Statesmen sometimes need some whoopingly big lies to justify to themselves and their followers actions which they contemplate.

Cycling's complex etiquette contains an unwritten rule that riders in contention for a race win should not be penalised for sheer misfortune.

Leo Messi scored a first-half hat-trick to give Barcelona a 3-1 advantage vs Arsenal.

The apparent contradictions in his behaviour should therefore be discounted as ingenuous attempts to extricate himself from the consequences of an intellectual position which he once adopted but was never really his by intimate conviction.