It was a bright cold day in June and the clocks were striking 13. Obiter Smith needed to find a study of local legal aid commissioned by the last government and published last year.

However a search by the document’s title on the Ministry of Justice’s website came up with 0 hits.

Obiter widened the search to ‘legal aid’. Again, the result came back: ‘No results were found for your search in the Ministry of Justice website.’

It wasn’t just us. A press officer at the ministry had the same experience, and referred us to Google. Which to our relief confirmed that there had, once, been such a thing as legal aid.

No doubt it was all down to a technical glitch, but conspiracy theorists may reflect on how convenient it would be for the chancellor of the exchequer if any mention of a golden age when public money was spent on legal aid simply disappeared from the record. As the Party slogan said in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’