And so to nominative determinism news and the curious case that made its way to court last week between crisp manufacturer Walkers and the taxman.

The dispute in question centred on their Sensations Poppadoms brand and whether said snack was a crisp or a poppadom.

This might sound a small point, but financially such definitions are big business. If you can prove to the taxman that your product falls into a particular food category, then you find yourself exempt from VAT.

Older readers may remember a column I wrote a couple of years ago about the case of the humble flapjack, which was the subject of the classic ‘cake or biscuit?’ debate for similar reasons: even older readers may remember the 1991 case when McVities successfully argued a Jaffa Cake was a cake and avoided tax accordingly.

Back in crispworld, the Walkers gambit also has precedent.

In 2008, Pringles successfully convinced a judge that given they contained less that 50 per cent potato matter, they weren’t technically crisps (a year later, the taxman had this ruling overturned, costing Pringles an estimate £100 million).

Walkers went high rather than low in their argument, positing that their Poppadoms were essentially restaurant food, and designed to be eaten ‘with dips, chutneys and pickles’.

The judge in question, Anne Fairpo, gave Walkers short shrift. ‘Nominative determinism is not a characteristic of snack foods,’ she ruled, pointing out that ‘Calling a snack food ‘Hula Hoops’ does not mean that one could twirl that product around one’s midriff’. Ergo, just because Walkers call their snack Poppadoms doesn’t actually mean they are poppadoms.

Judge Fairpo’s ruling was specifically on snack foods, but has broader implications.

Because increasingly in public life, there is a trend for people to argue that if they say something is the case, then it is.

This was the logic in Rishi Sunak’s risible Rwanda bill, which got round the Supreme Court’s ruling that Rwanda wasn’t a safe country by passing a law to say that Rwanda was a safe country, and that was the end of the argument.

This week, the Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer has been doing the media rounds claiming that the BBC is biased.

In one excruciating exchange on Sky News, she failed to understand the difference between the perception of BBC being biased (which has gone up) and any evidence that the BBC actually is biased (of which she failed to give a single example).

Frazer’s reasoning appeared to be that because some people think the BBC is biased, then it actually is.

Like Walkers’ Poppadom defence, Frazer’s arguments about bias were Poppadoomed the moment they came up against reality. As the popular internet meme puts it, damn those pesky facts.