At times like these, when the world is in uproar and we are assailed by opinion on all sides, you can generally rely on George Orwell to provide a telling and instructive commentary.

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two and two equals four”, contends the protagonist in 1984, Orwell’s treatise on how to protect free speech in the face of totalitarian opposition. What he meant was that, in a civilised society, we should be free to speak truth to power.

This is a particularly apposite reflection on what happened in the production process of the BBC’s fateful Panorama programme about Donald Trump’s part in the storming of the Capitol building in 2021. Two and two did indeed make four. The bits of film that were spliced together from separate speeches by Trump added up to the incontestab

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