The American critic, Paul Berman, wrote recently that “neocon” had become a show-stopper in upmarket liberal circles. The mere use of the word was enough to convince an audience that a man was a monster. “You should say it out loud in falsetto, as if a mouse had just run across your foot,” he explained. “Otherwise you will not have captured the right tone.”

Jon Snow is no stranger to the hitched-up skirt and high-pitched scream. It echoes through his autobiography, Shooting History. Snow tells us that he is the son of a High Tory bishop, and in my view, he retains a part of the traditional conservative’s resentment of the Americans who usurped Britain’s status as a world power and shrank the horizons of his father’s class.

In the imagination of Channel 4 News’s anchorman, neocons have attained supernatural powers. They are time travellers responsible for “overthrowing Mossadegh in 1953 and Arbenz in 1954”, even though the neoconservative movement wasn’t born until the 1970s, two decades after the liberal Republican administration of General Eisenhower organised coups in Iran and Guatemala.

They are also shape-shifters who organised the “carpet bombing of Cambodia” in 1970 and the coup in Chile against Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, which would be news to the historians who say that the man responsible for both crimes was Henry Kissinger, a “realist” who no more believed in the neocon dream of using force to spread democracy than he believed in fairies at the bottom of the garden. (He still doesn’t.)

Worst of all, they are body snatchers, who prey on gullible members of the English aristocracy. Allow me to explain.