According to Dr Ben Pitcher, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Westminster, the sedate Radio 4 panel show Gardeners’ Question Time is riddled with “racial meanings” disguised as horticultural advice… Dr Pitcher said the “crisis in white identity in multicultural Britain” meant people felt unable to express their views for fear of being called racist, so expressed their racial identity in other ways, such as talking about gardening.

No mocking, you heathens. We must heed our sociology lecturers.

“You can try and blame it on Twitter.”

You can argue that the Internet has made things move too fast, and that our information economy has been corrupted by a constant landslide of new data that moves too fast for anyone to sort truth from falsehood and forces people back on simplistic frames of understanding, which simply reflect their pre-existing prejudices. All that is true. All that is also largely irrelevant. Nothing in this world justifies the sort of wild reaction that several journalists permitted themselves in public, reactions that went far, far beyond merely re-tweeting and sharing published information, to suggesting a dark and malign conspiracy on the part of an entire nation whose children were in fact murdered by terrorists, and whose civilian population was forced into bomb shelters for weeks.