“She favours Ottolenghi cookbooks, likes walking holidays, goes to church,” wrote Clare Foges in The Times this week about the new Prime Minister, Theresa May. “This is fine – but no more, please. The prime ministerial sphinx should stay that way, guarding her secrets.”

That is an unusual approach to take to a public figure these days. It would have sounded fogeyish in a courtier attempting to preserve the magic of the monarchy before its exposure by the television film Royal Family in 1969. But today we know more about Clare Foges than about Theresa May. Clare Foges was called, not as a sphinx, but a larynx, “the Prime Minister’s larynx” to be precise, having been a speechwriter for David Cameron. The story goes that Mr Cameron spent 40 minutes in a tête-à-tête with Mrs May before the late referendum, to educe her opinions on the European Union. He emerged none the wiser.

Checking a fact on Theresa May recently I clicked on her Wikipedia entry and found that the second citation of sources was to something I had written about her. I don’t say that this utterly undermines confidence in Wikipedia, but it didn’t get me much further. It is true, though,? that I’d unscrambled an error that Desert Island Discs had made when Mrs May was a castaway, in 2014.