We remember the strutting.

No one gives two shits about history. One way or the other we all die. If we are rich enough for long enough we can buy the opinions that we want and flip the rest of you sad sacks the bird while we are it. That, at least, is the simple calculus of the simple-minded about the risk/reward of being a total ass. Or the I-won't-leave-my-people-still-need-me kind of president. That means you, man with many cows. That means you too, man with football pitch at his official residence.

Before we could store memories in ones-and-zeroes, we had journals, diaries and the newspaper morgue, where microfiches of the more modern-minded, reminded us mere mortals of what had come to pass in the annals of our history, the microfiche being the annals of our history. The Professor's twenty four years and his predecessors fifteen can be relieved in microfiche and, on that rare occasion, in long-player vinyl and scratchy 8mm film. The Professor's successors came around just when memory-making and memory-storage were becoming more and more affordable and everything we didn't need Right Now could be kept in the cloud.

Perfidy is more difficult to hide. So too are autocratic tendencies, iniquity, inequity. What one says shall live on forever in the digital ether; nothing is ever truly erased. We don't need newspaper morgues; with enough bits we can create a morgue of our own to serve our own purposes. Whatever the reason, the amount of fluff we pump out into the universe is going to be preserved, in ones-and-zeroes, for all eternity. Which means it can be retrieved at lightning speed too.

And that is why the ones with the need for us to forget their greatest hits, so to speak, are going out of their way to create new, immediate positive images of themselves that they then incessantly replay on all platforms. This is an attempt to makes us concentrate, pigeon-like, on the immediate and ignore the long-forgotten. None of them wants us to scour the preceding decade in search of the One Clue that can explain their sudden ingratiating ass-licking. And there is a generation of young people, coddled by one and all, that will indulge all this avid brownnosing - their noses are buried in their smartphones and tablets, their minds have been imprisoned in "social" media and their intellect has been captured by the I-am-a-socialite creed.

We may not wield burning torches and pitchforks, but let there be no doubt that those of us with long memories have not forgotten that which would wish to remain long-forgotten. We remember the shame of it all. We remember the humiliation. We remember how they strutted. We remember how they found a friendly Frenchman to sanitise their reputations. So their current efforts to rewrite the past will remain unsuccessful. No one lives forever; their words will hunt their descendants for all eternity.