I was intending to post a comment on a widely quoted statement of Theresa May’s at Prime Minister’s Question Time a few days ago, but have since thought better of it. She was reported to have shouted over to Jeremy Corbyn: ‘We will never allow you to rule!’; which, for someone who has studied Establishment (including Secret Service) plots to undermine Labour governments in the 1920s and the 1960s by subversive means (see Robin Ramsay, Smear, 1992), struck me as reminiscent and somewhat menacing.

Anxious however, as any historian should be, to check my facts, I looked in Hansard and on Youtube for the offending words, and couldn’t find them. The nearest was her telling Corbyn, at the same PMQs: ‘We will never let it happen’; but referring, quite clearly, to letting the national debt rise while the Conservatives were in power. That’s an entirely different thing. A discussion on Facebook revealed that others had taken this the wrong way too.

It is, to be fair, in line with May’s authoritarian tendencies: viz her career at the Home Office. But it seems in fact – and unless anyone can come up with another reliable source – to be an example of ‘Fake News’; which we Leftists are always accusing the Right of making up for propaganda purposes, but in this case is either an invention or – at best – a mistake, by someone on the Left. Warning: don’t believe something just because you want to. That way lies Trumpery.