Poor Paul Nuttall. He seemed to have everything a cheeky by-election victor needed: the outsider vim, the accent, the cap. Then it emerged he had made stuff up about Hillsborough. That was that. He moved from admirable Scouser to tragedy-crasher.
In interviews over the years, Nuttall has referred to being at the stadium in Sheffield on the terrible day, and he still insists he was. We shall probably never know why that developed on his website into his having lost ‘close personal friends’ there — something which is not, it seems, true.
Yet while it is good fun blowing raspberries and deriding politicians, we should allow them a little understanding too. After all, who is not susceptible to a soupçon of Falstaffian exaggeration in their stories? There is a line between lying and honest mistakes, but exaggeration is not always a conscious error. It may start from a wish to impress. But if not challenged, then in time the exaggeration feels more comfortable than the earlier version, and consciously at first, unconsciously at some point after, it replaces the real memory.
I became interested in this business some years ago when writing a book on Northern Ireland.
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