IN 1917, after listening to an account of fighting on the western front, prime minister Lloyd George is reported to have said: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know.”

Eighty years later and a similar quote from a “senior official” was included in a book published by the Establishment think tank Chatham House: “Much of our foreign policy is conducted on the sly for fear that it would raise hackles at home if people knew what we were pushing for.”

The government camouflages the reality of British foreign policy in a variety of ways, including blunt censorship by the British military in war zones, “requests” to edit reporting by issuing D-notices, the favouring of particular journalists and likely most important, the normalisation of policy discussion and decision making that excludes the general public — an arrangement largely taken for granted by the media.