A hands up submission asking the officers not to shoot whilst Ferrari by name couch potato by nature smugs proud. However preened and plumped did you not think there would be snarling lions in the emperor’s Colosseum?

Boulton did however let slip a nugget of sweet truth. Cycle campaign groups (or rather their supporters) should indeed take his advice and “engage their brains”. Maybe whilst there also ask why a former London cycling “Tzar”, Andrew Gilligan, now works at a haulage lobby group which hates cycling, Russians and public transport. You have cycling Tzars but Ministers of Transport — do you see a pattern?

What Boulton has been tasked with is keeping focus on cycling and away from the motivations behind the disgusting propaganda campaign, and especially from what his organisations seek to achieve. Everything they say is a lie even when they seem to tell the truth, they don’t believe their own words, and you can’t change their minds.

In his latest hit-piece, he’s revealed himself further by transposing all the essential arguments from anti-semitism onto cycling, which seems a strange claim to make but I mean this literally and without hyperbole. It was Henry Ford that initiated the jewish holocaust with a vile hate campaign long before Hitler was cool, but don’t let Boulton be the only one learning from history. Successful strategies of old will be used again, and here the parallels are so close he even starts off contriving an association between cycle campaigners and a foreboding communism:

“Forget about zombies and North Koreans who are famously impervious to rational argument, the cyclists are coming.”

Echoing previous claims by Janet “Newscorp” Porter, Boulton would have you believe there exists some sort of cycling conspiracy to take over government. This is ridiculous and sounds like something from an Alex Jones podcast. He claims cyclists have undeserved riches, a shady cabal of influencers, and a government now pandering to their elite interests, meaning “our” British way of life is under threat. Ridiculous but intended, because his audience is dumb, and his audience is the typically average, degree holding, broadsheet reading professional. That’s probably you.