Peter Pienaar and Richard Hannay

Different characters appear on the public stage and try to convince us that things are the way they paint it ... one of the more recent is this Robert Jenrick, 

It reminds me of The Thirty-Nine Steps (the Buchan book from 1915) and the character Hannay mentions, a South African Peter Pienaar, appearing in a few Hannay stories of the time and illustrating the whole thing about plausibility.

The overwhelming evidence, together with a series of hunches, have the unlikely hero Hannay, accompanied by the British muscle, descending on a coastal gentlemen's retreat, where the dastardly, stop-at-nothing, wartime German agents were holed up BUT the supposed miscreants  were playing the English gentlemen to a tee and Hannay had great self-doubt ... maybe they had got it wrong after all ...

http://www.cleavebooks.co.uk/grol/buchan/39step10.htm

I watched Harris get up before a microphone, incensed that Trump was about to bring economic ruin to America ... she was pretty good at it, almost as convincing as Robert Jenrick or Andrea Jenkyns ... the full on Reform type conservatives the latter were ... except that the form guide said differently. Where had they been during their years in govt? Where had their principles been then?

And across the pond, there was Harris, angrily defending the people ... while she was party to 20,000 Haitians going into a red rosette town, Springfield, ruining that town.  Plus all the rest of it. One of the few times she was on cue and steaming ... it was disconcerting.

And Trump? In his speech, outlining her crimes ... yes he went on and on and on, bitterly ... such that he began to pale ... and yet we've all been piecing together evidence for a few years now ... the real story is quite different to how Harris's scriptwriters were portraying it.

And Starmer?  Good mate of the people? Of the pensioners?