When Martin Forde’s report on the Labour Party’s internal culture finally saw the light of day on Tuesday, the reaction from supporters of the movement that developed around Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was mixed. On the one hand, it was a relief to discover that Forde had not delivered an egregious whitewash.

If he had done so, there would have been no pushback from any important section of the British media or its political class, so we could not take anything for granted. Forde’s willingness to state the facts on several key points was a positive intervention in a discursive field shaped above all by contempt for the “reality-based community,” as a George W. Bush administration official once derisively called it.

On the other hand, the gravitational pull of conventional wisdom on the subject of the Labour Party is so great that it would take more than a lawyer’s report to escape its orbit. Keir Starmer’s leadership team, granted the privilege of anonymity by its embedded reporters, simply lied about the contents of the report, while liberal media outlets ignored all its most significant findings.