Nick Cohen on conspiracy theories

Twenty years ago the people who thought they were the political mainstream could dismiss conspiracy theories as the beliefs of a small number of cranks and nutters.

I certainly used to take for granted that the majority of people would agree with the rule which I believe was first formulated by Sir Bernard Ingham when he was Margaret Thatcher's press secretary:





































(Often expressed as "Nine times out of ten you'll be wiser to believe a cock-up theory than a conspiracy theory.")

The most convincing reason to believe that conspiracy theories are usually wrong has been put forward by many people from the comedian David Mitchell to the journalist David Aaronovitch - you usually have to credit the conspirators with confidence that thousands of people will do their jobs perfectly and that none of them will blab.

I have been quoting the late Stephen  Hawking in my "quote of the day" pieces since his death last week. As professor Hawking said of one conspiracy theory,





"But, but, but and again, but!" (to quote Sir Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," from which the quote is taken.)

Although I still think that Sir Bernard was dead right about the sensible way to judge what is really happening, after 2017 the idea that the overwhelming majority of people agree that conspiracy theories are usually silly is coming to look like somewhere between complacency and arrogance.

These days it is only too obvious that millions of people believe what would once have been dismissed as conspiracy theories by those who thought we were the overwhelming majority but now find ourselves to be one strand of thought in a deeply divided society - and not always the dominant strand.

Of course, even if they are not responsible for everything that goes on in the world, conspiracies do exist and some crimes are down to them. Somebody conspired to murder Sergei Skripal and his daughter and almost any explanation for the attack would be described as a conspiracy theory by anyone who disagreed with it.

I note incidentally the announcement in the past 24 hours that Vladimir Putin has been re-elected with an increased majority, which does at least disprove one argument put forward last week against Russian involvement in the Salisbury attack, namely that the Russian state would have been foolish to carry out an assassination just before a Russian presidential election.

We now know that, if Putin calculated that being accused by the West of trying to murder someone who many Russians would regard as a traitor would not hurt him in the election, he was, sadly, entirely correct.

At the weekend Nick Cohen wrote a powerful but depressing piece in the Observer about the rise of conspiracy theories from the fringes of politics to the mainstream, and what to do about it, which you can read here.

To finish this post on a less depressing note, the medical site "Pulse" has an amusing article here by a Bracknell GP called Dr Nick Ramscar who descibed how he used the "cock-up-theory" to persuade one patient to at least consider taking the antibiotic he wanted to prescribe her ...

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