Lying is of course one of the key precepts of political PR. The truth may be out there, but if you repeat a falsehood enough times people just begin to believe it.

Tony Blair has gone on record that he wants to see a reduced Constitution, mainly to avoid having to ask the British people what they think. In this he is supporting the lead runner in the French Elections, Nicolas Sarkozy.

However the reporting of this statement has brought out one of those convenient fictions so beloved of the supporters of ‘The Project.’ The fib in question is this, “there are the 18 countries that have already ratified the rejected document.”

Or as Blair put it, “I think the important thing is that if we want to get this resolved, then we have to understand that even though there are 18 of the countries that have ratified the constitutional treaty, there are other countries that really will have a difficulty with a constitutional treaty rather than a treaty, say, in the tradition of the treaty that we negotiated in Amsterdam some 10 years ago.”

That is a LIE, and he knows it, only 16 countries ratified the Constitution. The key country to have failed to have done so is Germany. As the BBC put it, “The German parliament voted to ratify the constitution in May 2005, but the bill has yet to be signed by President Horst Koehler, pending the outcome of a case being heard in the constitutional court.”

And Slovakia is in the same position.