oven-ready Brexit – A campaign line about an “oven-ready” Brexit deal has been treated as either a lie or the kind of indifference described by philosopher Harry Frankfurt as “bullshit”—but the debate runs deeper than semantics, reaching how truth gets handled in public life.
In December 2019, Boris Johnson stepped in front of British voters and promised a Brexit deal that was “oven ready … you just put it in the microwave and there it is.” The image landed because it sounded simple, finished, and inevitable.
Then the exit dragged on. Britain did not formally leave the EU until the end of January 2021. The gap between the promise and the timetable is where the argument starts—not as a detail for political historians. but as a question that followers of cultural and intellectual life keep coming back to: was the slogan just wrong. or did it operate on a different moral plane?.
Many people have answered quickly: Johnson’s “oven ready” claim was a lie. But another reading circulates, anchored in a distinction developed by philosopher Harry Frankfurt. Frankfurt. who died in 2023. argued that the bullshitter’s problem is not necessarily that they assert what they believe to be false. “The bullshitter may not deceive us. or even intend to do so. either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be.” What matters. for Frankfurt. is something else: the essence of bullshit is “indifference to how things really are.”.
In Frankfurt’s account, the bullshitter is “neither on the side of the true nor, like a liar, on the side of the false.” Their “eye is not on the facts at all,” and that indifference is part of what the bullshitter hides.
Frankfurt’s own example—often cited because it removes ambiguity—was Donald Trump. Frankfurt regarded Trump as a bullshitter in this sense. In 2016, the New York Times ran a profile of Anthony Senecal, Trump’s longtime butler at Mar-a-Lago. When Trump told guests that the tiles in one of the bedrooms were made by Walt Disney. Senecal rolled his eyes and protested that it wasn’t true. Trump laughed and responded. “Who cares?” Even if Disney did end up making the tiles. the “indifference to the truth or falsity of his assertion about their manufacture” signaled. for Frankfurt’s framework. that Trump was bullshitting.
The thinking traces back to a version of Frankfurt’s essay “On Bullshit. ” first published in 1986. at a time when Watergate was still fresh and politicians like Richard Nixon were widely seen as liars. Frankfurt insisted that lying depends on knowing what the truth is: “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth.” In that respect. the liar is still. in his own way. responding to truth—so “the liar is at least responding to the truth and is to this extent respectful of it.”.
By contrast. Frankfurt argued that the bullshitter “does not reject the authority of the truth. as the liar does. and oppose himself to it.” Instead. the bullshitter “pays no attention to it at all.” The result. in Frankfurt’s formulation. was stark: “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”.
That conclusion has never sat comfortably with everyone—especially people who look at the world and see how catastrophic falsehood can be when it is deliberate and systematic. The case against Frankfurt is simple in its moral urgency: what could be more dangerous than “an inveterate liar” who. “like Hitler and Goebbels. ” uses deliberate. colossal falsehoods (the ‘big lie’) to promote genocidal policies that result in the deaths of millions?. Compared to that kind of liar, bullshitting can look almost manageable. Yet Frankfurt, in a postscript to the 2025 anniversary edition of “On Bullshit,” insisted bullshit is far from innocuous. Indifference to the truth is “extremely dangerous” because “the conduct of civilized life. and the vitality of the institutions that are indispensable to it. depend very fundamentally on respect for the distinction between the true and the false.”.
The argument then runs into the messy middle of real life: it isn’t always clear whether a false assertion is a lie or bullshit. Frankfurt made mental state central. But even he. in “the concluding paragraph of his essay. ” acknowledged that facts about ourselves are not “peculiarly solid or always easy to know. ” which complicates our ability to determine whether the speaker cares about truth.
That uncertainty matters directly for the question raised by Johnson’s “oven-ready” phrase. Did he fully believe what he was saying?. Did he half-believe it?. Did he care whether his claim matched reality, or was he “totally indifferent”?. The point isn’t that people cannot speculate—it’s that the standards for proving motive are not the same standards people use to judge the outcome.
Frankfurt later insisted that bullshitting still means not reporting facts but shaping beliefs and attitudes. Writing in Time in 2016. he reiterated that the bullshitter is indifferent to the truth or falsity of their assertions and that their goal is not to report the facts but to shape the beliefs and attitudes of listeners. He also conceded it is often uncertain whether a person actually cares about the truth. leaving open whether the statement is lying or bullshitting.
So there is a possible way to rescue Johnson from the “bullshit” label. If he genuinely believed his claim about an oven-ready Brexit deal. he wasn’t lying or bullshitting—even if what he said was false. The criticism would then have to shift toward the kind of confidence that comes without evidence: he would still have made an assertion for which he “lacked adequate evidence” and was “not deterred” by recognizing that fact. The charge of bullshitting, on that line of reasoning, would hinge on “lack of care.”.
But this is where the debate starts to feel less like philosophy and more like a threat to everyday speech. If bullshit is too tightly tied to mental state. it risks classifying ordinary discourse as bullshit depending on how “well-grounded” assertions are meant to be. And the worry becomes circular: which speaker hasn’t made claims while lacking the evidence they would wish they had?.
There is an alternative route suggested by GA Cohen. Cohen proposed that bullshit is a form of “unclarifiable unclarity or nonsense. ” and that whether something is nonsense depends not on the mental state of the speaker but on whether it “actually makes sense.” Cohen. in that line of thought. treated the works of certain philosophers—he mentioned Hegel and Heidegger—as bullshit not because they didn’t care about truth but because their claims are unclarifiable.
Frankfurt responded to Cohen in a postscript that “originally appeared in 2002.” He didn’t deny bullshit exists in Cohen’s sense. but he regarded it as less important and dangerous than bullshit in the mental-state sense. The argument was partly practical: academic nonsense may not influence elsewhere and “genuinely unintelligible texts are unlikely to be widely read.” For politicians. Frankfurt’s line was that the problem isn’t that what they say is literally nonsensical.
Frankfurt also widened the frame beyond politics. He described advertising and public relations as “realms” replete with bullshit. and observed that “one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” If that was true in 1986. he suggested it was even more true when his essay was first published in book form in 2005.
Some people reach for social media as the engine. Frankfurt’s view complicates that. In his account. “bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.” In such situations. instead of confessing ignorance. people bluff—the bullshitter becomes a “phony. ” like an undergraduate who hasn’t done the reading and tries to bluff their way through a tutorial by pretending to know what they don’t.
But advertising and public relations don’t fit neatly into bluffing. Frankfurt described classic paradigms of bullshit there too. The issue with an advertiser who fails to mention a product’s poor safety record isn’t that the advertiser “doesn’t know what he is talking about.” It is that they “deliberately conceal pertinent facts from the consumer without actually lying.”.
After Brexit and the first Trump election in 2016. many progressives were hungry for concepts that could explain what felt unfathomable—“post-truth” and the power of bullshit among them. Some uses were frivolous. Some were deployed seriously or semi-seriously as political analysis. One idea that did real rounds in the year after the Brexit vote was that the Brexit campaign’s success relied on routine use of bullshit.
That explanation, in the view presented here, is deeply suspect because it underestimates the strategic dimension of successful campaigns. By dismissing figures like Trump and Johnson as mere bullshitters. progressives could avoid offering a serious account of how they built a message that appealed to large numbers of voters.
The emblem was the NHS funding slogan: “We send the EU £350 million a week – let’s fund our NHS instead.” Was that the ultimate bullshit political claim?. The £350 million figure was misleading in that it was gross rather than net, and was closer to £175 million. But Dominic Cummings. described here as one of the architects of the successful campaign for Brexit. said the point of using the gross figure was to focus attention on the issue and provoke an argument. with the expectation that even the net figure would be seen by most voters as too high.
So the slogan looks less like self-indulgent carelessness and more like messaging designed to resonate. If it was bullshit, it was “strategic rather than careless bullshit,” and the question becomes whether that still counts as bullshit at all.
Frankfurt himself wrestled with this tension between bullshit as attitude and bullshit as craft. He noted the idea of “carefully wrought bullshit” involves “a certain inner strain. ” but said it is “not out of the question.” Effective political operatives. like advertisers using opinion polls. market research and psychological testing. can “dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right.”.
That sits uneasily with the ordinary idea of bullshit as lax and slovenly. Trump’s “tiles” claim at Mar-a-Lago was bullshit in Frankfurt’s sense because it wasn’t produced by tireless dedication to getting it right.
There’s another wrinkle: not all bullshit is descriptive. In a phone call in November. President Trump presented Nicolás Maduro with an ultimatum: “go into exile or face the consequences.” Maduro’s nonchalant response and refusal to comply were easy to read if Trump was bullshitting. Within weeks. as Maduro was being taken into custody by US forces. it turned out Trump was “deadly serious.” Danes and Greenlanders were then advised to keep in mind that yesterday’s supposed bullshit can become today’s reality.
That distinction matters because a bullshit ultimatum—defined here as one “isn’t meant seriously”—is not a description of reality at all. It is an attempt to shape reality by threatening dire consequences for failing to comply. a bluff where the person issuing it does not care enough to follow through. And yet, as Maduro learned, it can still be hard to tell whether the ultimatum is bullshit.
The editorial tension running beneath all of this is the uncomfortable one for cultural life: Frankfurt’s framework is ingenious. but it also generates doubts about whether it maps cleanly onto the everyday variety of public speech. Calling political enemies bullshitting can become a comfort ritual—an explanation that flatters the believer and spares them harder thinking.
After all, the last line of the debate is the one that hangs in the air longest: it may be comforting to assert that political opponents are bullshitters, but that comfort might itself be “a piece of bullshit.”
Boris Johnson Brexit Harry Frankfurt On Bullshit Donald Trump Anthony Senecal Mar-a-Lago tiles Anthony Senecal Dominic Cummings post-truth cultural identity public relations advertising NHS £350 million slogan Nicolás Maduro Danes and Greenlanders