When a politician tells you five times in a single speech that he is going to be honest…

hello again one of the things which I have discovered over the course of a long and exciting life is that there are certain key phrases which should always set the alarm bells ringing if you do not wish to be lied to and deceived for instance if a man says trust me then that is the very last thing you should do in the same way when somebody tells you it's not what it looks like then 99 times out of 100 it is exactly what it looks like the heart sinks too when a man announces I can change if he were going to change and he would simply do so without feeling the need to tell anybody beforehand he's up to no good I strongly suspect that older viewers are probably laughing at this point and mentally compiling their own list of dodgy Expressions which set them on their guard protestations of honesty frankness and the desire to be truthful and open are of course almost invariably the Prelude to lies growing up in East London I recall various villainous types swearing elaborate HS on my kids' lives for example was always a popular line for a man about to purger himself anybody who says I'm going to be honest with you or quite frankly is almost without a doubt about to tell an outrageous lie I was for this reason fascinated to watch our prime minister delivering his speech yesterday about fixing the foundations I give a link in the description to this video to the full text of the speech and my word it really is something of a classic I don't recall last when I was more entertaining our political speech in the course of his oration Kia starm assured us no fewer than five times that he was being honest with us and he twice reminded us he was being frank none of this boded well of course click on the link and read that speech so you can see what I mean let me read out what he said but I have to be honest with you to be honest with you being honest with people honest about the challenges we face but I will be honest with you and frankly and then again and frankly these are all red flags the kind of things one would expect to hear from a Shifty and devious estate agent what about the substance of the speech itself well it was full of outright lies of course just as one would expect from a man who has repeatedly told us how honest and Frank he has being let's look at one or two of those lies we've set up Great British energy to create good jobs and cut people's bills how he can possibly say such a thing after increasing everybody's energy bills by 10% and abolishing the winter fuel payment for 10 billion pensioners I do not know here is something even more astounding I didn't want to means test the winter fuel p but it was a choice we had to make a choice to protect the most vulnerable pensioners out depriving 10 million old people have helped with their gas and electricity bills is a choice to help pensioners is not altogether clear to most of us here is perhaps the biggest lie of all starmer announced that he's going to be taking more money from us in various taxes with the uh budget coming in October and he CLS it in this way I'll have to turn to the country and make big asks of you as well to accept short-term pain for long-term good the difficult tradeoff is a genuine solution and I know that after all you've been through that it's a really big ask and really difficult to hear well I pay a large amount in taxes but the in their revenue do not ask me instead they send me demand the prime minister is not asking anything of us he is about to demand more of our money asking suggests that we might refuse but just try and refuse paying your taxes and see what happens this speech really is something of a collector's item incidentally you'll observe that in the official version from the government's own website there are no fewer than seven reductions of political content I've never seen this before on this website and I'm curious to know what's going on there I'm bound to say that I have great hopes for Kia stalber as being the most dishonest and untruthful prime minister in modern times the competition for this role is pretty stiff but I'm sure that he's in the lead at the moment