Stop me if I’ve told you this one before, but 20 years ago, a BNP-supporting aunt of mine forwarded me a document, purporting to be a scholarly explanation of why Muslims were inhuman, by a particular academic from a particular university. Even back in the pre-Cambridge Analytica days, I still did a quick fact check, before calling my aunt to say: “You have to be a bit careful with these sort of things, Auntie. Neither the professor that wrote that article, nor the university it says he’s from, actually exist.” “That’s as may be,” she said, “but I still think he makes a lot of valid points.”
The fact that my aunt knew the anti-Islamic man was not real did not stop her using his work to reinforce her prejudices. If I had realised the extent to which her adoption of the research of a man she knew did not exist was a prophecy of the way the whole country was soon to think, I would have joined my friend Roger in emigrating to the Pyrenees before Brexit to set up a pinball machine renovation business.
