‘She’s produced a bestseller!” panted the Spectator. “Liz Truss’s new book has been out for less than 72 hours and it’s already sold out on Amazon.” Thus began the fairly widespread British media hallucination that the 45-day PM was once more igniting the nation with her 2024 book Ten Years to Save the West. In the end, Truss’s book sold 2,228 copies in the UK in its first week, which placed it at No 70 in the “bestseller” charts . The next week it had fallen back to 223, comfortably obliterated by any number of cookbooks, novels, self-help titles and sticker books, none of which had enjoyed anything like its level of publicity. You hear a lot about AI hallucinations, but rather less about the hallucinations suffered by journalists all on their own.

So, then, to the furore over the academic/recent Reform candidate Matt Goodwin’s new book, which I find at least as high-stakes for our culture as that courtroom battle between Gwyneth Paltrow and the – I think? – retired optometrist who accidentally skied into her.

Goodwin has self-published a book called Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, and the political writer Andy Twelves has made his case that the book is likely AI-assisted, given that it contains various imaginary quotes from philosophers and ChatGPT links in some footnotes and so on. One of them challenged the other to a debate on GB News, which was very much won by Twelves. But also by Goodwin, given we live in a post-shame political culture and you really could not buy this level of publicity for a sub-mediocre nonfiction book in its week of........

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