Boris Johnston stuck his hand into the drawer of random cutlery and pulled out a flat four inch fish-shaped piece of steel.

‘Excellent, a Tudor fish knife!’ he declared.

He was, of course, wrong. The metal might  have been fashioned into the form of a fish, but the work had been almost certainly done by a machine in twenty-first century China. Added to this, the fish was only decorative, with no practical function.

This was just another of the Prime Minister’s lies.