Rather confused about the clocks going forward, my eighteen month old son Joshua and I prepared to watch some of the old Michael Horden voice-over Paddington Bear cartoons on video. Instead we found ourselves watching Andrew Marr as he introduced Guardian and Observer journalist and all-round nonsense talker Carole Cadwalladr.
Some of us who were at Oxford 30 years ago, age with our hair changing colour and more lines appearing on an increasingly beaten and worn boat-race. I, sadly, am in that camp. I was struck by how Carole had the same coloured hair as when we both went down some c30 years ago and no lines at all on a wrinkle free face which, oddly, did not look at all like the face I remembered. It really is odd how some folks age. Lucky her.
Almost since the great moment when we evil Brexiteers triumphed in the great Independence Day referendum, Carole has been pushing the line of Russian interference. You know the sort of stuff: bots on twitter, facebook advertising, claims that Vlad and cohorts were funding the Leave campaigns. The Observer and its rapidly dwindling readership, appeared to have loved it although in terms of hard facts, that is to say proof of any meaningful Russian interference, Carole and her colleagues have failed to produce anything. Innuendo does not count.
But for a butthurt remaoner that does not matter. If only those Russian bots on twitter had not caused millions of feeble minded folks to vote Leave, then the result would have been different. True butthurt remoaners like Carole simply cannot accept the fact that we Brits ignored the dire warnings from elitists like her that only old people and stupid racists wanted Brexit and voted for it anyway.
But now Carole has a new avenue to pursue. So she explained to Marr how the Brexit result was all to do with Cambridge Analytica, facebook data scraping and thus this invalidated the outcome. But hang on, there was sod all facebook UK data scraped. the leave campaign did not use Cambridge Analytica. But so what. Repeatedly Carole was asked where's the evidence? There is of course none. Just like there was no evidence that the Russians stole the result but that has not stopped Cadwalladr banging on about it ad nauseam for 18 months.
I suppose at least this means that Carole might fess up that her tens of thousands of words about how the Russians stole it were all her little joke. Or maybe Vlad is working arm in arm with facebook. I rather lose track.
In due course this canard will be put to bed by all bar the most dedicated remoaner loons. At that point I fully expect Cadwalladr to come up with a new crazy theory to explain why the British people could have been so stupid to ignore all the experts, the celebs, the academics, most of the deadwood press and all of the BBC to vote for Brexit. Because as all metropolitan elitists know, because they are so much smarter than the rest of us, there were no good reasons for the result so someone must have rigged the ballot somehow, someone must have used foul means to persuade feeble minded people like me and my wife to vote the wrong way.
It does not matter if there is no evidence for this, if butthurting remoaners like Carole Cadwalladr write about it often enough maybe the peasantry will start to believe it anyway.