Having taken the piss out of Guardian columnists for their laughably painful paroxysms over the appalling attacks upon women at Cologne railway station, credit where it’s due. The paper at least broke this story about the Swedish police being accused of covering up sex attacks by refugees at a music festival.

I dare say that Deborah Orr and Gaby Hinsliff et al will still have some fatuous explanation. Some circuitous route which exculpates the adherents of a primitive, brutal and deeply misogynist creed and perhaps blames western colonialism instead. Well, sure, ok; stick to your guns you babes, no matter how much evidence stacks up to suggest that you are deluded idiots.

I am not one for conspiracies. But nonetheless there has been a deliberate, concerted and one would assume officially-sanctioned attempt on the part of the European authorities to downplay these crimes, to pretend they were minor, or were not committed at all, in the hope that the rest of us will not notice. The question is whether or not this mass evasion of the truth was co-ordinated or simply the consequence of a mindset which is at one and the same time liberal, in the modern sense, and totalitarian in a very old sense.