A senior figure in a major party openly admits that its last manifesto contained a ‘great deception’ over one of the central issues of our time. This is an astonishing story, a political Ratner moment of huge proportions.

Major Party’s Top Figure Admits ‘Deception’ About Immigration Control’.

And almost nothing happens.

The media had plenty of Sunday to check the quote (spoken on the BBC’s Andrew Marr programme quite early on Sunday morning) and follow it up, and seek reaction to it, and organise informed comment on it. Until Mr Alexander ("Boris") Johnson made his amazing and damaging confession, none of the Fleet Street papers had an especially strong story with which to carry on coverage of the most extraordinary political upset of modern times.

Here are the core words ; ‘I think there were two big deceptions. The first was when Blair took the brakes off in 2004. Other countries kept their borders sealed and we didn’t. That was a mistake. And the second thing was saying that we could control the numbers when we couldn’t.’

Actually the Blair creature actively wanted the migrants in 2004, as Andrew Neather revealed in his famous outburst. The other EU states could only lawfully have kept their borders ‘sealed’ for a limited time. In the end they had to open them as well, and (controls being what they are in the borderless EU) they couldn’t really limit them even then. Our shambolic monitoring of foreigners once in the country, our vast army of unemployable comprehensively-‘educated’ young people who shun low-paid work, and our non-contributory benefits system make us a greater target anyway.

The real core remains the words : ‘saying that we could control the numbers when we couldn’t’.

But by Monday morning the confession/condemnation had sunk into obscurity. The Blairite ‘Daily Telegraph’, whose readers ought to be wholly baffled by their habitual newspaper’s cultural revolution, hilariously led on a supposed call by Mr Johnson for ‘ quotas on EU immigrants’ which sounded to me remarkably like the very thing he had just denounced – a promise to do something he had no conceivable power to do.

This is like calling for air traffic control on flying pigs, as Mr Johnson knows perfectly well. EU law absolutely prevents any such quotas. To suggest that this measure is any more possible now than it was in 2010 is to repeat the deception for which he has just castigated his own leader on national TV.

Mr Johnson penned a bizarre article in which he says that the answer to the revolt against David Cameron and his dishonest party (a party Mr Johnson has just explicitly admitted was wholly dishonest in its 2010 migration pledge ) is …vote Tory again.

SARCASM WARNING HERE: Generously conceding that not all UKIP voters are racist (how kind!) , and that to be worried about immigration is not necessarily to be personally hostile to immigrants themselves ( my goodness, how magnanimous!) Mr Johnson then recounts the history of his revolting, gazillionaire-infested party’s opportunist lying on the subject, so very similar to the lying done by the other revolting, gazillionaire-infested Blairite Party, New Labour.

You can read the thing in full here

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/11157515/The-answer-to-the-Ukip-anger-is-simple-vote-David-Cameron.html

He says : ‘The electorate was told that we could reduce the numbers of immigrants – when in fact it was legally impossible to do so.’

See, now here we are in the passive again. The electorate ‘was told’ Who told it? Why, the Tories told it. So why not say ‘We Tories told voters that we could reduce the numbers of immigrants – when in fact it was legally impossible to do so.’

Is it because he still chokes and gags on the admission, like his party? And if so, why?

Could it be that the Age of Deception is not over?



He even admits : ‘There is no way, under current UK law, that we can stop people entering this country in large numbers from all 28 EU countries, including those where wages and benefits are very much lower than our own. The voters aren’t fools. They have spotted this incoherence..’

Well, if we’re not fools then why does he then make this laughable claim a few lines further on?

‘There is only one man who has both grasped what needs to be done and who is in a position to do it, and that is David Cameron.’

I defy anyone to identify a solitary syllable of truth in this assertion. What is Mr Cameron (who pretended he could act in 2010 when he couldn’t) going to do, exactly?

What sort of fool would believe it?

Well, here’s your answer, uncrammed with practical or legal detail:

‘Only David Cameron can conceivably deliver those changes, since he is the only leader who can lead reform of the EU.’

So here we are in the wonderful territory so well summed up by the old chants: ‘with a ladder and some glasses, you could see the Hackney Marshes, if it wasn’t for the houses in between’ . Or ‘If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs’.

If we had some ham…Mr Cameron has to win a parliamentary majority in May 2015 (arithmetically and politically impossible even if UKIP sank to the bottom of the ocean tonight). If we had some eggs….He then has to persuade the EU to reverse the ’acquis communautaire’ (its irreversible ratchet under which all powers conceded to it by nation states remain forever in the EU’s hands) .

Then, after viewing the Hackney Marshes with his imaginary ladder and glasses, except for the problem of the houses in between, and after cooking and eating his imaginary eggs and ham, he will deliver phantasmal changes to our relationship with the EU (changes which I for one am by no means sure he or Mr Johnson actually want anyway).

Serious people have to keep asking the Tories why they never actually say what their attitude is towards EU membership. They hint, they bluster and blow hot and cold, they leak, they allow people to speculate on certain lines, but have you ever heard any significant senior Tory say ‘Yup, we have to leave if we are to get our borders back, and we will’.

No. Nor will you. Because, while they know perfectly well thus is true, they will never leave the EU . But you *will* with increasing frequency hear statements designed to look as if the person is saying this, when he isn’t.

The Tories are and always have been the party of the EU. All they have learned from the past 30 years is how to pretend to dislike the thing they support. That’s why we will have to get someone else to do it, if we want this job done.