It’s wrong, I know, but there’s something thrilling about a really humungous lie.
It’s wrong, I know, but there’s something thrilling about a really humungous lie. Consider, for example, the sheer brass neck of Alan McIlwraith — or Captain Sir Alan McIlwraith KBE, DSO, MC, as he prefers to be known. This mysterious young war hero was pictured recently in the celebrity magazine No. 1 sipping champagne at a charity function. He was dressed in full military regalia, his breast clattering with medals, accompanied by a woman described as his wife, ‘Lady Shona’.
Sir Alan’s decorations were, he claimed, won on the battlefields of Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland and Kosovo. His acts of derring-do included rescuing a young woman from an angry mob with nothing but his bare fists. He had served as an adviser to General Wesley Clark, formerly Nato’s Supreme Allied Commander of Europe. His entry in Wikipedia — the online encyclopaedia to which anyone can contribute — was breathless in its praise. ‘Capt McIlwraith is known throughout the military world as a man that can get things done and is thought of as such a hero that the UN and Nato can look to in times of trouble,’ it swooned.
In case suspicious minds should wonder why this mighty warrior, this latter-day Hector, was not better known to the public, Wikipedia provided an explanatory quote, apparently from General Sir Mike Jackson, head of the army: ‘Very few photographs of Capt McIlwraith are in circulation as he is camera shy but a splendid soldier.’
It turns out, however, that there is a simpler explanation. Alan McIlwraith is not a hero, or even a soldier, but a call-centre worker from Glasgow. He was rumbled when his colleagues at Dell — where he earns £16,000 a year answering phones to firms who need their computers fixed — spotted his picture in No. 1 magazine. Evidently, they had long been unconvinced by his military tales, even though he wore army boots to the office and had a nameplate on his desk reading Sir Alan McIlwraith. ‘At first we thought it was a bit funny,’ said a co-worker, ‘because he doesn’t look like he could fight his way out of a wet paper bag. But he’s gone too far. He’s an insult to anyone who has ever served in the armed forces.’
I’m not sure that’s true; imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery. And although what Mr McIlwraith did was bad, and possibly mad — such giant deceptions often being indicative of an unbalanced mind — it was, in its own way, gloriously brave.
Most of us tell only acceptable lies: flattery, hyperbole, tactful evasions. We may have the odd Walter Mitty fantasy, casting ourselves in the role of action man or femme fatale, but we would never go so far as to actually pretend. What holds us back is the invisible membrane of social trust — so delicate that we are hardly conscious of its embrace, yet so strong that almost no one dares push through.
If everyone went about pretending to be soldiers instead of telephonists, chaos would ensue: IT problems would go unfixed, and the army would get beaten every time. By fulfilling our part of the social pact — to be reasonably honest most of the time — we ensure the smooth running of the world in which we live, and feel virtuous into the bargain. But isn’t there also, deep down, an element of cowardice behind our rectitude?
In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche argued that people often refrain from fibbing out of weakness rather than nobility. They are daunted by the prospect of maintaining a lie — or worse, being caught out and having to face society’s disdain.
As a congenital weakling myself, I see his point. I have not attempted a really whopping lie since an unfortunate incident at primary school, when I told my classmates that my father used to be married to Joan Collins. Before the fib was even off my tongue, I knew it was too big for me to handle. My hair follicles rustled with fear. I blushed so hard that my body seemed surrounded by a corona of fire. The lie faltered, then petered out on an apologetic ‘...it’s true!’ Silence fell as my peers considered my fate, before collapsing into squeals of mocking laughter. By trying so clumsily to impress them, I had consigned myself to playground exile.
To be a convincing liar, you need a daredevil streak. You cannot be intimidated by the prospect of discovery, of becoming a laughing stock. And you need to be resolute, neutralising other people’s suspicions by sheer force of conviction.
I know this because I used to live with a compulsive liar. She was also a kleptomaniac — partly, I suspected, in order to have something to lie about. She used to steal clothes from all the girls in our house, wear them right under our noses, and then insist they were hers all along. Once she came down to breakfast in my favourite skirt: long, bohemian, patterned with little sprigs of blue flowers. ‘You’ve got my skirt on,’ I noted, more in surprise than anger. ‘What, this?’ she trilled, twisting it round to show me where she had snipped the label out. ‘My mum made this for me, ages ago.’
The trouble with a fib like that — a real eyeball-to-eyeball humdinger — is that it’s almost impossible to contradict, at least in public. To do so, one has to enter the liar’s lawless territory: a place where normal conventions of politeness and trust do not apply. You would have to say, out loud: ‘You’re lying.’ That is amazingly difficult for any well-brought-up person to do.
This is, perhaps, the worst thing about liars: that they force other people into such uncomfortable positions. If you ignore their lies, you feel compromised and feeble; if you confront them, you are likely to end up sweaty, trembling and none the wiser.
Sociopaths and desperados get away with extraordinary scams because most people don’t have the stomach to suspect them. In Missouri last week police arrested a couple who pretended to have given birth to sextup-lets in order to solicit gifts from concerned neighbours. It worked a treat: Kris and Sarah Everson received cash and gift certificates, a new van, a washing machine and tumble-drier, and even an offer of a new house.
The fact that there wasn’t a baby in sight was dealt with ingeniously: a court had banned them from showing off the new arrivals, they said, because a crazed relative had threatened to kill them. Even now, having been rumbled by a local newspaper, Mrs Everson is sticking to her story. ‘Nobody understands how hard this is,’ she sobbed indignantly as she was carted off in handcuffs. ‘Nobody gets it.’
I can think of someone who might: Captain Sir Alan McIlwraith KBE, DSO, MC. Though their motives might have been different — greed in one case, self-aggrandisement in the other — they both know what it’s like to do the unthinkable: to burst out of the social straitjacket that keeps us honest. It may be wicked and mad, but it must be awfully exhilarating.
Jemima Lewis is a contributing editor of The Spectator.