Before we explore the shortcomings of Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej's memory, we have to concede that not many of us have a particularly strong handle on reality.   

70-80% of drivers are convinced that they are ‘above average'.  This includes people who have to be extricated from the mangled wrecks of their own making in order to give that opinion. Even more incredibly, it also includes Volvo drivers.  And 25% of Americans fondly believe they belong to the richest 5% of the population.   

In a well-known psychological experiment, subjects are asked to press buttons to see if they can control a light bulb.  Normal people will, after a few minutes of this, be convinced they are in control, or at least they will be with a few more goes.  In fact the light bulb is controlled by a heartless, unsympathetic computer.  The subjects have no control at all.  They are just fooling themselves. 

Interestingly, depressed people who have taken part in this kind of experiment seem more likely to decide, quite correctly, that they are not in control.  This has given rise to the disputed theory of ‘depressive realism'.  This is a bizarrely reassuring idea.  Mr Average views the world through self-serving rose-tinted spectacles, so that's alright then, even when it's not.  Old Misery Guts, on the other hand, can take comfort in the fact that most other people are wrong and it will definitely rain before morning.  Or at least go dark. 

Now these perverted perceptions of reality are relatively easy to identify, and so you can just as easily discount them.  The general rule is to say, and believe, honestly and truly, that you yourself are better, more capable, more resourceful, more moral, more hard-working, more intelligent, more gifted, more sympathetic, more insightful ... Have I missed anything?  Oh yes, and infinitely more modest than you have any real right to claim.   

Any CV in support of a job application will prove my point.  And every personnel manager knows full well how to read between the self-aggrandizing lines.   

But our more disinterested perceptions of reality are also on very shaky grounds.  Police officers are well aware of how much witness statements about the same incident can differ from each other.  And the psychologists have again proved how easily our perceptions can be manipulated. 

After watching a film of a traffic accident, in which no white vehicle of any description was involved, subjects were asked one of two questions.  ‘Did you see a white car?' doesn't get many takers.  But the subtly different question, ‘Did you see the white car?', seems to jog a few non-existent memories and suddenly people will testify, in good faith, to what never happened. 

So the question we must ask today is whether the passage of time and the slow death and decay of his grey cells has led Samak to his bizarre statement that only one ‘unlucky' student does on Oct 6, 1976.   

Or do we have a PM with a penchant for telling porkies? 

Deluded or deceitful?  Muddle-minded or malevolent? 

The omens are not good.  For a start, there is documentary evidence that Samak once said something else.  Now 40-odd deaths may still be a wild underestimate, but that was the official count at the time, and Samak was part of officialdom and that's what he said then. 

Then there are his statements since he was called on his howler.  First he claims that Abhisit is too young, wasn't there, and so how can he know any different?  And another plank of Samak's defence is that well, he only saw one corpse, so he assumed that was it.  If you don't see it, you can't know, and if I don't see it, it never happened.   

This somewhat limited epistemological methodology makes the study of any history older than living memory a bit of a non-starter.   

But the kind of history the rest of are prepared to accept is littered with examples of delusional egomaniacs.  Hitler marshalling the defence of Berlin in 1945 with non-existent regiments springs to mind.  And just this past week, Mohamed Al Fayed claimed Prince Philip was a Nazi from Germany (and there was I thinking he was sailor from Greece) and a BBC reporter who asked the wrong question was ‘an idiot from MI6'. 

Problem is, Al Fayed runs nothing more demanding than a department store and a poor to middling premier league team.  Nobody's asked him to run a country.