenches everyone else. Fault lines open up between the people who speak from the heart, and those who come at you with a bunch of graphs.
So, great, we discovered that calling out lies was unpersuasive. It shouldn’t have followed that we just had to get used to liars in public life. There is a world in which the architects of known untruths would no longer be invited on the BBC; if they were quoted in the press, it would be with a rider: for instance, “the known fibber Nigel Farage commented …”. It should be possible to make the price of entry into mainstream debate that you at least believe what you’re saying in the moment you say it. Or maybe that’s naive.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
