Am I alone in being unimpressed? So salespeople and advertisers and propagandists try to hoodwink us into buying their goods, voting for their candidates and their programmes, and donating to their bogus charities. In the 1960s, I read a book about all that called The Hidden Persuaders by, I think, somebody called Vance Packard. He explained the tricks, the psychological ploys, the whole lot. Sixty years on and they’re still at it. The tricks are trickier, I suppose, and more pervasive, but the insulting assumption is the same: we are infinitely manipulable, we easily fall for their tricks, they can read our minds and control our behaviour, make us buy what we don’t really want, get us to vote in the way they want us to, persuade us that our refugee next-door neighbours are a threat to our way of life, and that our disabled neighbours are getting benefits under false pretences. They make fat profits and accumulate power out of this stuff.

One claim that annoys me is the idea that, because of Cambridge Analytica’s trickery, we ought to revisit the EU referendum result because millions of people were hoodwinked into believing clever lies so we didn’t know what we were doing when we cast our vote (I voted Remain, by the way). The argument reminded me of a member of my local Constituency Labour Party who argued in a meeting after Corbyn had won the 2015 leadership election that we needed another one because, after the 2015  general election defeat, we had been traumatised and we – yes – didn’t know what we were doing. I had only just rejoined the party at that point and I wondered if this low level of argument was all I should expect from the Labour Party. To my relief it wasn’t. Anyway, this particular member got his wish. Unfortunately for him, when Corbyn was forced to face a second election in 2016 he won even better.

Another example: Tony Benn liked to point out that people didn’t always fall for the politics of the Tory tabloid newspapers. At one election (I forget which), he said The Sun newspaper sent all the details about him to a psychiatrist in America for examination (an attempt at psychological profiling, I suppose). The results came back and they published them on election day: the front-page headline shouted, “Benn is stark, staring bonkers – official!” “When the results came in the next day,” said Benn, “I found I had increased my majority! So, you see, people don’t necessarily …”

Anyway, I’ve had my gripe. I see that the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica story is turning into a soap opera: An over-excited Kylie Morris announced to Channel 4 News viewers tonight, as Zuckerberg sat in Congress waiting for his grilling: “Mark Zuckerberg is pouring himself a glass of water.” Talk about blow by blow. But Jon Snow went just a little bit too far, signing off with the words, “On this momentous day in Washington, that’s Channel 4 News”! Could he really mean these hearings? Earlier the FBI had raided Trump’s lawyer’s offices and home. People had hinted earlier that that could be momentous, but C4News peremptorily cut short an interview on that after about 30 seconds, and with no apology. Why? In order to cut seamlessly back to Congress and Mark’s now-half-empty glass of water. For the boy had begun to speak. What could be more momentous than that?