If you live near the frontiers of acceptable opinion, as any thinking person must surely do, you quickly find that these badlands are policed mainly with insults and innuendos. And so you learn one morning, to your surprise, that you are an apologist for some repulsive regime which you strongly dislike. If you have been especially daring, you may be a ‘war crimes denier’ as well. Or you are charged with ‘whataboutery’, a word its users think will magically erase your case. Or, in many ways best of all, you are a conspiracy theorist.

There is a myth that this phrase was invented by the CIA to try to discredit protestors against the Vietnam war, but the expression is far older than that. Even so, like all these dismissive epithets, it is remarkably effective – especially among the great electronic mobs of antisocial media.

If you cannot distinguish between oven-ready propaganda and fact, should you even engage in politics?

If you cannot distinguish between oven-ready propaganda and fact, should you even engage in politics?

The word ‘conspiracy’ is one of the strangest in our language. The authorities will readily allege it when they have very little actual evidence against a defendant. Nobody sniggers when they do so. But a private individual will be laughed to scorn if he suggests that powerful or influential people might have met privately to discuss a common aim – as in fact they do all the time. The moment the tinfoil hat of ‘conspiracy theorist’ descends on your........

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