We were all horrified when my niece BM announced at the breakfast table that she was about to be interviewed by a financial journalist on Radio 4’s Today programme. What on earth did she know about big business?

It was true that she didn’t have an ounce of relevant knowledge. However, BM was an actor who had spent the past couple of years working in high-end fashion manufacturing. Listening into conversations at work, she had picked up the vocabulary of the business owners.

She made a very credible interviewee, analysing the current industrial landscape, assessing the contribution of ‘her’ business to economic recovery, and predicting vast profits in post-pandemic times. Nobody would ever have known that she was faking it.