I got a tweet this morning from, as far as I can tell, a youngish man who seemed axeless to me. He had been watching Sir John Major at the Leveson Inquiry and had a question that perhaps a greybeard like me might be able to answer. “Finding Sir John v impressive and sincere,” he wrote, “Why has the press for years told me he was useless & incompetent?”

Well, precisely. It’s hard to know when the business of “monstering” (as opposed to criticising) public figures began. Major was not an idiot, everything he did was not useless, indeed his most substantial crime was probably to win an election that most people thought that he and his party really should lose.

He was, it is true, thin-skinned. He was the boss when the European Exchange Rate Mechanism debacle took place. It was on his watch that the Tory Eurosceptics became rebellious. But he was also a decent man, who was partly responsible for starting the Northern Ireland peace process.

Yet he was universally depicted as useless, ineffectual and boring.

Nor can this caricature be somehow ascribed only to the tabloid press (despite Kelvin McKenzie’s much repeated and self-serving anecdote about the “bucket of shit”). As Hugo Rifkind wrote in The Times this morning (£), this kind of modern monstering happened “because it was fun, because it was just so damn easy, because a mindless sort of group-think took hold and ordinary humanity flew out the window”. Ditto England managers, by the way.

And let’s not imagine that the people on media like Twitter, who today castigate the tabloids, are not also the children of the monster culture. They too enjoy group-think at the expense of their own chosen victims.

Twitter: @DAaronovitch