I NEVER thought I’d say this, but I may be starting to miss the days when “spin” dominated public life.

The word entered common use in the 1990s, when the term “spin doctors” was applied to the burgeoning number of people who communicated on behalf of politicians.

John Major was prime minister when I first heard the expression, although it was most associated with the New Labour era and Tony Blair’s communications director Alastair Campbell.

Spin had been around long before the name was coined, of course. Harold Wilson’s spokesman Joe Haines and Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary Sir Bernard Ingham practised the art every bit as effectively as their successors.

But it will always conjure up the kind of brutally single-minded behaviour that was so brilliantly portrayed by Peter Capaldi as the bullying, foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker in the TV series The Thick of It.

For most of my time as a journalist and politics-follower, I’ve grumbled about spin.

We can all recall some of the worst examples. There were the reported attempts in 2002 to discredit the Paddington rail crash survivors. There was Jo Moore, a special adviser at the Department of Transport, emailing colleagues on September 11, 2001, to say it would be “good day to bury bad news”.

Perhaps most notoriously, many stomachs were turned by the manner in which evidence was presented to make a case for going to war in Iraq, or the way weapons expert Dr David Kelly became a pawn in a battle between the BBC and the government.

As political spin grew, the number of people employed to manage the news in other organisations mushroomed. The term “spin” has been used to describe communications officials in local councils, the NHS, the police and other public bodies. But those communicators are often very different.

The spin doctors of Whitehall have, generally, been nothing if not blunt. (Remember how journalists were told that Tory minister John Biffen was “semi-detached”, or that chancellor Gordon Brown was “psychologically flawed”). But in the regions, public relations departments often avoid plain speaking. They tend to shield the decision-makers from journalists’ queries, responding with statements signed off by half a dozen people and worded in the kind of English no human being ever speaks out loud.

But in national and world affairs, I think the spin practices of previous decades are losing their effectiveness. Given all that I’ve just said, you might imagine that was a good thing.

But for years, I’ve been under the illusion that if you did away with spin, what you’d get was the truth.

In fact, it turns out that the opposite of spin may not be truth, but lies.

People who spin for politicians draw the line at an outright untruth. Spin may be devious, but it has to engage with facts.

You may argue that something like the “Dodgy Dossier” produced in the run-up to the Iraq war was so partial and slanted that it was as near to lying as makes no difference. But government spokespeople caught telling untruths tend to pay a heavy price.

Compare the spin of recent times with what’s coming out of the White House now.

Was your inauguration poorly attended? Just claim the contrary, and when the photographic evidence undermines you, just complain loudly that the journalists are lying.

Facing difficult questions about your campaign’s alleged links to Russia? Make up an outlandish accusation about President Obama having your phone tapped, and ignore all calls to produce evidence.

If Donald Trump manages to rewrite the rules in the US, the same is sure to happen here. I think we’re seeing signs already.

Having decried spin, I’ve learned that sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for.