During the Brexit era, it became obvious many comments under these columns were being placed by Russian trolls, with slightly strange grasps of idiomatic English, cut-and-pasting blocks of approved pro-Putin and anti-EU texts to change the direction of the discourse. Their posts read like the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but trained on 90s MTV Europe presenters’ accents and Russia Today op-eds.

I began to bait the bots by inserting deliberately incomprehensible, but also somehow provocative, sentences into my pieces, culminating in the following paragraph, from the summer of 2016, after which point the Russian provocateurs left me alone:

“One may as well give the kosovorotka-marinading wazzocks something incomprehensible to feed their bewildered brainstems. To me, then, Vladimir Putin is a giant, prolapsed female worker bee that sucks hot ridicule out of langoustines’ cephalothoraxes. Let’s see what crunchy, expansionist lavatory honey this notion causes the parthenogenic Russian wendigos to inflate for us this week, in the shadow of Paul McGann and his art gnome.”

But nature abhors a vacuum, and soon the comment space the Russians vacated was filled by Tories and Brexiters, like rats entering a vacant building, or unseated Tory MPs getting their own reality TV shows. Between 2020 and the fall of the last government these columns were the subject of complaints and criticisms on the right, many with their own newspaper columns in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph, and their own House of Commons notepaper........

© The Guardian