the media’s self-obsession knows no bounds. This assumption on the part of some journalists that it’s their job to harangue the government over every issue also points to a hole at the heart of British politics. They are effectively trying to fill the gap left by the decline of political and public debate, and presenting themselves as a new Opposition. Instead we get the New Cynicism and an increasingly degraded public debate.

Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn’t about something being true or not true: that’s a humanities graduate parody. It’s about the error bar, statistical significance, it’s about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it’s about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence.