Long life | 12 November 2015

It is hardly uncommon for politicians to lie, especially when their careers are threatened by a sexual transgression — John Profumo about Christine Keeler, for example, and Bill Clinton on not having had ‘sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky’. But there is a particular kind of distortion of the truth that is rare over here but almost routine among American presidential candidates; and this is the way they embellish their personal histories to maximise their appeal to voters. It’s been going on for ages among candidates of both main parties, but presently most scrutiny is directed at Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and Seventh-day Adventist — denier of global warming, Darwinism and most other fashionable creeds — who has surprisingly jumped in the polls to the front of the Republican field.

Carson’s story is one of rags to riches in which a violent temper as a boy was cured by study of the Bible.