In 2002, as a fourteen-year-old living in my south Wales hometown of Newport, I walked the same route every day after school: past the local army barracks and through the city center, which was decorated in mosaic murals showing the Chartist uprising in 1839, the last and largest armed rebellion of working men demanding the vote. My journey ended at the cenotaph, where a group of people, young and old, stood with placards waving at drivers and handing out leaflets to passersby about the impending Iraq War.

The vast majority of people we met, my teachers and friends at school, my family and coworkers, opposed the war. Public opinion polling showed much the same.

But the media were baying for blood. Merrily and credulously adopting the New Labour line, with Tony Blair’s notorious media handler Alastair Campbell acting as enforcer, newspapers claimed Saddam Hussein and his regime in Baghdad could launch a missile strike within forty-five minutes. This was an assertion that felt flatly false to people reading the headlines — but seemingly not to editors, most of whom were from posh schools and families a world away from working-class Britain.