Grant Shapps Lied On Newsnight

Still Grant “Spiv” Shapps is chairman of the Tory Party, and still his pants are well and truly on fire, as witness his quizzing by Evan Davis on Monday evening’s Newsnight. Shapps first helpfully explained that the Tories’ claim of Labour tax rises of well over £3,000 were per working household, to make the numbers look bigger, and then aggregated over five years, to make them truly scary.

Can you smell burning?

That much was merely misleading, and some of the minor untruths, such as asserting that Mil The Younger had done nothing with his life except be a professional politician, were what passes as mere background noise in today’s political campaigning. But when Davis moved the discussion on to business, Shapps could not resist the temptation to go into full delusional whopper mode - all captured on video.

The UK five years ago, he asserted, was “bust as Greece”. Er, hello? Let’s see what all those credit ratings agencies think of that, shall we? Greece generally merits a credit rating of B, on a scale that goes AAA, AA, A, BBB, BB and then B. The UK in 2010 was still rated AAA. The idea that it was “bust as Greece” isn’t just misleading, it’s a flat-out lie. And any credit downgrade has come under the Coalition.

Would Sir like to pour a little petrol on those flames to get his burning trousers blazing a little more fiercely? He certainly would: Shapps then asserted that the UK’s growth rate was the highest in the developed world. This depends on arguing that China, Nigeria, India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia are not part of that “developed world”, which “Spiv” could just about justify. But then it gets more difficult.

You wouldn’t say that other EU member states were not part of the “developed world”, would you? So how does Shapps explain the presence of Ireland, Hungary and Poland, all growing faster than the UK? Ooh look there’s South Korea too - hardly a backwater. And Norway as well. So that’s another flat-out lie from the Spiv. And, when it came to excusing his own online marketing business, there was worse to come.

Davis specifically alluded to a product which “scraped” content to get hits and generate income from adverts. Shapps eventually asserted that his businesses had been “perfectly legal”. That one was not: the product Davis mentioned was the notorious Traffic Paymaster, which had been sold by Shapps’ How To Corp, and which effectively plagiarised others’ content to garner clicks and income for others.

That was in flagrant violation of Google’s rules, and the product had to be withdrawn. Had the product been “perfectly legal”, then there would have been no need to withdraw it. So that’s three occasions on which the chairman of the Tory Party flat-out lied during his Newsnight interview. As he is still in post, it has to be concluded that his party has no problem with having a chairman for whom dishonesty comes so naturally.

That’s something that the voters will have time to consider before casting their votes.