BRIAN READE: ‘Tory obsession with lies of Rachel Reeves highlights their desperation’

No one makes it to the top of politics without being a skilled weaver of fiction, Brian Reade says, which makes the fallout and Tory ranting following Rachel Reeves’ Budget all the more galling

I’m struggling to get a top tune and a pained scowl out of my head. The tune is Eagles’ Lyin’ Eyes and the scowl is, well more of that later. But back to the latest Tory obsession, the lies of Rachel Reeves, which they are attacking so ferociously I’m surprised they haven’t called for her to be tarred, feathered and chained to Churchill’s statue as a mark of shame. Give it time.

To be fair, Labour’s budget was a baffling, months-long, self-sabotaging omnishambles. But the continued hammering Reeves is getting from right-wingers for freezing tax thresholds after vowing not to increase taxes in her manifesto, is hypocritical garbage that highlights desperation.

Take Nadine Dorries ’s judgment: “When politicians lie in such a brazen way they discredit democracy and bring shame on Westminster.” This from a woman who attached herself like a limpet to the most shameful liar in the history of political lying, Boris Johnson.

Kemi Badenoch has spent all week looking smug over her repeated claim that Reeves’s budget transferred billions from workers to shirkers on Benefits Street. Yet, she surely knows that three-quarters of the kids who will be lifted out of poverty by scrapping the two-child benefit cap come from working families? Plus £3billion of the increased spending will go to state pensioners who ate up almost half (£150.7billion) of last year’s £313billion welfare budget.

Are all pensioners Benefits Street shirkers stealing from workers’ pockets? If so, why did the Tories cry foul when Labour tried to scrap the winter fuel payment? Even Nigel Farage ­ridiculed their hypocrisy by asking: “Do they seriously imagine the British public has forgotten 14 years of Conservative governments trashing promises, raising taxes, piling up national debt and saying one thing while doing the opposite?”

My memory goes back further, to Margaret Thatcher’s epoch-defining 1979 general election win when the deceit was off the scale. The infamous “Labour Isn’t Working” poster which purported to show depressed crowds queuing outside a dole office was made up entirely of Young Conservatives. Who were nowhere near a dole office.

During the campaign Thatcher denied allegations she would savagely attack the unions and the NHS and raise unemployment. She did all three. And to claims she was planning to double VAT to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, she told reporters: “We have no intention of doubling VAT.”

Within months of winning, VAT rose from 8% to 15%. No party has a monopoly on lies. In 2009, following the global banking crash, I interviewed Labour’s then chancellor, Alistair Darling, who told me he had the right economic policies to succeed and was backed to the hilt by Gordon Brown.

Two years later he wrote a book saying that during that time there was “an air of permanent chaos and crisis” in Downing Street, his economic ­policies “lacked credibility”, and he and Brown were having so many fights he met David Miliband to consider a coup.

The awkward truth is that no one makes it to the top of politics without being a skilled weaver of fiction and voters long ago sussed it. Which brings me to the pained scowl I keep seeing. It’s Jeremy Paxman’s. Specifically the one he admitted to adopting during every political interview as he stared at his prey with incredulity and thought: “Why is this lying b****** lying to me.”