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By the time you read this column, we’ll know who has won the ­election. But whoever wins, truth has been the biggest loser.

Although it seems impossible, this election has been more mired in lies than the Brexit referendum. Jennifer Nadel of the Compassion in Politics campaign has called it “the most ­divisive, deceitful, and disrespectful election campaign in living memory”.

Yesterday, the New York Times asked: “Can Boris Johnson Lie His Way Back Into Office?”

We have seen tactics straight out of the EU Referendum playbook – the one shared with Donald Trump – used right from the start of the campaign.

Tactics that take advantage of our antiquated electoral laws, that don’t cover the online space where elections are now most bitterly fought.

A staggering 88% of Tory adverts on Facebook during the first four days of December included ­inaccurate claims, said disinformation tracking organisation First Draft.

(Image: REUTERS)

Yet Facebook, controversially, continues to refuse to fact check ­political advertising.

Meanwhile, when the Mirror front page told the story of four-year-old Jack, a little boy who had to lie on coats while waiting to be treated for pneumonia because of our crumbling, cash-starved NHS, the web robots – or bots – went into action.

“Very interesting,” a number of accounts all started tweeting simultaneously. “A good friend of mine is a senior nursing sister at Leeds Hospital.

The boy shown on the floor by the media was in fact put there by the boy’s mother who then took photos on her mobile phone and uploaded it to media outlets before he climbed back on the trolley fake [sic].”

These are known as ‘sock puppet’ accounts – all controlled by the same user. In this case, someone who wanted to rubbish the Mirror’s story, which was damaging to the Conservatives.

Some researchers have suggested one in eight messages about British politics posted on Twitter are generated by automated accounts known as bots.

But it’s not just the robots that have been lying to us this election.

The Prime Minister pocketed a reporter’s phone rather than confront the truth about Jack.

And later that day, Labour ‘thugs’ were accused of attacking one of Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s aides at the hospital – when video footage later clearly showed the aide had walked into the arm of a protestor.

The Lib Dems have been putting out leaflets with dodgy graphs in them that make them look like they’re the only ones who can beat the Tories, and disguising their propaganda to look like local newspapers.

Some of these propaganda sheets have been designed to be almost ­indistinguishable from a local paper.

The Tories created a fake Labour manifesto at Labourmanifesto.org.uk, paying to ensure it popped up when people Googled the Labour manifesto.

They disguised their Conservative HQ twitter account, calling it ­‘FactcheckUK’ during an election debate. Throughout the campaign Johnson has hidden from everyone, from Good Morning Britain to interview rottweiler Andrew Neil.

A video clip of Sir Keir Starmer answering a question about Labour’s Brexit policy was altered – falsified – to show him apparently floundering for words, when he had, in fact, as usual given a full reply without the hesitation.

Boris Johnson’s social care plan that was already drawn up and ready to go, turned out not to exist. So what faith are we to have that his ‘oven-ready’ Brexit isn’t actually just a recipe scrawled on the back of an envelope?

(Image: Sunday Mail)

The election started with the PM’s refusal to make public the 50-page report about Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum, including in the Conservative Party – until after the election.

This meant as Stewart McDonald, the SNP’s defence spokesman, said: “Parliament is about to be sent packing into a general election without fully understanding the extent to which Russia has meddled in our most recent ­democratic electoral events.”

The election began with the Tory promise to “build 40 hospitals” that turned out to be only six. Then there were the 50,000 new nurses, of which 18,500 turned out to already be working for the NHS.

Now, we wait to find out whether the biggest lie of all was Boris

Johnson’s claim that he will “get

Brexit done”.

When all this is over, Compassion in Politics has prepared a Bill for ­Parliament that would make it illegal to lie in election materials – or for a politician to make a public pronouncement which, at the time it was made, they knew or believed to be untrue.

This can be the only response to an election that started with lies and ended with the Prime Minister hiding from journalistic scrutiny in a fridge.