Evening Standard
Now, the issue here isn’t the truthfulness or accuracy of Rishi Sunak’s claims about Labour’s tax plans: I quite accept that those claims are, to put it mildly, debatable. There were a hundred circumlocutions you could use: if Sir Keir had spluttered, “that’s not true!” it would have meant exactly the same thing, but would have been entirely unproblematic. Once, scrupulous people would use the word “untruth” in denying the veracity of a statement and this too would lack the terrible force of the word “lie”, which implies a deliberate intention to deceive.