I didn't send out a Tweet!

An awful lot of politicians tell lies, but very few of them are as brazen about it as the disgraced Liam Fox. In an interview with Sophy Ridge he denied sending a controversial Tweet despite sitting in front of a giant picture of it.

The man

The disgraced Liam Fox was one of the very few people David Cameron ever had to expel from his cabinet. Cameron had an extraordinary tolerance for corruption and ineptitude (how else is it possible to explain his refusal to ever sack total incompetents like George Osborne, Theresa May and Iain Duncan Smith), but even Cameron's lax attitude couldn't save the disgraced Liam Fox from the treasonous mess of his own making.

The disgraced Liam Fox invited his special friend/fake security adviser Adam Werritty to sit in on all kinds of classified meetings, despite the fact that he had no official position and no security clearance.

Somehow the disgraced Liam Fox avoided the jail sentence that an ordinary soldier would have received for wilfully disclosing classified information to their friends, and he even kept his seat in parliament. All he had to do was resign in disgrace, and then pop back as a government minister a few years later.

The controversy

The idea that Britain has no disgraceful 20th Century history to bury is absolutely ridiculous. Here are just a few examples off the top of my head: The use of chemical weapons in Iraq and concentration camps in South Africa; the brutal repression of the Easter Rising in Ireland, the Amritsar massacre in India; the gifting of all of Iran's oilfields to a single private company; the 1943 Bengal Famine (over 1.5 million dead); the ethnic cleansing of Palestine; the brutal repression of the Mau Mau in Kenya; Support for the racist regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa; and the expulsion of the Chagos Islanders.

Of course Britain left many of the ex-colonies with improved ports, roads and rail networks, because they were necessary infrastructure in order carry out the vast scale of resource extraction that the empire was all about, but this infrastructure is hardly adequate compensation for the resource theft and the crimes against humanity listed above.

The backwardsness of it

School children in countries like Germany and Austria are taught about the horrors of Nazism, but British school kids are drip-fed a very sanitised Anglocentric version of history, where the horrors of the British Empire are rarely or never mentioned.

The consequence of this is that only a small minority of Germans and Austrians look back to the Third Reich with fondness and nostalgia, but astounding numbers of British people consider Britain's brutal imperialist history as something to be intensely proud of!

Liam Fox's Tweet was extraordinarily wrong because Britain is actually one of the worst offenders at burying the worst aspects of it's 20th Century history.

The denial

The astoundingly smug look that flashes across the disgraced Liam Fox's face as he says "As a point of clarification, I didn't send out a Tweet" illustrates just how comfortable he is telling lies.

Of course we're all familiar with the fact that lots of politicians tell lies and expect to get away with it, but very few of them have the absolute brazenness to lie to the public in front of a giant screen displaying the evidence that what they're saying is an outright lie.

The conspiracy theory
After denying that he sent out the Tweet the disgraced Liam Fox then outlined a conspiracy theory about how the Guardian were to blame for the controversy for supposedly Tweeting an out of context and incomplete extract from one of his speeches.

The disgraced Liam Fox's own Tweet continued to be displayed behind him as he detailed his bizarre conspiracy theory about how the nasty left-wing press were to blame for the whole thing.

The dupes
Despite getting caught red handed at giving away classified information to his special friend, the disgraced Liam Fox was reelected to his North Somerset parliamentary seat with an increased share of the vote in 2015!

It seems that it doesn't matter how corrupt the individual has proven to be, there are people in certain parts of England who would vote Tory without a second thought.

These are the kinds of people who could look at the disgraced Liam Fox smugly lying about how he never sent out the Tweet while sitting in front of a giant picture of it, and conclude that the Tory is absolutely right to pin the blame on the nasty leftie Guardian for the whole thing.

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