I once met a person with the same amoral judgement as Trump and Boris – and I’ve never forgotten about it

Like Trump, Boris Johnson has made a plethora of promises that he cannot, and never intended, to keep

Boris Johnson and President Trump have quite a lot in common (Reuters)

Dangerous are those people who have no notion of truth or falsehood in their discourse. Instead they say whatever suits their interests at a given time. I have been wondering whether Boris Johnson is a case in point.

Donald Trump is the outstanding example of this condition, but before I come to Boris, I want to mention how I first became aware that such a pathology exists. For it is quite rare. It happened early in The Independent’s history when I was editor, so this takes us back to the second half of the 1980s.

I had noticed that the late Robert Maxwell, who was then the owner of the Daily Mirror newspaper group, was adding to his shareholding in The Independent. I hadn’t been at all pleased when he first showed up on the list of shareholders because I wanted to avoid any relationship with traditional newspaper tycoons. Apart from Maxwell, City institutions, pension funds, life insurance funds and the like comprised the shareholder list.

At all events, I rang Maxwell. The additional shares? “Not me, old boy. My New York office decided to buy them. Nothing to do with me at all.” Hmmm. I immediately rang the New York office. “Mr Maxwell told us to buy the shares”, an executive said. At that very moment, it came to me in a flash: Maxwell had no interest in truth or falsehood, only in what was useful to him.

Now having been a financial journalist for 25 years, I had often been lied to. It went with the territory. But there was something different about the exchange with Maxwell. I already knew he had bought the shares in The Independent, they were logged on the share register. It wasn’t a crime to be hidden from view.

What I had noticed was Maxwell’s reflex action: always say what is most useful or reflects well on you however trivial the circumstances. It doesn’t matter if you are caught out later. Shrug your shoulders and carry on.

It seems to be the same with the President of the United States. Donald Trump lies on an industrial scale. He does it so often that the New York Times keeps a regular tally. The newspaper started counting from the day Trump took office. In his first 10 days at the White House the newspaper documents 12 lies. His most notorious early lie was the statement that the audience at his inauguration was “the biggest ever”. Never mind that official aerial photos show that Obama’s 2009 inauguration was much more heavily attended.

Trump’s behaviour is counter-intuitive. As President he can be sure that every lie will be seen for what it is within a few moments of utterance. But it seems he cannot stop. It is, perhaps, a compulsion. The New York Times counted 12 lies in February, 11 lies in March, 11 lies in April, seven in May and nine in June. Why do this? Because these lies always seem serve his self-interest even if it is only by pleasing his so-called “base”, the remaining diehards who voted for him.

So we come to the Foreign Secretary. Is Boris Johnson someone who doesn’t give a fig whether what he says is true or false? There is no doubt that his erroneous claim made during the Leave campaign that Britain will take back control of some £350m a week after Brexit was useful. It may even have swung some Referendum votes into the “Leave” column. No doubt that is why it was repeated in a slightly more vague form over the weekend in his Daily Telegraph article.

Boris Johnson has been fired twice for lying – from The Times in 1988 for making up a quotation and from the shadow front bench in Parliament for his response to questions about an alleged extra-marital affair. And like Trump as President, as London mayor he made promises he could not possibly keep, such as eradicating rough sleeping from the streets of London or reducing transport fares.

So we should put Boris Johnson into the “basket of deplorables” alongside Maxwell and the US President.