More troubling is the story of the play Perdition. Written by his long-time collaborator, Jim Allen (Loach calls him “a wonderful socialist”), the play was to be directed at the Royal Court by Loach but was cancelled because of accusations of bias and anti-Semitism. It was based on a libel action concerning the alleged collaboration between the wartime Zionist leadership in Hungary and the Nazis. Loach passionately defended the play and later wrote to the Guardian that “the charge of anti-Semitism” against Allen’s play was “the time-honoured way to deflect anti-Zionist arguments”. 

Loach has been an obsessive critic of Israel and has called for an “absolute boycott of all the cultural happenings supported by the Israeli state”. He told an interviewer last year: “Israel is breaking international law, the Geneva Conventions, stealing land that belongs to another people and making the lives of the Palestinians intolerable.”

A passionate supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, he has been accused of being evasive about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. The Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland quoted Loach as saying, “It’s funny these stories suddenly appeared when Jeremy Corbyn became leader, isn’t it?” Writing on the Jewish Voice for Labour website, Loach called this “cynical journalism”. A year later, his response looks even worse.   

And yet despite all this, the more left-wing and partisan his films are, the more prizes he wins.  This tells us more about those who give out European film awards than it does about the quality of Loach’s work. It is simply inconceivable that a conservative film-maker would have received the same kind of acclaim. Loach has supported the poor and the oppressed, but these were always fashionable causes in British television in the 1960s and ‘70s and have become increasingly popular among European film juries.

The telling gap, though, is between the numbers who go to see Loach’s films and the number of prizes he wins. The Wind That Shakes the Barley, his biggest box office success to date, grossed barely £5 million in the UK, I, Daniel Blake little more than £3 million. In the US the figures are even worse. This tells a larger story about left-wing cultural figures. They are hugely popular among critics and prize juries, less so among viewers. Perhaps we should ask the heretical question: does the public rate Ken Loach more accurately than critics and prize juries?