Our ageing population is something to be celebrated

While most of us are busy getting on with our lives, whether hard at work or enjoying a family holiday, Westminster has been getting its bloomers in a twist this week over whether a man who wants to be prime minister of this country did or did not lay a wreath in tribute to terrorists.

What’s bizarre about this quandary is that there is still an ongoing debate about it. It is, after all, not really a question of “he said, she said”, since the evidence is absolutely and unequivocally clear that Jeremy Corbyn did hold a wreath and pay tribute at the graves of the Palestinian masterminds behind the 1972 massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich.

Not only is there clear photographic evidence of the Labour leader, then a mere backbench MP, standing in front of the gravestone with a wreath in his hands, but an article about him doing just that was published in his favourite newspaper, Morning Star, at the time – written by one Jeremy Corbyn MP.

The trouble is, thanks to the news whirlpool of social media, we are now living in an Orwellian world where lies and truth are not just interchangeable, they can quickly become one and the same thing. Thus, Corbyn can claim to both not have been there, and to have been “present” at the wreath-laying but “not think” he was “involved” in the actual laying of the wreath. And his supporters will insist each statement is 100 per cent copper-bottomed truth.

Indeed, the bigger and bolder the lie, the better it works. And even when it is proven to be a lie, Corbynistas will simply shrug their shoulders and point to someone else – invariably the Israelis, the Saudis or the Tories – who has done a far worse deed than Comrade Corbyn’s delightful chums.

The truth is that the Labour leader has taken a leaf out of the Donald Trump playbook. He has worked out that, even when the truth is staring us in the face, he can tell us that black is indeed white and two plus two does equal five and enough people will believe it. Or worse, they simply won’t care what is fact and what is fiction.