Does Stonewall have no shame?

Watching people brazening it out can be tremendous fun. The higher the stakes, the more extreme the disparity between reality and what we now call ‘cope’, the greater the cheer.

We remember the brass neck of Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister dubbed ‘Comical Ali’, still denying the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime as American tanks rolled into Baghdad. Or the final balcony address given by Nicolae Ceaușescu on his pet TV station as his regime was toppling.

We associate this kind of thing with despotic regimes, but in the democratic world we get the occasional glimpse of it: a public figure refusing to acknowledge openly the import of a reverse or a loss. Theresa May’s frankly terrifying croak of ‘nothing has changed’ after the 2017 election that changed everything; or Jeremy Corbyn assuring his disciples he had ‘won the argument’ after leading Labour to its most crushing defeat for eighty years.