Welcome to this spectator podcast with me Fraser Nelson. This week we'll be discussing the

return of political lying, speaking to Steve Hilton about his case for Brexit, and talking about

the shortage of mariable men and the lengths to which women now have to go to to find a match.

First up,

The Lion Game. In this cover piece this week, Peter O'Born says that David Cameron and George Osborne are using the sort of techniques of deception deployed by new labour in the run-up to the

Iraq War. But Matthew Paris, in his column, says that in politics there's no point complaining about being lied to,

that's the cry of the bad loser. They both join me now.

Peter, you wrote a book on the rise of political lying. At the time you said it was Labour malaise.

Do you really think the authorities are now just as bad?

Very much so. There was something very new about the, what I really call the

new labour epistemology, which took away truth from its normal meaning and turned it into

an instrument of power. And it really, the truth was what you said it was was and they used that in all kinds of ways to sell

the new labor narrative and ultimately to sell the case for for war with the various dodgy dossiers

and the frequent misstatements false statements lies out of, uttered by Blair and his ministers.

And we know about that process, and we'll learn about it in more detail, I imagine, with the

Chilcott report.

And when David Cameron turned up as leader of the Conservative Party, I think it's fair to say

that he offered a new return to a more traditional political discourse.

But what has happened in the last, really quite recently, the last couple of years, last year really,

is that mendacity and fabrication and deception have re-entered political discourse from the very top.

That's very troubling, and it's now part of the campaign to keep written in the European Union.

Matthew, do you see any comparison between the tricks Tony Blair was up to

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