In the kitchen, officers pored over cookbooks and scrutinised his wife’s shopping list. One remarks on the footage: “Bleach, foil, gloves… Bit of an odd list, isn’t it?” It takes several minutes before they realise that she is a hairdresser, and not stockpiling bomb-making materials.

Mr Foulkes was then driven to Medway police station, booked in, fingerprinted, photographed and had his DNA taken. “I asked what I’d done,” he said. “The officer said it was for a post of ‘an extremism nature’ – that’s all I was told.”

He was held in a cell for eight hours before he was interviewed at 9pm. He said it was only in the interview, when he was finally shown a screenshot of the allegedly offensive X post from Oct 31 that he grasped how surreal the situation had become.

“Kent Police decided to interpret my post as anti-Jewish,” he said. “But it was the exact opposite. If they’d looked at the full thread, they’d have understood. It would have taken two minutes. I told them there was more to it, but they didn’t pause the interview to check.”

He denied five times that he intended to cause distress or alarm, “but that was just ignored”. He was bailed and told to return on Feb 1 last year.

He had feared neighbours would see officers seizing his computers, iPad and phones and assume the worst, saying: “I was terrified they’d think I was a paedophile.”

Above all, he feared anything that might stop him from visiting his daughter in Australia. “My life wouldn’t be worth living if I couldn’t see her,” he said. “At the time, I believed a caution wouldn’t affect travel, but a conviction definitely would.”

At his lowest point, on Nov 7 – just days after being bailed – Mr Foulkes was told to return to Medway police station on Nov 10 so a caution could be issued.

“I didn’t agree, but I felt I had no choice,” he said. “In hindsight, it would never have gone to court. The CPS wouldn’t touch it with no evidence. But I wasn’t thinking logically at the time.”