It's inconceivable that the expert political journalists who work for the Daily Express should make such an elementary error as to confuse the European Court of Human Rights with the EU. I have no doubt that its writers – if not its readers – are perfectly well aware that the Court is an entirely separate institution which has nothing to do with Britain's EU membership.

So how are we to explain the brazenly inaccurate headline on page two of Friday's Express: 'EU gives convicts in British jails right to vote'?

Every other news source in the UK managed to recognise that it was the Strasbourg court, not the EU, that made the ruling in question. So I suppose we must conclude that this was a simple slip of the Express pen which will soon be corrected.

After all, I'm sure it couldn't be, oh, I don't know, an attempt to spread further inventions about the insidious bureaucrats of Brussels interfering in our daily lives? Such inventions would surely not be in keeping with the standard of political journalism for which the Express is rightly renowned.