"You may have heard him say that," growled Peter Capaldi as potty-mouthed political spin doctor Malcolm Tucker during the film In The Loop, "but he did not say that, and that is a fact."
Ferrari's response to executive chairman John Elkann's comments last week was rather less direct than that of their fictional counterparts, but involved similar achievements in the field of mental gymnastics.
Elkann praised Ferrari's World Endurance Championship-winning squad, paid tribute to the mechanics, engineers and floor sweepers of its F1 team, then delivered the slap: the Formula 1 drivers "need to focus on driving and talk less". This in the context of a faltering F1 campaign in which, most recently – *checks notes* – one driver was eliminated from the Brazil Grand Prix through no fault of his own and the other was called upon to park his palpably undriveable car after sustaining damage in a first-corner fracas.
With this in mind, then, you can understand why it would require a star performance in the art of defending the indefensible.
Thus Las Vegas on a Wednesday evening was the venue for a spectacle: Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, clearly briefed up to their eyeballs, desperately trying to accentuate the positives without fluffing their lines when the subject inevitably came up.
"I'm always willing to do less media…" Hamilton's opening gambit of making a joke about it was a good idea, but sadly fell flat in the room.
"But no, seriously, I think, look," he continued, grinding the gears of verbiage somewhat rather than shifting seamlessly, "I think we all need to take responsibility in this team and we all need to play our part, and I know that there's so much passion in this team, every single member of this team.
"I'm incredibly grateful for the extraordinary effort every single person back at the factory continues to put in week on week. And naturally, knowing that the team is Ferrari, there's always a huge amount of attention, not always in a positive way, but we're all fully committed to turn this around and I'm fully committed to helping this team rebuild and grow.
"Every challenge is an opportunity for us to grow and learn and I firmly believe that we will get to where we want to be."
It was generic and had more than a hint of the kind of self-help tome you might find in an airport bookshop, but it did the job of answering the question without actually answering it, so job done.
It was Leclerc's turn next, and in this he had the disadvantage of enjoying long-established connections with Elkann, rather than merely having been recently employed by him.
"Yeah, I mean, obviously, I mean," he began in an unpromising bout of verbal wheelspin. "John and I have known each other for many, many years. We have a very good relationship and obviously we've been working together for many years.
"So we know each other and I know John is a very ambitious person and wants to push every people to the maximum in order to have the maximum results. He loves Ferrari, I love Ferrari, we all love Ferrari, and we try to do the best in every situation.
"And I didn't actually see the news. John called me before that, just like he does after every race to catch up and to also tell me that the message he wanted to send was a positive one in saying, yeah, we need to do better and that is clear for everyone. So really, we are aligned and I'll do absolutely everything in order to bring back Ferrari to the top."
Pleasing though it must have been to hear of it straight from the prancing horse's mouth, as it were, Charles was edging into "you may have heard him say that but it's not what he said" territory. And so it continued.
"John has always been very honest with me. And I think that is very rare. When you're in Formula 2, Formula 3, it's very easy to meet actually people that are honest with you. When you get to Formula 1 your status changes a little bit, it's a lot more difficult to actually find people that are honest with you.
"John has always been extremely honest with me and when he thinks I've done something wrong, or that anybody has done something wrong in the team, he will say it. And when he called me, he told me what were the intentions of his words.
"And that was very clear. It was a positive message, trying to be positive. Then whichever way it's been expressed, I cannot really comment and it's not my job to comment. But the intent was positive and that's what really matters to me."
Perhaps Elkann's swaggering dismissal of his drivers' value stems from a desire to align himself with marque founder Enzo Ferrari, who was known to view the majority of his drivers with disdainful hauteur.
"[Enzo] Ferrari's expectation of performance exerted a strong force that radiated throughout the organisation, and the drivers were not exempt from it," wrote the 1961 world champion Phil Hill. "Rather than the race being a culmination of a team effort to win, there was a feeling instead as if you, the driver, had been reluctantly entrusted with this gem of a machine, this fruit of genius, and hopefully your natural dunderheadedness would not destroy it.
"When one of us did win I sensed a certain reluctance on Ferrari's part to share the laurels with the driver, to pat him on the back and thank him for a job well done. It was more like Ferrari felt the victory was doubly his – he had not only managed to build a car that was better than all the other cars, but a car that was also good enough to foil even his driver's natural destructiveness."
But Enzo Ferrari, of course, built the company from nothing, and, crucially, times have changed. Grand prix racing has achieved a greater level of global exposure, and the words and deeds of the drivers have a longer reach.
Ferrari, and by extension Elkann, hired Hamilton because he is a seven-time world champion and commands the marketing value which accompanies this status. He remains F1's biggest star. One does not hire such a person and then subject them to a gagging order – neither would such a thing be possible in our media-saturated age.
As to Leclerc, he has had to put up with many disappointments at Ferrari, but being forced to tug his forelock to a man in a suit who ought to know better must quietly rankle.
And as to Elkann, maybe he should focus on doing what he does, and talk less?
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