The Telegraph’s Helen Brown is an arts writer – music and film reviews, interviews with comedians, directors and ballet choreographers, write-ups of new documentaries. Geopolitics is not her bag.

So when she was asked if she had written a potentially libellous story about Volodymyr Zelensky, she was first bemused, then perturbed.

“I was a bit like, what? And I was in the middle of a field with the dog. The dog was still playing with some dogs she didn’t know. And I was like, ‘I’m a freelancer’, you know? I’m a self-employed arts journalist”, she said.

She squinted at the screen to see the “incriminating” story, dog lead in one hand, phone in the other. The text was too small to make out the author’s picture. “I got back and had a proper look and, oh my goodness, there I was – good grief – in some mashed-together London Evening Standard with the Daily Telegraph.”

Helen’s byline photo – an old one, lifted from her Twitter profile – sat under a headline claiming that Volodymyr Zelensky had been caught in a billion-dollar corruption scheme, a subject she had never written about. The byline was Charlotte Davies, a name she had never heard. And the host website was so shoddy “my kids could have done a better job.”