5 Fibs You Were Told This Week By Politicians, Pollsters And, Er, David Icke

Hello and congratulations if you’ve made it to Thursday.

Now, we’re not saying this last week has been the most despair-inducing week in political history, but the president of the United States did retweet an account called “Cat Turd”.

Elsewhere, the political landscape was equally as depressing with fibs aplenty, which is great news for a certain weekly HuffPost UK series, but terrible news for democracy, truth and the idea that humanity somehow actually deserves its place on earth.

So let’s start with Boris Johnson, partly because he’s the PM but mostly because we just can’t bring ourselves to kick things off with David Icke.

Boris Johnson, part 1: Offices

Amid fears that town and city centres will soon be filled only with long-dead zombie office workers vainly searching for a Pret, the government has for a few weeks now been pushing Brits to get back into their workplaces.

And this week, refreshed after the long Bank Holiday weekend, they did! Or at least Johnson claimed they had, announcing that “huge numbers” of people had returned to work on Tuesday.

Unfortunately, Downing Street could not supply any evidence for the statement. And it emerged later that, in Greater London, bus use was up by just 6% and Tube use by 8% week-on-week.

“People are going back to the office in huge numbers across our country – and quite right, too,” he told ministers gathered in a socially-distanced room at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

But as social media users pointed to empty streets and train stations in big cities, his official spokesperson admitted that there were no publicly available statistics for any return.

Asked for evidence for the “huge...

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