In 1986, Sir Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, gave evidence in the Supreme Court of New South Wales in Sydney, in the Spycatcher trial. Under cross-examination by Malcolm Turnbull, then a barrister, he said that a letter contained “a misleading impression,” not a lie. “A lie is a straight untruth,” he said. Then he added: “As one person said, it is perhaps being economical with the truth.”
The phrase was not his own. Edmund Burke had written of an “oeconomy of truth” in the 1790s. Within weeks of the trial, MPs were using “economical with the truth” in the House of Commons.