I don't believe a word that Mr Blair says

The chief characteristic of Mr Tony Blair is that you can never believe a word he says. He is not the first Prime Minister of whom this may be asserted. But in my experience, from Harold Macmillan onwards, he is the one least inclined to telling the truth. Some of his predecessors, such as Margaret Thatcher, have an undeserved reputation for veracity. Others, notably Harold Wilson, have become a byword for unreliability when what they said was wholly justifiable.

For instance, scarcely a month passes when someone does not write somewhere that Wilson's "pound in your pocket" broadcast showed him to be a liar. On the contrary: it was both defensible and correct. It was intended to reassure the pensioner that his or her money in National Savings or the building society had not been diminished in proportion to the change in the exchange rate. This modification to his script had been suggested by Wilson's adviser, Thomas Balogh. He was a malign influence and an unpleasant man. But that is not the point here. On devaluation he was speaking the truth, and so was Wilson.

Truth-telling was nevertheless not a large part of Wilson's political stock-in-trade. With Mr Blair it is. We all remember his broadcast after the Bernie Ecclestone motor-racing scandal when he said in effect: "Trust me, I'm a politician." And people duly trusted him.

And yet his "Forces of Conservatism" speech at Bournemouth was a farrago of false suggestion and straight untruth. He seemed to be claiming David Lloyd George, William Beveridge and Maynard Keynes as pioneers of the Movement comparable to Keir Hardie; whereas they all stuck to the Liberals to the end of their days, even though they could have joined Labour without any difficulty if they had wanted to.

In addition, he gave Labour the credit for bringing about the women's vote. In fact the Liberal government was against it, the young Labour Party not over-concerned with it. It was brought about partly by the Coalition government in 1918 and fully by the Conservatives in 1928. More recently, we have heard Mr Blair telling us that America "stood by" us in the Blitz. In fact the United States had not even entered the war when London was first being bombed.

There are those who excuse Mr Blair by saying that his trouble is that he does not know any history. It is not, to be sure, an excuse that is at all flattering to Mr Blair. Several Prime Ministers have known a great deal of history: notably Macmillan and, before him, C R Attlee and, of course, Winston Churchill.

I am not sure that I accept the excuse. True, Fettes, where he was at school, is more famous for rugby football than for intellectual pursuits. But it did manage to produce three distinguished politicians in Selwyn Lloyd, Iain Macleod and Sir John Simon. Lloyd wrote a good book on the Speakership; Macleod became editor of The Spectator; while Simon, though disliked as a man, knew a lot of history. At Oxford, Mr Blair read Law, a subject which, as Edmund Burke once observed, does more to strengthen the mind than to liberalise it. Still, I should have expected something of Mr Blair's lengthy and expensive education to stick to him in his later life.

It is more likely that Mr Blair does not care what he says, provided it achieves the purpose which he is seeking at the moment. There was his story, designed to emphasise his roots in the North-east, that as a boy he had watched Jackie Milburn of Newcastle United. It turned out that the great centre-forward had stopped playing when Mr Blair was four years old. There was another story, in the same childhood-of-Tony context, that he had stowed away in an aeroplane which had taken him to faraway places. It was quickly established that there was not a word of truth in it.

Many of us bathe our childhoods in warm, scented soapsuds. Mr Blair, however, cannot be relied upon to give an accurate account even of the day before yesterday. For example, he appeared as a solo panellist on the BBC's Question Time. He was asked why the Government had not yet abolished fox-hunting. Well, Mr Blair replied, it had tried its best. But the Commons vote had been overturned by the Lords. The Government intended to prevent them from frustrating the will of the Commons and would reintroduce the measure in due course.

This account was false in every single particular. There never had been any such rejection by the Lords. Fox-hunting remains unabolished. And all the emphasis now in Lords reform is not over their lordships' powers but over their chamber's composition. Here Mr Blair has shifted from his previously proclaimed support for a partly elected chamber to one that is wholly appointed. The story of the two Welshwomen who were discussing their new minister bears repetition at this point:

"He is a fine-looking man and no mistake."

"With a lovely speaking voice, Mrs Jones."

"And so powerful in prayer."

"What a pity he's such a bloody liar."

My mother, however, a Welshwoman likewise, taught me that the word "liar" found no place in polite conversation. I do not use it here of Mr Blair. Instead I prefer to call him a romancer. I have known several such men: for women, though by no means truthful always, do not go in for tall tales as men do. They are always intelligent, charming and articulate, in no need, one would have thought, to make up stories.

Among them was the journalist and broadcaster, the late John Morgan. He claimed to have enjoyed an affair with Princess Margaret. They had met, it seemed, when he was doing his national service as an education officer in the RAF and she was visiting his station. "You're different from the others," she had apparently said. This was plausible enough. Morgan possessed Celtic looks and a knowledge of Mozart's operas. The liaison had been conducted, he said, at one of her royal residences, always at teatime. This made me suspicious, for tea was not the favoured tipple of either of them.

Mr Blair has not, as far as I know, made any comparable claim. He is married to Cherie. Indeed, so clearly devoted are they that we might be forgiven for concluding that they had never heard of birth control. It is in politics that he is a romancer. His affair is with Mr George Bush. In modern argot: he does sincerity, as all romancers do. In addition, he does passion. This always impresses our perhaps easily impressed parliamentary sketchwriters. He relies on simple and strong assertion: that al-Qa'ida has links with Saddam Hussein and that we are in mortal danger from Iraq. Only last week he was promising to go to war next with North Korea. I do not believe a word of it.