Is liberalism obsolete? Has it outlived its purpose? That is what Vladimir Putin claimed in a wide-ranging interview given on the eve of the G20 summit in Japan. And as with so much that the Russian leader says, the problem is not whether he is right or wrong, but that when he is right it is for the wrong reasons.

For some years now Putin has demonstrated an ability to push his KGB-trained fingers on the very sorest parts of the Western nervous system. Russia may have lost the Cold War and spent the Putin era struggling to make up in bombast what it has lost in prestige. But precisely because Russia’s force-projection and demographics are dwindling, Putin has found a way to assume a position on the world stage vastly out of proportion to what should be his global standing.

He deranges different people in different ways. For those broadly on the Left in Western politics he has become the puppet-master supreme. Nothing Putin could ever boast of could exceed the claims made about him by those who imagine themselves his opponents.

For three years adults in Britain and America who cannot reconcile themselves to the Brexit and Trump votes have pretended that Putin is the cause of their losses. Earlier this week Nick Clegg had to appear on the BBC to absolve his new employers of complicity in the first of those votes. Of course, it is uncertain whether people will find Nick Clegg the Facebook employee any more trustworthy than Nick Clegg the Liberal Democrat leader. But he should be congratulated for one thing alone. For he is right when he says that the Brexit vote did not happen because of Russian bots on social media. It happened because the British people had for decades nurtured negative feelings about ever-closer union. Those who have insisted otherwise have not only tested everyone else’s patience, but wasted three years of their lives.