Has the Vote Leave campaign been hijacked by racists in the aftermath of the referendum? That’s certainly the impression you get from reading about the volume of racist incidents since last Friday – an Asian BBC presenter being called a “P–––” in Basingstoke, a Muslim woman in Birmingham being cornered by young white men and told, “Get out, we voted Leave.”

Reports of hate crimes increased 57 per cent between Thursday and Sunday compared to the corresponding days four weeks ago, according to the National Police Chiefs' Council.

At first, I treated these stories with a degree of scepticism. They seemed to be part of a narrative that characterised those who’d voted for Brexit as knuckle-dragging troglodytes when, according to ComRes, twice as many Leave voters cited sovereignty as the most important issue (53 per cent) than immigration (34 per cent).

One of the accusations made repeatedly by the Remainers during the campaign is that the leaders of the Leave campaign had let the genie of nationalism out of the bottle and once out it would be impossible to control.

These reports of racist incidents struck me as just one more example of the Remainers gleefully holding up “proof” that all their apocalyptic doom-mongering had come true. “Not so much Project Fear as Project Massive Understatement,” said the Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron on Friday morning.