The Talented Mr Hari

A Study in Fakery

If there’s one thing I can’t abide in politics or life, it’s fakery. This aversion has nothing to do with my political allegiances. I dislike fakes who supposedly represent ‘my side’ just as as much as I dislike them on the other. When I say fakery, I mean the term in its most basic dictionary sense as ‘a thing that is not genuine, a forgery or a sham.’

Every era has its share of people who fit this definition, but our shallow, distracted-addicted age has more fakes than most. It’s the golden age of the grifter, the huckster, the carnival barker, the snake oil vendor, the chancer and the fast-buck hustler. It’s an age in which slippery dishonesty, duplicity and the absence of a moral compass will never be impediments to self-advancement as long as you aren’t caught out, and will generally not be held against you even if you are.

Last week, languishing in my sickbed with COVID, three examples of a particular kind of ersatz leftism came drifting unasked into my Twitter feed. First up was Paul Mason, announcing that he was putting himself forward as a Labour nominee to run against Jeremy Corbyn in North Islington. This is Mason’s fourth attempt to get a safe seat under Starmer, who has taken Corbyn’s place in his affections. Mason has previously tried Manchester and Wales. He once came up here to Sheffield, even though there was already a very popular local candidate in the district he was trying to parachute into.

He didn’t get the nomination, and now this ridiculous carpetbagger wants to oppose Jeremy Corbyn, the man who he once hailed as the saviour of the working class, in Corbyn’s own constituency. Maybe there’s been some kind of political journey there, but all I see is craven opportunism and a tedious craving for attention that will seek an outlet in whatever spaces appear, and tailor its politics accordingly.

Then there was Russell Brand, another former revolutionary messiah, now alleged rapist and swivel-eyed conspiracy theorist, engaging in some kind of Christian Bros immersion in the Thames with Bear Grylls and some other sinner. So much repentant tattooed flesh in those toxic swirling waters was enough to make the angels weep. But it will take more than the Thames - especially nowadays - to wash off the unmistakeable stench of grift from Brand’s Damascene photo-op.

And in the same week, up popped Johann Hari, perhaps the most brazen grifter in the history of British journalism, promoting his new book in the way that only he can. Hari has written that the food critic Jay Rayner once took the weight-reducing drug Ozempic, a claim that Rayner denied in a tweet that accused Hari of talking ‘complete and utter bollocks’. Hari apologised and blamed his fact-checkers, and said that he had actually confused Rayner with the writer and critic Leila Latif. His apology was marred somewhat by the fact that he spelt Latif’s first name wrong, and it then transpired that she had not described taking the drug Hari was referring to.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Factchecker

Few people who know anything about Hari will be surprised by this car-crash. Something like it happens whenever he publishes a book. Every writer makes mistakes, even we don’t all have fact-checkers. I have been saved from humiliation on more than one occasion by editors who spotted mistakes I made before the books went into print, and there have been mistakes that have got through. But when that happens, the mistakes are ultimately mine, not the editor’s. The problem with Hari is that he has been making ‘mistakes’ for a very long time, and I’m not talking about typos or the occasional incorrect date or reference.

In 2011, Hari was (belatedly) investigated by the Independent after it became an open secret that he had been inserting quotations from his interviewees’ books or articles in his own interview/profiles and then passing them off as his own quotes. It seemed then, that he was finally about to get the comeuppence that many people thought he deserved.

I was definitely one of those people. I never admired or respected Hari’s writing, and most importantly, I never trusted him, even when I agreed with what he was saying. It wasn’t just the arrogance and self-regard, the wheedling, bombastic prose, or Hari’s eager sixth form enthusiasm for aerial bombardment - I mean, he once suggested that the West should bomb North Korea as well as Iraq. Too often, his reporting just didn’t ring true. Take, for example, the piece he wrote about Hamas and the Gaza Strip in 2006, in which he argued - correctly, in my view - that the West was making a mistake by ignoring Hamas’s offer of a truce with Israel. But his piece also contained an interview with a member of Islamic Jihad named ‘Abu Ahmad’, which included the following exchange:

“I want to kill and kill and kill again. I want to be a killing machine until, inshallah, I become a martyr,” he said, staring at me intensely. He is 27 – my age – and murderous. He has just described how he slashed the throats of four female Israeli soldiers in an illegal settlement in 2002, and he chuckled as he described how they cried for their mothers.

This atrocity was supposed to have happened in 2002. Except that there is no record that such an event actually took place in 2002 or in any other year, and you can bet that if four female Israeli soldiers had had their throats cut in Gaza, the world would have known about it.

Either Hari was really told this story by a fantasist, in which case he and his newspaper were too lazy to confirm its veracity. Or else Hari himself was the fantasist, and made up this Palestinian Psycho vignette to embellish his story. There are many other equally improbable stories from Hari’s reporting in those years, when he saw things that other people say he couldn’t have seen, or wrote down supposedly verbatim quotes that turned out not to have actually said. And yet when the allegations against Hari became impossible to ignore in 2011, the likes of Polly Toynbee, Laurie Penny and even Naomi Klein fell over themselves to defend Hari, and said that his critics were jealous, homophobic, or political axe grinders.

Even when the Independent had to admit that most of the charges against him were true, it allowed Hari to issue a typically self-serving apology, which admitted that he had plagiarised, and also waged cruel ‘sock-puppet’ campaigns against people he disliked on the Internet, while still suggesting that he was some kind of victim. In accounting for his interview ‘technique’, Hari described how

When I recorded and typed up any conversation, I found something odd: points that sounded perfectly clear when you heard them being spoken often don’t translate to the page. They can be quite confusing and unclear. When this happened, if the interviewee had made a similar point in their writing (or, much more rarely, when they were speaking to somebody else), I would use those words instead. At the time, I justified this to myself by saying I was giving the clearest possible representation of what the interviewee thought, in their most considered and clear words.

This is the most pitiful sophistry. I’ve interviewed many people, and sometimes I wanted them to give me ringing or telling quotes, but interviews aren’t like the written word. People say what they say in a particular moment, and their utterances don’t always come out in the form of a golden quote. When that happens, you accept what you get and work with it. You DO NOT rephrase your subjects or put words into their mouth because you don’t think they’ve expressed themselves clearly or sensationally enough for you - unless, that is, you are so desperate for fame and fortune that you are willing to say whatever you think will get your story the most attention.

Also, if you quote from an interviewee’s books or articles, you make that distinction clear, you DO NOT take a quote from a book and then pretend that someone actually said it in your presence. My late friend Graham Usher lived and worked in the Occupied Territories as a teacher and a journalist for many years. Graham never studied journalism, but he became one of the most authoritative correspondents in the Occupied Territories. Graham would never have dreamed of doing even once, what Hari did on a routine basis, and the same could be said of any writer with even the smidgeon of integrity.

Neither Hari nor the Independent addressed the full extent of the allegations directed against him, which included borrowing whole chunks from other people’s books and articles and reproducing them wholesale; fabricating stories, meetings and incidents that never happened; and making some 600-odd edits of other people’s Wikipedia pages using the pseudonym David Rose.

The Independent didn’t sack him for any of this; instead it packed him off to New York to go on a ‘journalism course.’ Because that was what was wrong with their star columnist: he didn’t understand what journalism was. Like many others who followed this dismal saga, I was incredulous at the time, not at Hari’s slippery dishonesty - I already considered that baked in - but by the Independent’s cowardly face-saving. I predicted in my blog that the Independent had ‘done their hero more harm than good’, and that Hari would no longer have any future in journalism.

Boy, was I wrong about that.

Hari went on to become a bestselling author-cum-mental health guru, weaving pop culture, self-help takes on drugs and depression into international journeys of personal discovery. Various experts in the fields that he was ‘investigating’ questioned his research methods, his conclusions, and his sources. None of this mattered. Boosted by celebrity endorsements from Elton John, Hilary Clinton, and Noam Chomsky, for God’s sake, Hari shrugged off the cloud of ignominy like the Teletubbies baby sun. Millions of viewers watched his Ted Talk on addiction. He worked with Russell Brand - birds of a feather.

And now, nearly fourteen years after I predicted his downfall, he’s still here with the same ‘mistakes’ and the same bad-faith apologies, while his publishing company insist how proud they were to have published him. Hari is not without talent - and not only for re-invention - but there are plenty of talented writers in the world, most of whom would never do what he did. And in a world that valued and expected integrity from writers - or from anybody, for that matter - Hari’s ‘mistakes’ should have obliged him to seek another profession.

Shouldn’t there be space for forgiveness, you ask? Shouldn’t people be given a second chance if they genuinely repent? Yes. But the key word is ‘genuine’. And I have never read a word by Hari that suggests he genuinely repents anything, except that he got caught.

Such things matter, because if writing has any social or moral purpose beyond mere entertainment, it’s because of its connection to truth. This doesn’t mean that writers are always right. Or even that the truth is always possible. But writers should always strive to find it, when they put their thoughts onto the page or the computer screen. Writers - real writers - should not lie, not for governments or political parties or for self-advancement. They should not make stuff up. They should not copy or use other people’s work without acknowledging it.

If they do these things, in the pursuit of fame and self-aggrandisement, then they should be recognized for what they are: propagandists, court scribes, hacks, and grubby, dishonourable chancers. And if society is not willing to do that, then, as with politicians, it will get the kind of writers it deserves.

Such writers have always been around. There’s something of New Grub Street’s Jasper Milvain in Hari’s ruthlessly amoral quest for literary fame and fortune. But behind Hari’s ‘lost connections’ woo and the ‘stolen focus’ happy-clappy pieties about not spending time on the Internet, something else has been lost along the way - a basic moral compass. And I can’t think of Hari without thinking of Tom Ripley - another vindictive social climber and pathological liar with a penchant for false names and a taste for the high life.

Ripley inhabited other people’s lives - after killing them. Hari became rich and famous by divesting himself of all the ethical codes that writing should imply, and like Ripley, he got away with it. But integrity, once willingly given up, cannot be recovered, and no amount of reinvention can entirely conceal its absence. ‘I would rather fail with honour than succeed by cheating,’ wrote Sophocles. That ought to be a guiding principle in every profession, and the world would be a much better place if it was.

The talented Mr Hari didn’t live by it and probably doesn’t care. He’s done very well out of the world we have, and the tragedy - if that’s not too strong a word for his disturbing moral turpitude - is that too many other people never really cared either, as long as he made them money or told them what they wanted to hear.