Theresa May is a terrible liar – due to lack of intelligence, it seems.

She appears unable to understand that people don’t have to accept her word on anything – we can all fact-check her claims immediately and call her out on her lies.

And that’s what happened on October 24, 2018, when she said this:

https://twitter.com/Corbynator2/status/1055128399616860164

She may have had the page marked but she seems never to have read it.

The book was Economics for the Many, edited by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, and she was referring to a chapter by Professor Simon Wren-Lewis, author of the Mainly Macro economics blog. He knows his stuff.

He also knows what he wrote – and what he didn’t.

He didn’t write that Labour’s sums didn’t add up. He wrote that the Institute for Fiscal Studies had claimed Labour’s sums didn’t add up – and then he wrote that it didn’t matter.

Worse still, the IFS didn’t claim Labour’s sums didn’t add up. The think tank had said that it was “hard to say” whether Labour’s pledge to reduce debt was compatible with their promises of a wave of nationalisations of water and energy, as the economic transformation would be so radical nobody could tell whether the manifesto costings would be accurate.

It gets worse.

When Professor Wren-Lewis tweeted a correction, the Conservative Party’s press office doubled down on Mrs May’s claim with an out-of-context quote that he swiftly dismissed. Then it seems CCHQ went all shy and decided to finish the conversation by private message:

The situation reminds me of the way I was accused of anti-Semitism by people who selected words I had written that could be misinterpreted, clipped them out of the articles in which I had written them, and presented them out-of-context as if that were proof of their claims.

I have taken great pleasure, over the summer, in winning multiple battles with national newspapers that quoted these claims – and I intend to demolish the Labour Party’s attempted use of those claims at a disciplinary hearing that will be held very soon.

For Mrs May, retribution has been much more swift:

Yes, indeed.

Because we can’t believe anything else Mrs May says, if we can’t believe her when she claims to be imparting information to MPs; lying to Parliament is an offence for which even the prime minister may be expelled (although corruption in the corridors of power is so deeply entrenched that it never comes to that).

What if her claim to have 95 per cent of a Brexit deal sorted turned out to be untrue?

See what I mean?

Visit our JustGiving page to help Vox Political’s Mike Sivier fight anti-Semitism libels in court

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