At six days to go, seeds of doubt are set and lies spun to conquer the electorate

WHEN only six days are left, that’s when it usually starts.

Six days before people go to the polls. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a general election or a by-election, that’s when a frenetic fatalism breaks out.

At that point, every candidate is exhausted and affronted. Sometimes the affront is at media, which has shown its true colours and revealed itself to be in the pay of the other side. Sometimes, the affront is at headquarters, for allowing the other candidate on the ticket to get away with murder. Sometimes the affront is at people on the doorsteps.

Put together the exhaustion, the affront and the terror of either losing your job or not getting your dream job, and it’s not just that all bets are off. All standards are off, too, so when a supporter suggests actions the candidate would have shuddered away from just two weeks earlier, the candidate either gets enthusiastic about the mooted malfeasance or rejects it the way our grannies used to refuse a cup of tea: with such lukewarm emphasis that it’s perfectly clear they want action, but don’t necessarily want their fingerprints on that action.

If you ever want to see vertical take-off, retrospective rage in action, ask a politician who’s been around for a while what was the worst lie told about them in the latter end of an election campaign.

Watch the red rise over their collar. Observe their ear lobes swell. Note the spluttered half-syllables that exit their mouth before they can form a full sentence. There was the leaflet that circulated two days before the election suggesting they were pro-abortion – a leaflet carrying no indication of source. Or the phone calls ostensibly part of an orthodox telephone survey, where the caller slipped in a “question” that wasn’t really a question.

The best example of the latter comes from America, where recipients of the call were asked, half-way through, if knowing that one (named) candidate had fathered mix-race children outside of his marriage would it influence the way they would vote. Influence them? You kidding? Of course, the accusation dressed up as a query wasn’t true, but who was to know? And – the respondent might think – why would a research company be asking such a question unless they knew something the respondent hadn’t known up to then?

We know about some Irish candidates, like Adi Roche, who was subjected to more than one anonymous lie in the final days of a presidential campaign. She has continued to lead a successful public life. That’s not always the case. Ireland holds more than a handful of embittered individuals who once thought they’d contribute to Irish public life only to become electoral road-kill during the last days of the campaign, and be left forever tainted, in their own view, by lies. They know who benefited from those lies, but they can never prove a direct link. An iffy lamb chop is more traceable than a vile allegation printed at home on someone’s desktop technology.

It has ever been thus.

In 1933, novelist Upton Sinclair ran for Governor of California for the Democrats. Sinclair’s bestselling classic The Jungle, published in 1906, which revealed that the ghastly filth of Chicago’s meatpacking industry was paralleled by brutal exploitation of poor labours, had changed the way food manufacturing plants could operate. It was the first of several such bestsellers, each exposing the underside of some part of American capitalism.

Although the New York Times described Sinclair as “a quiet, slight figure with a pleasant smile constantly on his lips, suggesting inner certainty rather than humour or political winsomeness...who avoids emotional appeals and the stage tricks of fighting virility”, the writer was an impelling public orator.

Troubled by the effects of the Great Depression, he came up with a detailed manifesto to “End Poverty in California” (EPIC), and ran for office. He came up with a smart electoral gimmick, too: a short book called I, Governor, which presented the fictional history of California a few years after he was elected. The booklet sold a million copies, indicating a popularity deeply threatening to Californian vested interests.

They moved into action, calling on powerful friends in the communications business like MGM production chief Irving Thalberg, who created a series of newsreels wherein dirty derelicts endorsing Sinclair’s candidacy were contrasted with pleasant middle-class voters praising his opponent. The actor playing one of the derelicts uttered the line “Vell, his system verked vell in Russia, vy can’t it verk here?”

The newsreels, in common with all the other anti-Sinclair attack material, were phony. They were lies. Sinclair fought back, no doubt remembering Twain’s observation that “a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on”.

Sinclair lost. His self-donated consolation prize was a book he wrote about how his candidacy was destroyed. Up to recently, whether an election happened in the US, Britain or Ireland, the candidate done in by lies peddled on behalf of, or directly authorised by an opponent, had little more in the way of post-factum options than Sinclair had, eighty years ago.

However, this week, the House of Commons will have to manage without the member for Oldham and Saddleworth, Phil Woolas. Phil, a Liberal Democrat, suffered from the Six Day Syndrome during the British general election in May when it became apparent that another Liberal Democrat in the same constituency named Elwyn Watkins, might just beat him on polling day.

One of Phil’s supportive pals put it bluntly in an email, saying that if his camp didn’t get “the white folk angry”, his goose was cooked, he’d had his chips and he was down the tubes.

His mind focused by the prospect of electoral hanging, if not in the morning, at least within a few mornings time, Phil put out the good word. Sorry. Let’s take that again. Phil put out the bad word. He got “the white folks” good and riled by alleging that Elwyn Watkins (who had served as immigration minister under Gordon Brown), was out there wooing Muslims who support extremists. Phil knew it wasn’t true, but the Six Day Syndrome had him by the short and curlies, so what had truth got to do with it?

Sure enough, on polling day, it was Elwyn Watkins’ goose that was cooked. Admittedly, it was only barely cooked. Woolas won by only 103 votes. But he was now entitled to put Member of Parliament on his letterhead and Mr Watkins was not, at least until last week’s High Court decision. It said that, since Woolas not only had no reason to believe that Watkins was pally with extremists, but knew for a fact that he wasn’t, putting it out as factual amounted to making false statements about his opponent and he must lose his seat in consequence. The contest is to be run again, the difference being that, this time around, Phil Woolas may not and cannot be a contender.

Game, set and match to the truth. It makes a neat change, does it not? It would be even better if Ireland had legislation that would remove from Leinster House anyone who got there by telling lies about their opponent.