Ten years ago, sitting at the back of a press conference in Wellington, my shake of the head and snort of contempt at the propaganda being spouted from the podium prompted a nudge from my right hand side.

Not having noticed that someone had taken that seat I spun round, look of derision still affixed, to be greeted by what is perhaps fancifully remembered as a rather sheepish smile from the bloke I considered responsible, one Alastair Campbell.

Four days earlier, in the wake of the British & Irish Lions having been thrashed by the All Blacks in the opening Test but, thanks to the time difference, before the vast majority of copy had been filed, the spin king had raced to the main media hotel with Clive Woodward, the coach, to raise an issue that shifted attention away from the result.

Campbell, newly stepped down from helping Tony Blair through a couple of elections and the war on Iraq, had been recruited specifically for this type of contingency as Woodward who, if memory serves, had been pretty critical of then head coach Graham Henry’s efforts on the previous tour when the Lions lost the series 2-1 to Australia, sought to ensure his back was covered.

They were there to focus attention on how tour captain Brian O’Driscoll had suffered his shoulder injury and invite the conclusion that it had been brought about in shameful fashion. “Spear-gate” was born.

The video evidence was, to say the least, inconclusive, while Tana Umaga, accused along with Keven Mealamu of being one of the perpetrators, seemed particularly unlikely to have behaved so cynically. Yet the vast majority of the British and Irish media more than enthusiastically took the populist line they had been invited to pursue for their audiences back home.

If Umaga and Mealamu were guilty of anything it was of a similarly careless clear-out to the one that has seen Ross Ford and Jonny Gray banned from the rest of this World Cup. The key difference is that the video clip that has now been widely distributed, is very clear in the case of the two Scots.

Any accusation of malice aforethought would be as unconvincing now as it was in the New Zealand winter of 2005, but this time there can be no doubt that Jack Lam’s legs were raised above his hips and he was allowed to land face first in a way that, had accidental pressure been applied from either another opponent or a team-mate, could have had appalling consequences.

Was their offence worthy of a three week ban? That very much depends on how determined rugby’s authorities are to eradicate this type of clear-out.

However those now up in arms are likely to be rugby watchers who took more than a passing interest in the Lions tour of 2005 so it seems reasonable to suggest that only the few who can place hand on heart and say they were unhappy about the way the Lions repeatedly spun that tale of woe are entitled to express concerns about the fate of Ford and Gray.

There have, in that context, been many more references to what happened to O’Driscoll in 2005 being a ‘spear tackle’ than there has been criticism of the public relations tactics employed by the Lions management. In any case they may also want to consider that while the ploy may temporarily have distracted from the scale of a humbling defeat while applying pressure to the opposition captain, it had little effect as the Lions lost a series 3-0 for the first time since the early eighties.

The outcome of any appeals apart, then, all that is left is to hope that rather than linger too long on any sense of grievance Scotland regroup and do better without their former and future captains than the Lions managed to when their skipper was removed from the fray all those years ago.