If Downing Street’s new fake news unit is any good, it will start by shutting itself down

The government has set up a coronavirus disinformation operation, which will quickly discover the source of the problem is the prime minister

The government has announced it is creating an official “disinformation unit” and I know, I know, your first thought will have been the same as mine, but actually, it turns out that its stated aim is to “counter” fake news, and not to spread it.

There is, apparently, a lot of disinformation, conspiracy theory and general scamming about coronavirus being spread by Russia and China, and now the situation will be monitored by a special team at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

It’s a serious problem, this. Only last week, an extraordinary, and clearly faked, video of Boris Johnson appeared online, in which he is seen giving a press conference in No 10, where he claimed to have gone into a hospital and shaken hands with coronavirus patients, even though such an event had, very obviously, never happened.

After the video went viral, thousands of people are reported to have turned up unsolicited at their local A&E, in the false belief they can immunise themselves against the virus by shaking hands with people who have got it.

Government spokespeople found themselves having to deny the prime minister had ever said these words, much to the confusion of large numbers of journalists who haven’t merely seen the video, but were actually there, in the room, when it happened.

It is hoped that the new disinformation unit will be able to act fast to rapidly rebut obviously false reports of what people have seen and heard with their own eyes and ears.

But the issue doesn’t stop there. Based entirely on anecdotal evidence, it does appear that over the weekend, fewer than 5 per cent of the population were able to ride in a taxi or get a haircut without learning as certain fact that coronavirus has been synthesised by the Chinese government in order to suppress resistance to its 5G data network, or that, actually, it’s US-led biological warfare to artificially inflate the price of drugs like Lemsip.

It is, naturally, very important that the government gets across this. Fake news, spread via social media by malignant political entities for their own nefarious ends is among the gravest problems the world faces.

Shortly before the EU referendum, for example, a Channel 4 News reporter stopped a man on the street in Barnsley, who said he would be voting for Brexit, “because it’s all about immigration. It’s not about trade, or anything like that, it’s all about immigration.”

“People from France, Germany, that’s fine,” he said. “But not Syria or Iraq or everywhere else. It’s all wrong.”

It seemed like a very strange point to make. Staying in the EU, after all, had absolutely nothing to do with immigration from Syria and Iraq. And then, a few months later – after the referendum of course – Vote Leave’s Facebook secret, highly targeted advertising campaign was made public, including the blatant, and blatantly Islamophobic lie: “The UK’s new border is with Syria and Iraq. Click here to save the NHS instead.”

Oh well. Perhaps we shouldn’t just laugh at the brass neck of it all. Leading figures from Vote Leave run the government now, and as they’re the nation’s, if not the world’s top experts on how to spread lies online, perhaps we should be grateful they’re now on our side, like the currency forgers who end up serving their prison time, then taking lucratively paid jobs designing new notes for national reserve banks – a simile that would be perfect, but for the prison time aspect, of course.

Meanwhile, Johnson has given his latest coronavirus press conference, and already it seems like the fake news unit is working.

In the latest video clip, the prime minister can be seen telling the country that everything will be fine, “if we continue to look out for one another, behave responsibly and think about others”.

No one’s possibly going to believe he could ever have said those words with a straight face, so the battle’s almost already won.