Comment of the Day: As Dan Davies says, finance works with criminal penalties for material misrepresentations, and works better. Would not politics also work better with such?: Graydon: "Remember that in this case, Boris made the public lie in an official capacity, was told by the relevant governmental body that it was a lie—the statistics authority officially informed the official persona of the officeholder that no, no, that's not correct; that is not close to correct—and the official persona went right on making the lie in public in ways the court refuses to find obviously immaterial. There's not much 'chilling speech' there; there's an obligation on office-holders to act in the public interest. It's unusual to use a court to hold them to it, but it's not obviously wrong to use a court to hold them to it, any more than it would be wrong to charge someone with taking bribes to act contrary to the public interest while holding a public office...
#commentoftheday
