I’ve long accepted that the role of rational thought in human existence has been greatly exaggerated. We believe our team is going to win, despite the fact that they’ve lost five games in a row; we put a bet on the outsider in the 2.30 at Hamilton because we’ve a good feeling about the horse’s name; or we support a political party, not because of their policies and what they promise to do in office, but because our parents and grandparents have always voted for them.

I suspect that life has always been like this, although of late it really has struck me that we are living at a time when facts don’t matter, and that people have come to rely on their emotion to make sense of themselves and the world in which they live. Passionately-expressed personal beliefs get prioritised over evidence or, if you prefer, what used to be called the “Truth”.

I recently had an object lesson in how the personal and the emotional trumps the evidential when I posted on my Instagram account about the convicted serial killer Lucy Letby. I recommended a new book – Unmasking Lucy Letby by Jonathan Coffey and Judith Moritz – and suggested that this was “an important and balanced contribution to the feverish public debate about Lucy Letby”, that it was “even-handed” and could therefore be regarded as a “corrective to the current ‘miscarriage’ narrative [about Letby] by carefully presenting the prosecution case” and encouraged people to “judge for yourselves”.

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The comments that I received in reply were but a tiny glimpse into what has become known as a “post-Truth World”, and it........

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