On 20 July, Marcus Rashford tweeted that he had heard the Spectator was ‘planning to run a story on me tomorrow about how I have benefitted commercially in the last 18 months’. He made it clear that he had not in fact made any money from his campaigns to provide children with food, books and shelter. The article never appeared in the Spectator. On 5 August, the comedian Dannie Grufferty revealed she was the source of the bogus story, and had spent months fooling the magazine into almost running it.

After regaling them with the story of how he fell for an elaborate hoax at the hands of one of the actors in Copenhagen, Michael Frayn told an audience at the Edinburgh Book Festival yesterday that there's a seven-word private joke hidden in his latest novel, Skios. He'll send a bottle of champagne to the first person to spot it. 'All you need to have done to understand it is have read my complete works – my 10 novels and 15 plays,' he said, apparently without feeling the need to add that they're available at all good bookshops.