LAST week I had the immense privilege to attend a book launch. Sir Michael Morpurgo, author, former Children’s Laureate and illustrator Michael Foreman spoke about their partnership and their new book, Poppy Field; a delightful, timely narrative woven around John McCrae’s famous war poem ‘In Flanders Field’, the inspiration behind the commemorative poppy.

First published in December 1915, a mythology soon grew around its origin. John, a surgeon in the Canadian Army, performed a burial service for a close friend killed in the intense fighting at Ypres in May; he wrote the poem soon after, gazing at the burial plot with poppies blowing in the breeze, and commented to colleagues on how quickly poppies grew up around the fresh graves. Reputedly dissatisfied with the poem, he threw it away, whereupon it was picked up by a colleague who was so moved by it, he learned it off by heart and eventually persuaded John to submit it for publication.

Sir Michael Morpurgo was typically modest about his craft. ‘I’m not really a writer,’ he claimed. ‘More a storyteller. Actually, I’m really a liar. What storytellers do is take the truth and then change it a bit. And if you think we shouldn’t do that you need to take that up with Shakespeare…’

Playing fast and loose with the truth is a time honoured literary tradition – sometimes to make a good yarn even better; sometimes for the aggrandisement of the participants (to the consternation, debate and continued secure employment of subsequent generations of historians) and sometimes (and here I must throw up my hand to plead guilty) because the embellishment will raise a smile and make the narrative more appealing.

And sometimes, as in this and many of Sir Michael’s books, because weaving fact and fiction together helps the story teller create a deeper, more profound truth.

But that tradition may now be under threat. Even before the present incumbent of the White House repackaged lying as ‘alternative reality’ and peddled unsubstantiated falsehoods purely to bolster and feed the prejudice of his supporter base, the impact of false narratives was becoming problematic. To many, Rambo re-writes history and wins the Vietnam war for America (almost single-handedly); Oliver Stone’s fictional portrayal of Kennedy’s assassination in JFK, is such wonderful, convincing cinema, that it fuelled and spawned an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory between the FBI and CIA that many now believe, encouraging the unscrupulous to peddle, wilder ‘deep state’ conspiracies for political gain.

Have storytellers who knowingly take liberties with the truth, unwittingly prepared the fertile soil in which the weeds of political usurpers choke out the grain of truth on which democracy depends? Or like Poppy Field is there still a place for the deeper truth that their fiction can uncover?