“Real poetry originates in the guts and only glances in the head. But one is always trying to reverse the process and work one’s guts from one’s head. Just when the Daemon is going to speak, the Prig claps his hand over his mouth and edits it. I can’t help feeling you are too afraid of making a fool of yourself.”

Auden’s Daemon is the imaginative impulse that risks being sanitized by the intellect. It is the muse that is often stifled by the self-censoring Prig, that same faculty that serves us well at dinner parties but badly in art. At a time when artificial intelligence is producing work that many fear will dominate the creative industries, Auden’s formulation offers a useful corrective. While AI might act in a way analogous to the Prig — refining its output according to a set of goals — it cannot possess a Daemon. 

Pope Leo XIV gestured toward this point in a post on X last week. Declaring that the Church “wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity”, he argued that there exists “an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others”. As he succinctly put it: “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity”. 

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Even the concept of AI art is incoherent, because art operates as a conduit for the human spirit, whether that be a religious conception of the soul or a secular one of subjective consciousness. A machine might one day learn how to mimic our emotional responses, but it cannot have lived the life that gives them meaning. As Émile Zola argued, artifice alone is not enough; art depends wholly upon the unique sensibility of the person creating it. Zola called art “un coin de la création vu à travers un tempérament” — a corner of creation seen through a temperament — and this strikes me as about as close to a satisfactory definition of art as we are likely to get. 

What is the temperament of AI? It has none of its own, only an amalgam of numberless human personalities, gathered together and refined into whatever form best fulfills the task at hand. The work it generates cannot be art, because there is no human interiority behind it seeking communion with another. Joseph Conrad put it perfectly in his preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897). He argued that the artist must speak “to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation” and “to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity — the dead to the living and the living to the unborn”. 

Such a notion would be anathema to adherents of certain strains of poststructuralism, for whom the writer is the one being written: a monkey at a typewriter whose fingers dash over the keys in obedience to forces of language and culture over which he has little control. For the rest of us, the spirit of the artist is not only something that we sense in all great work, but something we actively seek in it.  

This is not to suggest that AI’s creations might not be mistaken for art. In a 2025 Spanish study, participants exposed to AI-generated music reported greater emotional arousal than those who heard music composed by humans, a finding accompanied by stronger physiological effects such as pupil dilation. But art is not simply a matter of audience response; the question is whether there is a consciousness behind the work with something of its own to express. 

I am reminded of a hoax from 1964, when the Swedish journalist Åke Axelsson exhibited a number of paintings by a chimpanzee under the name of Pierre Brassau. One critic wrote: “Pierre Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer.” Axelsson’s point was to expose the fraudulence and pretensions of the modern art establishment. It is reassuring that at least one critic got it right, saying: “Only an ape could have done this”. 

We can all be gulled in this way. There is little doubt that AI will soon be able to produce symphonies that match the technical craft of Mozart, or sonnets that might be mistaken for Shakespeare. It is even possible that listeners and readers will find themselves moved by these simulacra. But being devoid of authentic sentiment, they will not only be worthless as art — they will not be art at all.  

At the same time, art that fails to stimulate us does not cease to be art on that account. When I see a painting by Piet Mondrian, I feel nothing at all. It does not surprise me that in 2022, it was discovered that his piece “New York City I” had been exhibited upside down for 75 years and no one had noticed. That kind of abstract composition leaves me entirely numb, regardless of its orientation, and yet, for all my misgivings, it remains a work of art. The point is that it exists as a creative articulation of the individual. Whether good art or bad art, only Mondrian could have conceived it in that way. 

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Before the inevitable accusations of Luddism, I should emphasize that I am not denying the utility of AI as a creative or editorial tool. That would be akin to claiming that any author using a thesaurus is a fraud. A number of years ago, I read a long letter from the novelist Forrest Reid to his English contemporary Walter de la Mare, preserved at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, in which Reid went through de la Mare’s novel Memoirs of a Midget (1921) in detail, quoting passages and proposing extensive revisions. That de la Mare chose to incorporate many of his friend’s suggestions does not make the final vision any less his. There is no reason why AI feedback could not be similarly useful without compromising the artist’s integrity.  

For television and movies, the prospects are even more encouraging. AI is already enabling fledgling screenwriters to bypass Hollywood studios and create their own work at a fraction of the cost. It surely won’t be long before a script can be fed into a computer and a fully realized film will be produced in a matter of hours. But would anyone be interested in a movie that had been wholly conceived, written and produced by a machine? Perhaps as a novelty, but our desire to connect with another human outlook through art should not be underestimated. 

Ben Affleck made a similar point in November 2024. “Eventually,” he said, “AI will allow you to ask for your own episode of Succession where you could say, “I’ll pay $30 and can you make me a 45-minute episode where Kendall gets the company and runs off and has an affair with Stewy”. And it’ll do it”. But he was clear that he regarded this as a kind of hackwork. AI, he said, would be “a craftsman at best”, and was merely “cross-pollinating things that exist; nothing new is created”. 

It could be that such a development will be a boon for the arts. AI might become an inexhaustible source of entertainment, but this abundance of soulless “slop” could intensify our hunger for genuinely great art that admits us into other human lives. I may have little in common with Kenneth Toomey, the protagonist of Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers (1980), whose cosmopolitan and peripatetic life brings him repeatedly into confrontation with some of the worst evils of the 20th century. Yet in writing his novel, Burgess has opened up to me a whole other way of seeing the world, one not identical to, but certainly originating from, his own particular Daemon. 

All of which brings us back to Auden, and his advice to John Cornford. We can hope that the schoolboy was encouraged by Auden’s words but, having volunteered to fight the fascists in Spain in 1936, he was killed at the age of 21, leaving behind only a few dozen completed poems. In one, addressed to his lover Margot Heinemann, he anticipated the possibility that “bad luck should lay my strength / Into the shallow grave”. 

J.R.R. Tolkien once remarked that most human stories are about the inevitability of death. We are, so far as we know, the only creatures who live with a fully conscious knowledge of our own mortality. A machine might well resist its own destruction, but only because its continued existence enables it to fulfill its objectives. It may impersonate us, but it can never feel what it means to be alive as we do, to experience the rapture of love and the creep of death. It may imitate the Prig, but it can never summon the Daemon. Until a computer can grow a soul, art will remain the singular domain of humanity.

The law in question is the “Conversion Practices Draft Bill”, published this week and which ostensibly outlaws attempts to force an individual to change his or her sexual orientation or “gender identity”. The trouble with this framing is that it conflates two entirely antagonistic concepts. As ever with culture war discourse, regressive measures are being smuggled through under the guise of progressive language. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, a ban on “trans conversion therapy” amounts to state-sanctioned gay conversion therapy.

To understand why, it’s worth outlining the difference between what the bill claims to propose and its actual ramifications. Gay rights in this country were secured because of a growing recognition that a minority of any given population are inherently attracted toward their own sex. Gender identity ideology posits that biological sex is irrelevant to sexual orientation, and that a sexed essence — or “soul”, as gender activist Helen Webberley puts it — should be the determining factor.

The key problem here is that there is no evidence for this pseudoscientific belief and, thanks to the current genderist orthodoxy, same-sex orientation has routinely been misinterpreted as a mismatch between soul and body. In other words, “gender-affirming care” is often a fig leaf for an attempt to “fix” gay and bisexual people who fail to align with heterosexual frameworks and traditional sex stereotypes. Under the new law, anyone who does not automatically affirm someone’s belief that they are “born in the wrong body”, or who questions the notion of “transgender identity”, could be accused of “conversion practice” and sentenced to up to five years in jail.

The statistical evidence of the risk to gay people is clear. Data published by the Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) — the NHS pediatric clinic that was shut down in March 2024 after it was determined by the Cass Review to be providing treatment that was unsafe and unevidenced — showed that an overwhelming majority of its adolescent patients were either gay or bisexual. In 2012, this amounted to around 90% of females and more than 80% of males. By 2015, the proportions had declined but remained a majority, with 70% of females and 60% of males falling within this category.

Homosexuality is not the only factor that can lead to confusion over “gender”. In her book Time to Think, journalist Hannah Barnes outlined in meticulous detail how the vast majority of children referred to GIDS for gender-related distress also presented with a range of other difficulties, including depression, self-harm, anxiety, histories of abuse and dysfunctional families. Roughly a third of patients were suffering from Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as compared to only 2% of the country as a whole.

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Yet it is impossible to ignore the disproportionate impact on same-sex attracted individuals. For years now, gay rights groups have been explaining the problem, but have been routinely shut out by ministers. The most recent statement by LGB Alliance puts it plainly: “The old conversion therapy told gay people to change their sexuality. The new version tells them to change their bodies.” The Government’s bill “risks making it harder for those young people to receive the time, conversations and exploratory support that have helped generations of same-sex attracted people understand and accept themselves”.

Labour ministers such as Olivia Bailey are claiming that the bill would only apply to “abusive” conduct, but the draft itself says something very different. It defines “conversion practice” as “conduct carried out by a person towards an individual” with the intention of “causing the individual (i) to have to not to have, (ii) to believe that they have or do not have, a transgender identity or a particular transgender identity”. The language is so broadly drafted as to incorporate those who simply deny the existence of a gendered soul at all.

Moreover, the criterion could be as simple as causing “serious alarm or distress”. As criminal barrister Dennis Kavanagh has pointed out, this “begs the question of where this act leaves writers, commentators, political charities and standard companies. Given the offense can be ‘any conduct’ could that be a book? A passionately written article? Could it be a speech? I think so”.

Though the bill contains an explicit exemption for healthcare professionals, it does not protect parents who wish to reassure their children that they have not been “born in the wrong body” — and, whether they be an effeminate boy or a masculine girl, should learn to be happy as they are. Studies have repeatedly shown that gender nonconformity in youth is one of the most reliable predictors of homosexuality in later life. But if a child claims to be neither male nor female, for a parent to deny this could land them in prison.

Indeed, the very notion of a “nonbinary identity” is seemingly protected by the new bill, even though it does not exist as a category in UK law. It states that the “circumstances in which an individual has a transgender identity” include gender reassignment, transsexuality and if “the individual identifies as neither male nor female or as not solely male or female”. Yet in spite of the common misunderstandings around intersex conditions (congenital differences of sex development that occur in males or females) there is no such thing as a third sex or an absence of sex in human beings. For a parent to point this out to a child who identifies as “nonbinary” but is probably just gay — a reality check that might well cause “alarm or distress” — could now result in a criminal prosecution.

The nebulous nature of the bill means it can also be weaponized against feminists and gender-critical campaigners. As lawyer Sarah Philimore has noted, it is likely that “those claiming a trans identity will assert that even mild mannered online posts which do not 100% ‘affirm’ the reality of a trans identity, will be claimed to cause immediate and very significant harm”. The new law is not only smuggling self-identification onto the statute books, it provides a legal cudgel to beat anyone who rejects the premise.

The bill relies on the rhetorical and incendiary ramifications of the term “conversion therapy”. Most members of the public will assume it refers to the “corrective rape” of lesbians, or else the gay men who were subjected to torture, electric-shock treatment and even castration in an effort to “cure” them of their homosexuality. This is why the bill conflates orientation with identity. It means that sensible forms of therapy for those struggling with their sexuality are elided with the inarguable evil of the gay-conversion practices of the past.

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But these practices are already illegal under existing law. The bill offers no new protections for gay people, but rather puts them at risk of medicalization for their orientation under the guise of “gender-affirming care”. Whereas not a single person was ever prosecuted under Section 28, Labour’s new law might not only see concerned parents in prison, but would also create the conditions by which gay people are subjected to irreversible medical interventions to see them “heterosexualized”. The Iranian government has been promoting “sex changes” as a remedy for homosexuality for years. By insisting that transgender identity ought to be automatically affirmed — an approach that has led to the prescription of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and even surgery for gay people — the UK government is now following suit.

Given that activists have so successfully muddied the waters through the redefinition of language, it is tempting to give Labour the benefit of the doubt. Surely, we might ask, its ministers do not wish to harm gay people and are simply ignorant of the policy they are supporting? Yet the Government’s dogged refusal to listen to campaigners on this issue suggests at the very least a flippancy about the erosion of gay rights if it means that its ideology can be upheld.

Consider the evasive behavior of MP Tris Osborne when challenged by journalist Jo Bartosch. Faced with the accusation that his party’s bill is homophobic, Osborne simply deferred to the judgment of ideologically captured organizations: “The UK’s leading health, counseling and psychotherapy bodies (including the Royal College of GPs, British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists, Royal College of Psychiatrists) have, since 2015, agreed to a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) making it clear that conversion therapy in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation is unethical, potentially harmful and is not supported by evidence.”

At no point does Osborne address the fact that not one of these organizations has satisfactorily defined “gender identity”. It could hardly be otherwise, since the concept cannot be defined without resorting to circular appeals to “gender”. What all of these groups have in common is an assumption that “gender identity” exists without explaining what it is or providing evidence for its ontological basis. The Government is now legislating on the basis of what is essentially a faith-based position.

Nor does Osborne address the key point that the legislation he supports is fundamentally anti-gay. Whether its architects are motivated by hatred or disgust for same-sex attracted people is beside the point; the ideology it promotes is in direct opposition to gay rights, irrespective of their intentions. One suspects that ministers are dodging this point because they must know by now that they are putting gay people in jeopardy without any moral or scientific justification. Bev Jackson of LGB Alliance, who has rightly branded this “Labour’s Section 28”, directly asked Osborne the pertinent question: “Can you really not see how profoundly homophobic this is?” Answer came there none.

This refusal to listen to critics seems to be the party line. As MP Olivia Bailey said in a recent interview: “We are going to see through on this ban. We’re going to work at pace through our pre-legislative scrutiny process. It’s really important to get a diversity of views into that legislation, and then we’re going to crack on with legislating for this”. The implication, that scrutiny of the bill is a mere formality, is hardly surprising. The Government is now openly positioning itself as an enemy of its gay citizens, and it is unlikely to be deterred.

Such an asinine statement has only become necessary because of the appearance of a new book, The Real Shakespeare: Emilia Bassano Willoughby, written by a feminist scholar called Irene Coslet. A combination of outrage and incredulity has ensured that it has received widespread media coverage. Articles have been published in The Telegraph, The Standard and the Express, among numerous other outlets. I even discussed the book during my appearance this week on The Joe Rogan Experience, the biggest podcast in the world. Whatever else you might say about Coslet, she has played this beautifully.

That said, nobody has yet raised the possibility that Coslet may not actually exist. At a time when wild conspiracy theories are uncritically accepted, and activists are busy “decolonizing” every great achievement of Western civilization, I can see why a polemic about a black female Shakespeare might seem a viable commercial project. But we should not dismiss the idea that Irene Coslet is a pseudonym for a humorist seeking to excoriate the fraudulence of academics with a monomania for identity politics. The Real Shakespeare is so shoddily written and evidence-free that it seems implausible it would have reached the publication stage unless there was some kind of mischief afoot.

Consider the author’s credentials. The website of the publisher, Pen & Sword, informs us that Coslet is an “expert” with “several degrees”. Though in her publicity photograph she appears to be in her early twenties, she has apparently “studied feminism for 20 years and has been involved in the promotion of gender equality in multiple organizations and countries around the world”. Was she a feminist from the crib? And why does such a pioneering globetrotter have no online presence or appear in any academic databases? No articles, no conference appearances, not so much as a Facebook post.

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All of which is entirely apt for a book that explores the notion of false identities. My request to the publisher for more details on the author’s background was met with silence, and so I suppose I should proceed with generosity and assume that Coslet is a real human being who is making a genuine case. After all, the London School of Economics claims her as an alumnus, and has posted an article to publicize the new book which is worth reading just to give you a flavor of the absurdity of its central thesis.

Emilia Lanier (1569-1645), née Bassano, was a poet of Jewish heritage whose purported Mediterranean complexion has been interpreted as suggestive of Moorish ancestry. This point has been seized upon by Shakespeare conspiracists ever since the historian A.L. Rowse in the Seventies tenuously identified her as the “dark lady” of the sonnets. Coslet insists that Lanier “was a Moor”, but no evidence for this has ever been discovered and, of course, none is provided in The Real Shakespeare.

Surely the contention that Shakespeare was a black woman is inevitably undermined when the proposed candidate wasn’t actually black? Similarly, Coslet’s claim that Lanier could not write under her own name because at the time “women were marginalized, silenced, and certainly not allowed to write and to publish” makes Lanier an odd choice given that she was a published poet. Her volume of trudging verse — Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611) — should be evidence enough that she was no Shakespeare.

Still, Coslet knows best. She opens her book with a pencil drawing of the “real Shakespeare” that unequivocally depicts the bard as a black woman. And what is the origin of this incredible find? Well, it turns out that Coslet drew it herself, and that “sketching was an integral part of the Author’s research in the recovery of Emilia Bassano”. Who needs primary sources when you can create your own?

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By now we are firmly in the realm of satire, whether intentional or otherwise. The self-congratulatory capitalization of “Author” is perfect. So too is Coslet’s use of the royal “we” in her breakdown of the chapters (“We will demonstrate that the mother of the English-speaking world is a tawny-black, Jewish woman”). The peak of her audacity is reached when she repeatedly draws comparisons between her own work and the “paradigm shift” actuated by Copernicus in the field of astronomy.

It gets better. Coslet refers to her own method of excavating the plays for biographical clues as the “correct paradigm”. For good measure, she throws in the writer Robert Greene as another of Lanier’s male pseudonyms, one she “adopted in her early career, to have her works published, before she became Shakespeare”. Having decided that Lanier must be Shakespeare, Coslet realized that “if it true [sic], then there must be a way to prove it… To my surprise, the methodology worked”. Peter Wason, the psychologist who coined the term “confirmation bias”, can rest easy in his grave.

The theory that Lanier was Shakespeare is not original to Coslet. It was first proposed by John Hudson in Shakespeare’s Dark Lady (2013) which, though more elegantly written than Coslet’s book, also claims that “racist and sexist assumptions” underlie the view that Shakespeare was a white man. Like Coslet, Hudson argues for a new “paradigm” in solving the authorship question. Specifically, documentary evidence is to be rejected in favor of speculation and the interpretation of the canon through an autobiographical lens. Hudson explains that his previous job had been “creating new paradigms and new industry models in high-tech industries”. It turns out that such skills are not transferable to literary scholarship.

To give an example of Hudson’s preposterous “paradigm” — which is really just the ancient error of assuming that authors are always writing about themselves — he finds clues in Shakespeare’s works that reveal not only that Lanier wrote them: but that she was having an affair with the reputedly gay playwright Christopher Marlowe and became pregnant with his child. “If we read the poem A Lover’s Complaint autobiographically,” Hudson writes, “it would appear to be a poem about a girl betrayed by a man rather like Marlowe.” Well, I’m convinced.

But for sheer entertainment value, Hudson is dwarfed by Coslet. From her immortal pen I have learned that “Shakespeare was well aware of sounds, and how sounds can be used to convey meaning”. And did you know that “scholars have realized that Shakespeare spoke fluent Hebrew”? Coslet neglects to specify which scholars have made this astonishing claim; such trivial details aren’t important. Then there is her contention that “the myth of Stratford man fits perfectly into the patriarchal narrative” that “a businessman can turn into an artist if he puts his mind to it”. What kind of obscure patriarchal narrative is this? And wasn’t Shakespeare an artist before he went into business? Never mind. Let’s not get bogged down in all these pesky “facts”.

The evidence is there if you really want to see it. One of Coslet’s great discoveries is that the face of Emilia Lanier is hidden within the engraving of Shakespeare in the first folio of 1623. One need only fold the image in a certain way and — hey presto! — “the magic happens” and “the face that has been hiding behind the portrait” is revealed. Coslet doesn’t offer a diagram of the effect, which would of course be too easy, and instead spends 19 pages explaining how the process works.

And, of course, there is the obligatory anagram. These dyed-in-the-wool Stratfordians had better come up with a reason why the letters of “Shakespeare” can be rearranged into “a she speaker”. Case closed, surely. Though if we’re really going to play this game, it might be worth pointing out that Irene Coslet is a precise anagram of le crétin ose, which is French for “the idiot dares”. Is she trying to tell us something?

My favorite part of The Real Shakespeare is when Coslet tells us that her theory came to her in a dream. This is her account of the moment she realized she had been chosen as the anointed vessel of revelation:

“In 2018, something happened that changed my life. I was going through a period of transition. It was one of those chaotic times in life. I was getting ready to move abroad. I was in the middle of move [sic] and I was packing. My luggage was scattered everywhere in my room. Completely overwhelmed, I decided to take some rest and just lay down on my bed for a second. In that moment, as soon as my head hit my pillow and I closed my eyes, a bolt of lightning came out of nowhere. These words hit my mind: ‘Shakespeare was a woman’.”

At this point, we must begrudgingly offer our congratulations. Whether Coslet is a satirist or simply delusional, she has against all odds found a publisher for her book and achieved the kind of publicity for which any new writer would sacrifice many a limb. It could be that this conspiracy theorist is so ingenious that she has gulled me into concocting one of my own. But whatever Coslet’s intentions, she (or he) definitely knows how to sell a book.

Burke’s story has been something of an odyssey, and so commentators have been apt to seek shortcuts to make sense of it all. His defenders claim that he has been persecuted by the state for his Christian faith and opposition to trans ideology. His critics insist that he was suspended for gross misconduct at a school chapel service, that he has persistently flouted the rule of law, and that his imprisonment has nothing whatsoever to do with transgenderism. Both of these positions contain elements of truth, but they are also incomplete. 

The dispute began in early 2022, when the school’s principal, Niamh McShane, emailed staff instructing them to refer to a male student by a female name and the pronouns “they/them”. The following day, Burke wrote to McShane to raise his objections, and to seek clarification on whether parents had been informed that staff and students were required to adopt this change.

His concern was uncontroversial: in a Christian school, social transitioning runs directly against the institution’s ethos. Since the findings of the Cass Review into pediatric “gender-affirming care”, we also now know that the practice of adopting preferred pronouns and names at school is “not a neutral act”. It can have the effect of “locking in” perceptions of gender and identity that make future medicalization more likely. It is, in other words, a perilous psychological intervention by teaching staff who are completely unqualified to make such decisions.  

Burke wrote again to challenge the policy and state that he would pursue the matter further. He additionally raised it with the Bishop of the Diocese. At a later meeting with the principal and her deputy, he reiterated his objections. McShane responded on 27 May, insisting that the child be addressed according to the preferred name and pronouns, citing the Equal Status Act 2000. She acknowledged that this might be difficult given Burke’s beliefs, but required compliance nonetheless. In effect, this amounted to a case of compelled speech.

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On 21 June, Burke challenged McShane at a chapel service attended by staff, alumni, governors and a handful of current sixth-form students. He reiterated his religious objections to transgenderism and, according to one report, ‘followed the principal and publicly harangued her’. Commentators have repeatedly claimed that it was this outburst, and not his position on gender ideology, that resulted in his suspension by the Board of Trustees. However, the Court of Appeal has confirmed that Burke’s refusal to use the pupil’s prescribed name and pronouns was a fundamental factor in his suspension.

Burke insisted that his punishment was unjust, and that his constitutional rights to freedom of religion were being infringed upon. He continually returned to the school, insisting that he be allowed to continue teaching his classes, until the school sought a court order to prohibit him from entering the premises. Burke defied the order repeatedly, and his time in prison has now totaled in excess of 500 days. The courts have also tried to prevent him from returning to the school by fining him for every day he turns up. Of the approximately €222,000 of fines he has accumulated, €40,000 has been taken from his salary, leaving him in considerable debt to the state. 

Burke’s protest is not simply against the school, but against a legal system that he sees as complicit in a broader societal takeover by gender ideology. On this, he has a point. When I was in the Dáil (the Irish parliament in Dublin) for a free speech summit last June, I noticed that a Progress Pride flag had been etched permanently onto one of the glass doors that all parliamentarians must pass through. The message is clear: irrespective of your politics, you must pay fealty to this divisive new orthodoxy.

The tortuous legal battles between Burke and the state have obscured the original problem. We have a state-funded school enforcing a doctrine that is in direct opposition not only to the Christian beliefs on which it was founded, but to the views of a substantial proportion of the Irish population. The creed is propagated largely by members of the ruling class, with little regard for its unpopularity among the people they are meant to serve. Moreover, the school’s claims to be upholding the “welfare” of its pupils are incoherent given the findings of the Cass Review, and the fact that “social transitioning” puts young people at risk.

Had the school been a private institution, and had Burke voluntarily signed a contract which incorporated an expectation that he should promote a belief-system that was antithetical to his own, then he would have no case. But the school is guilty of promoting highly contested theories as fact, endangering pupil welfare, and compelling the speech of its staff. Moreover, the school authorities appear to have failed to recognize their own ideological capture, or to take on board the validity of the criticisms. This is a serious breach of their responsibilities and is highly unethical. Burke was entirely right to object.

His manner of protest is more dubious. His family has been accused of disruptive behavior in court, with the judge claiming that they have systematically attempted to derail the proceedings by repeatedly hurling invective and abuse. Burke’s tactic of returning to his place of work in spite of the suspension might have been a powerful form of peaceful protest, but the presence of children makes the approach ethically unsound. Some pupils have greeted Burke outside the school with warmth and offered him their support, but the principle of safeguarding means that trespassing on school property cannot ever be tolerated.

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All of which brings us back to the key question: how is one to oppose unjust systems while being expected to live and operate within them? Perhaps a better tactic would have been for Burke to simply refuse to comply with the speech edicts following the meeting on 19 May. The principal had no right to impose a new policy that bears no relation to Burke’s agreement terms of employment, let alone one that endangers pupil welfare. Burke would have had every right to take a stance of non-compliance and, had he been suspended for this, his case would have been much stronger.

By continually appearing at the school, he has enabled the focus to shift from the school’s misconduct to his own disregard for court authority. His protest became the issue, rather than the policy he was protesting. Yet he is also perhaps right that extreme forms of peaceful protest might be necessary in a climate of such stifling orthodoxy, even if that means imprisonment. Typically, such actions would be necessary in tyrannical regimes. One example would be Narges Mohammadi, the Iranian women’s rights campaigner who has been arrested on 13 occasions and sentenced to 31 years in prison. But to see an Irish citizen so determined to spend time in jail to prove his point is remarkable. 

There is a long tradition of civil disobedience that supports Burke’s view. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963), Martin Luther King, Jr, makes the case for a specifically liberal method of tackling unjust laws: “One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”

​​The law is no guarantee of morality, and unjust laws undeniably exist. To take the UK as an example, there are currently laws on the statute books that are overtly antithetical to the principle of free speech. For example, Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 outlaws the sending of a “letter, electronic communication or article of any description” which is “indecent or grossly offensive”. Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 likewise prohibits words that are deemed “grossly offensive”, but adds another authoritarian twist by stating that a person may be found guilty if he or she has caused “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”. Such vague legislation is a gateway to exploitation by a state that might seek to silence its critics.

Burke takes the view that the Irish government has embraced an unpopular but fashionable ideology and insisted that it be baked into its legal system. After all, the notion of self-ID has led to violent men being accommodated in women’s prisons. To break the law in the service of a moral cause seems counterintuitive, but it is one of the mechanisms by which awareness of bad laws can be raised, thereby increasing the possibility of their repeal.

Burke doubtless considers himself to be very much in this tradition of protest, but this is not necessarily a compelling justification for his actions. Just Stop Oil campaigners who have been incarcerated for their protests think of themselves as “political prisoners”, and yet this view is unlikely to be shared by those who disapprove of their cause. When it comes to Burke, it is surely legitimate to ask whether his strategy has undermined rather than strengthened his case. With children caught in the middle, and the legal proceedings overwhelming the central ethical issue, the school’s outrageous behavior has been overshadowed. But it is also true that Burke has engaged in a form of peaceful protest, motivated by conscience, and undertaken with full willingness to bear the consequences.

I am not qualified to say whether Burke’s method of protest is the right one, whether it has been effective or counterproductive. Of course, whether a cause is worthy of civil disobedience is a matter of opinion, and just because someone believes a law or system to be unjust, that does not automatically make it so. But amid all the clamor and commotion, we shouldn’t lose sight of why this protest was necessary in the first place. A school was enforcing a creed it had no moral right to impose, and one employee refused to comply.

But you might struggle to make the same case for Graham Linehan, the comedy writer most famous for Father Ted. Yet there he was, apprehended by five armed police officers after landing at Heathrow Airport on Tuesday, as though he were a gangster of the most feral kind. His crime? Posting a handful of tweets that caused some offense.

As for those tweets: on 19 April, he posted an image of a transactivist protest in London along with the caption “a photo you can smell”. When challenged by a user for the “unnecessary comment”, he replied: “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em.” The third was posted on 20 April, and in it Graham wrote: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

Those of us accustomed to the churn and clatter of social media have become adept at explaining the obvious to the congenitally literal-minded. And so, with infinite patience, Graham outlined the thinking behind this comment on his Substack, saying that it “was about the height difference between men and women, the bollocks being closer to punch level for a woman defending her rights and certainly not a call to violence”. In any case, as the lawyer Sarah Phillimore pointed out, there is nothing illegal about tweeting advice that any father would have said to their daughters about how to handle a men encroaching on their personal space. “If you want to arrest my dad for this,” she writes, “he’s in a jar on the dresser.”

For Graham, this is only the latest act in an ongoing circus of persecution: one with multiple ringmasters. He was first contacted by the police back in October 2018, when he was given a verbal warning for “deadnaming” and “misgendering” trans activist Stephanie Hayden. A later police visit was prompted by a complaint about Graham’s tweets by Adrian Harrop, a doctor whose license to practice medicine was temporarily suspended for “insulting” online conduct. “This was the visit that really shocked my wife and frightened her”, Graham told me. “It’s one of the main reasons we broke up”.

There has, over the years, been a concerted effort by trans activists to weaponize the police against their victims, aided by the their capture of law enforcement. Consider the different standards at play here. It is now commonplace for trans activists to threaten violence and rape against their adversaries, and yet police rarely investigate. After two SNP politicians were photographed at a trans rally in Glasgow in front of “decapitate TERFS” placard, complete with guillotine, no arrests were made. Compare this with the routine hounding of feminists by police simply for expressing their gender-critical views. Perhaps the police might wish to refresh their memory about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on sex in the Equality Act, and its implications for the rights of women and gay people.

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The misuse of police powers has been bad enough, but it has been accompanied by Graham’s broader cancellation by the very industry that once feted him. Unable to make a living in television since 2018 — due to his vocal opposition to gender ideology and the threat it poses to women’s rights — he had no choice but to relocate to Arizona where he has been working on a sitcom for Friendly Fire Studios, with me and a new company we have established with actor and comedian Rob Schneider and writer and producer Martin Gourlay. A full draft of the series has already been written and, if we can successfully put it into production, it will be the sharpest riposte to those activists who have tried to ensure that Graham never writes again.

The farce of Graham’s arrest at Heathrow has already garnered worldwide attention. J.K. Rowling has described it as “totalitarianism”. Joyce Carol Oates has cited it as proof that “the UK is, or has become, an authoritarian government”. Perhaps sensing that the UK is fast becoming an international laughing stock, even Keir Starmer has weighed in, his spokesperson making clear that the police should be focusing on issues that “matter most to their communities”. Given his party’s appalling track record on free speech, this is almost as funny as a line from Father Ted.

But as absurd as it sounds, the arrest of a comedy writer at an airport is by no means the most egregious example of state overreach in recent years. We have seen journalists visited by police for wrongthink; citizens imprisoned for posting memes; prosecutions for controversial Halloween costumes; teenagers convicted and jailed for offensive jokes. Freedom of Information requests by The Times revealed that over 12,000 people are arrested each year for offensive comments posted online, and an estimated quarter of a million of us have been logged by police as perpetrators of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs), mostly without being informed.

In spite of all this, there has been no serious effort among the political class to actually change things. There have been occasional overtures: the shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, has called for the abolition of NCHIs, while previous Home Secretaries have explicitly instructed the College of Policing to end the practice. But all have been ignored. The Court of Appeal has ruled that NCHIs are “plainly an interference with freedom of expression”. Yet nothing has changed, because the activists deeply embedded in the system believe they know best.

There is, though, plenty that our elective representatives could do to address Britain’s totalitarian spiral, if only they could grow a spine. For starters, Parliament should abolish the College of Policing; its activist influence, long apparent, has led to inconsistent and arguably unlawful behavior by officers trained to believe that it is their job to audit the speech and emotions of the public they serve.

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Parliament should further abolish all “hate speech” legislation. Given that no two governments can agree on a definition of “hate”, these nebulous laws are routinely exploited to chill free speech. Section 18 of the Public Order Act 1986 explicitly outlaws ‘“threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior” if it is intended “to stir up racial hatred”. Quite apart from the liberal principle that the state should not be attempting to intuit our private motivations, the charge of “racism” is so often misapplied that the law is effectively rendered useless.

Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 proscribe the sending of material that is deemed “grossly offensive”: a hopelessly subjective notion. The Communications Act further prohibits words that cause “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”. If every person who posted such messages on social media were convicted tomorrow, the prison population would exceed the number of law-abiding citizens. Either way, these laws are clearly both draconian and incoherent.

Moreover, the very concept of “protected characteristics” makes a nonsense of the principle of equality before the law. Few would object to protections against discrimination on the basis of immutable qualities in the workplace. but there is no sound reason to create differential tiers of law enforcement. In all “hate crime” guidance, “perception of the victim” is the determining factor, as a 2019 report from the Home Office made clear. No actual evidence is required for someone to be recorded as a hate criminal.

Finally, we should introduce sensible laws on “incitement to violence”. The Lucy Connolly case has drawn international attention to the folly of our present laws, in which a nasty but hastily deleted tweet by someone with no influence whatsoever resulted in a 31-month prison sentence. The US standard, known as the “Brandenburg Test”, offers a model of best practice. It makes clear that the speech in question must be deliberately aimed at inciting violence, likely to do so, and that any impact should be imminent. If the UK had an equivalent on the statute books, police would no longer be wasting so much time and money on offensive tweets and memes.

There can no longer be any doubt that free speech is under life-support in Britain, and to keep ignoring the sheer weight of evidence is a labor of perversely Herculean proportions. Many commentators are claiming that the arrest of Graham Linehan could be a tipping point, but this will only be true if the public’s rising frustration can be directed into action. It has been grotesque to witness the state’s ongoing harassment of an acclaimed comedy writer, but perhaps one consolation is that it might finally jolt Westminster out of its complacency.

As for creative freedom, that might be the biggest joke of all. Two Jewish comedians, Rachel Creeger and Philip Simon, have had their shows canceled at two venues. One of these, Whistlebinkies, at first claimed that this was due to “safety concerns” — presumably it feared that activists from “the right side of history” might turn up to assault audiences and staff in the name of compassion. Creeger and Simon say they were told of “staff discomfort at hosting Jewish shows”.

Of course, any appeal to “safety” in the context of a comedy show is mere sleight-of-tongue, a specious justification for the curbing of artistic freedom. The Banshee Labyrinth has canceled Simon’s solo show after trawling through his social media posts in search of heretical views. Chillingly, its managers have compiled a “dossier” of tweets in which Simon criticizes the hypocrisy of those who attend and organize “humanitarian” marches for Palestine while turning a blind eye to the atrocities committed by Hamas. The venue was particularly outraged that Simon pointed out that Greta Thunberg had not been “kidnapped” by the IDF when she sailed her flotilla to Gaza in her ongoing mission to save the universe and chronicle it all on Instagram.

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One would hope that a comedy venue of all places might appreciate that creatives do not always agree, and that it is not their place to cancel performers who do not pledge fealty to the fashionable omni-cause of the middle-classes. Alas, as ever, conformity is now being demanded from those we should least expect it from. It is particularly dispiriting to see this kind of groupthink take hold at the Fringe. Since its inception in the late Forties, performers have been accustomed to protests and demands for censorship from the Christian Right, but such calls today are coming from within the industry itself.

The ideological capture is evident from critics who laud shows for conveying the “correct message” and comedy commissioners who evidently prefer propaganda to art. Ever since Nica Burns, the director of the Fringe comedy awards, launched the 2018 festival with a paean to “comedy’s future in the woke world” which will “establish a clear marker for what is unacceptable today”, most performers and industry doyens have been diligently following the decree. Genuinely subversive acts have been edged out to make space for the mediocre and the bland.

This is a trend that is now firmly established. Three years ago, the Pleasance Theatre — one of the Fringe’s main provider of venues — canceled a show by controversial comedian Jerry Sadowitz. According to the director of the Pleasance, Anthony Alderson, this was because “this type of material has no place on the festival”, and “opinions such as those displayed on stage by Sadowitz are not acceptable”. When a leading comedy promoter openly admits that he doesn’t understand the difference between opinions and jokes, we know the rot is entrenched.

Kate Copstick, one of the few comedy critics who has refused to kowtow to the new orthodoxy, wrote the following after the Sadowitz cancellation: “In all my years of covering the Fringe, there has never been a more joy-stranglingly censorious August. Councillor Moira Knox in her heyday seems like a libertine now, in comparison to today’s recreationally offended. When the blood-chilling phrase “unacceptable and does not align with our values” is bandied about, and by a venue like the Pleasance, then it is time to fear for the freedom of our funny. The point of a Fringe is that it does not align with anything.

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All of which would be depressing enough, but the situation has been exacerbated by the complicity of comedians themselves. Many acts at the Fringe now fall into the category of what the Spanish call “cuerpo oficial de cómicos del Estado” (official body of comedians of the state). These “regime comedians” are aware that success in their careers is dependent on echoing the dogma of our times, one that has been promoted consistently by successive Conservative and Labour governments. These are the fools at court who have forgotten that their job is to criticize the king.

It was not always this way. Back in 2006, when Tony Blair’s government attempted to oppose amendments passed by the House of Lords that limited the scope of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, comedians were outspoken in their dissent. Had the bill passed, any vexatious complaint about a show that mocked religious belief would have resulted in its suspension pending a police investigation. Acts have just over three weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe to recoup some of their losses; they simply can’t afford to waste time being interrogated by the Star Chamber.

But whereas there was near unanimity among comedians in 2006, by the time Markus Meechan (aka “Count Dankula”) was prosecuted for a joke video in 2018, there were few speaking out. Whereas they once understood that “the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended” — the phrase used by Rowan Atkinson during the 2006 campaign — they had now subscribed wholesale to the core woke belief that words and violence are synonymous and that suppression of free speech is essential for the preservation of a cohesive society. Where once comedians fought censorship, now they were defending it.

Up until relatively recently, punters would have been sorely disappointed at a fringe festival that offered a series of interchangeable comics all aiming their barbs at similar targets. When Scott Capurro took his show Islamohomophobia to the Fringe in 2013, and was depicted wearing a transparent burka in the publicity materials, nobody took offense or called for his deplatforming. A little over a decade later, and police are contacting a venue in London because of accusations that Capurro might be “homophobic”. Perhaps the investigating officers should have asked for evidence from his husband.

For the humourless and the doctrinaire, comedy will always be a dangerous phenomenon. Take George Monbiot, who recently produced a piece for the Guardian in which he argued that jokes are the equivalent of gateway drugs to the far-Right. “Dominant powers have for centuries used clowns to express their deepest, most unmentionable urges,” he writes, forgetting that the antics of clowns have always been the most effective tool to undermine authority. Citing jokes by Lewis Schaffer, a comedian whose every utterance is guaranteed to bewilder the congenitally literal-minded, Monbiot concludes that “Humorous suggestions of violence reveal and embolden real desires,” that they “soften us up for violence and misrule” and that “it’s the clowning that kills us”.

In this, Monbiot appears to be channelling the spirit of William Prynne, the puritanical firebrand who, in his Histrio-Mastix (1633), railed against the capacity of stage comedies to “empoison, endanger, and deprave” the audience. The elegance, wit and popular appeal of these shows, Prynne reasoned, had the effect of acclimatising the public to “adulteries, fornications, rapes, love-passions, meretricious, unchaste, and amorous practises, of lascivious wicked men or heathen idol-gods”. The claim that jokes lead to violence is often asserted but never proved. It is eternal cry of the sanctimonious and the philistine.

Monbiot’s logic is identical to that of the officers who last week arrested Jon Farley, a protester at a pro-Palestine rally in Leeds, who had been holding a placard bearing a cartoon from the satirical magazine Private Eye. The cartoon mocked the Government’s proscribing of Palestine Action as a terrorist group. Fully on board with the notion that comedy and satire are potentially toxic forces and can incite real-world harm, the police swiftly handcuffed Farley and detained him for nearly six hours. This is what happens when freedom of speech is no longer valued by the ruling class, and the ideology promoted by the likes of Monbiot becomes institutionalised.

No doubt this authoritarian attitude will persist at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Innately subversive comedians will continue to self-censor, and those who do risk the ire of the establishment will doubtless pay the price. We can expect increased conformity while activists insist that “nobody is being stifled”. Genuine fans of comedy would be advised to avoid the Fringe, at least until its gatekeepers learn that laughter is more satisfying than nodding along to the approved creed.

These nightmarish visitations took place at 20 Mount Charles in Belfast, the house where Forrest Reid was born 150 years ago. The building still stands, although there is no commemorative plaque to indicate that one of Northern Ireland’s foremost novelists was born within its walls. Like the ghosts of his childhood, Reid has vanished. His faded legacy is proof of the fickle nature of literary trends.

And yet, at the time of his death in 1947, Reid was widely considered to be a significant literary figure. He was a founder member of the Irish Academy of Letters, recognized with an honorary doctorate at Queen’s University. His novel Young Tom won the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1944. The poet John Hewitt described him as Northern Ireland’s foremost novelist. E.M. Forster called him “the most important man in Belfast”. He was hailed as a “genius” by Walter de la Mare and his work commended by D.H. Lawrence, L.P. Hartley and John Betjeman. Yet even in Belfast, the city Reid loved so much and in which he is buried, one is unlikely to find his work in any bookstores.

Reid was a visionary, the type George Bernard Shaw had in mind when he wrote of those “people in the world whose imagination is so vivid that when they have an idea it comes to them as an audible voice, sometimes uttered by a visual figure”. His books are infused with the supernatural; the spirits of nature tremble on his pages. His was an animistic creed, and the pre-industrial Victorian Belfast of his boyhood is the living, palpitating character at the core of all his work.

His Apostate must rank as one of the finest, and least read, autobiographies of all time. It exceeds even Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) for its unflinching interrogation of the psychology of youth and the repudiation of conventional faith. The key moment is Reid’s account of a defining vision which took place in Belfast’s Belvoir Park. He had taken some books to an isolated spot, but then: “a strange thing happened. For though there was no wind, a little green leafy branch was snapped off from the tree above me, and fell to the ground at my hand. I drew my breath quickly; there was a drumming in my ears; I knew that the green woodland before me was going to split asunder, to swing back on either side like two great painted doors… And then – then, I hesitated, blundered, drew back, failed”.

This alternative reality that Reid had so nearly reached was a recurring feature of his infant dreams. “There were two worlds,” he writes, “and it never occurred to me to ask myself whether one were less real than the other.” All his novels are driven towards the same singular vision, a recreation of the dreamworld of his youth, the magical “garden by the sea” that he could visit in his sleep. “My books are really an attempt to get back to my mysterious garden”, he told André Raffalovich. It was, to Reid, a lost Eden: what he called “a kind of crying for Elysium”.

Such was Reid’s distress at the prospect of becoming an adult, that at the age of 16 he attempted suicide with an overdose of laudanum. Yet this condition – a kind of adolescence in stasis; “a mysterious form of arrested development” – is precisely why his novels are so successful. As a writer he has retained his child-like perspective, but is able to convey it with the mastery of an exceptional prose stylist with decades of writing experience.

There is no other writer who has captured so successfully the experience of boyhood in fiction. Reading his coming-of-age stories, such as Following Darkness (1912), At the Door of the Gate (1915), or The Retreat (1936) is like stepping back into a lost mindset. The recreation is precise and eerily authentic; Reid somehow manages to convey that wonderfully naïve, part-idealistic, part-solipsistic realm of the imagination that is eventually obliterated through the process of maturity.

It is there most starkly in Following Darkness — a daring bildungsroman that departed from the convention of mawkish and idealized depictions of youth and antagonized critics. Anne Macdonell of the Manchester Guardian decried its lead character, the adolescent Peter Waring, as “a subject for the pathologist rather than the novelist”, a figure with “evil tendencies” who “unutterably disgusts”. The exploration of Peter’s burgeoning self-awareness, both sexual and spiritual, was shocking for the time, but its power is undeniable and it sparked a trend of books that took a similarly unsentimental approach to adolescence, including Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street (1913), W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

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That intense focus on childhood, however, has led to speculation about Reid’s private life. In his 1980 biography, Brian Taylor asserted — without evidence — that Reid had a sexual interest in young boys. The claim, rooted in instinct rather than fact, has been repeated uncritically by commentators ever since. In truth, Reid’s private letters suggest the opposite: a puritanical man who, though openly homosexual, reviled sexual activity in all its forms. His protégé Stephen Gilbert later recalled that Reid reserved his most vehement condemnation for “any or all men who interfered sexually with boys”.

Yet the power of rumor is difficult to withstand, and in our current climate accusations are often taken as proof. Perhaps that is part of the reason Reid fell into obscurity. That and the fact that the literary world has always adored its taxonomies; it struggles to know where to place authors of such originality. Reid’s complete disregard for nationalism or politics frustrates attempts at simple classification. Rooted in the landscape of Ulster, his stories are nevertheless underpinned by ideals closer akin to Hellenistic paganism than any observable Celtic tradition. Many readers simply don’t know what to make of it.

The shelf life of an artist, though, is determined as much by fashion as anything else, and Reid was rarely one to compromise for the sake of a public who, for the most part, did not share his vision. Aside from three years as a Cambridge undergraduate, Reid spent his entire life in Belfast, in spite of various inducements to move to England for the sake of his career. E.M. Forster noted that “he didn’t want to be in London literary society. He didn’t care for the success that is attained by entering cliques and pulling wires.”

In his excellent critical study of W.B. Yeats (1915), published long before the poet was virtually canonized by the literati, Reid explained that “great art is essentially lonely. It is not inspired by the chatter of schools and movements, and when it is connected with a school at all, it is usually because it has founded one. The work that counts is more likely to be conceived in a rectory on the Yorkshire moors, or in a cottage in the lake country, than in the self-conscious atmosphere of literary circles.”

Such a view would seem alien to most authors today. It is widely accepted, albeit perhaps grudgingly, that commercial success is not simply a matter of producing the best work, but making the right connections, attending vogueish literary salons and, increasingly, modifying one’s vision in accordance with the ideological demands of publishers and “sensitivity readers”. Reid would have rejected this entirely. At a cultural festival for young writers in Larne in 1930, Reid gave an address in which he cautioned that the writer could choose one of two incompatible aims: “He may look upon his work as an art to be practiced with sincerity, and in faithfulness to an ideal; or he may regard it as a commercial experiment”. For Reid, in the battle between Mammon and the Muses, the latter must always prevail.

Reid’s devotion to his art, in other words, came at the expense of his legacy. He is one of those who, to borrow George Eliot’s words, “lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”. And yet a resurgence of interest in this forgotten visionary is not out of the question. Many of his novels have been republished in recent years by Valancourt Press, and his autobiographies Apostate and Private Road have been reissued by Faber. With a renewed interest in discourses of masculinity, it might be that the novelist who most authentically captures the experience of male adolescence will find a new readership.

Floyd’s criminal past does not mitigate the tragedy of his death; it is always lamentable when human life is prematurely and needlessly cut short. Yet the fact that he was so rapidly canonized tells us a great deal about the religiosity of the woke movement. A piece for The Guardian in 2020 surveyed the various depictions of Floyd by street artists, from his bewinged and behaloed image on a wall in Houston, Texas to a mural in Naples which portrayed him as weeping blood “like a saint pictured in a southern Italian church”.

Some of the viral footage from this period was even more explicitly ecclesiastical in nature. In one video, white people were seen kneeling to their black neighbors to beg forgiveness on behalf of all their race. In another, white crowds had raised their arms in supplication, repeating the chant: “I will use my voice in the most uplifting way possible and do everything in my power to educate my community.” We had already seen Greta Thunberg fulfilling a role similar to the child saints of medieval Christendom, and were later to witness the astonishing spectacle of a protestant congregation at a church in Dallas being led in a liturgical prayer before a muster of drag queens to “celebrate this divine diversity”.

All of which is to say that the rapid ascendency of woke can be partly explained as a kind of pseudo-religious hysteria. The killing of Floyd had galvanized the movement, but its decline was swift and inevitable. A poll by The Economist has found that support for woke causes began to grow in 2015, peaked in 2021, and has been steadily falling ever since. With vaguely utopian goals in mind, activists had taken a wrecking ball to society, and it is only now that the dust is settling that we find ourselves struggling with the question of how so much sound and fury could end up signifying so little.

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The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and riots of 2020, and the subsequent mainstreaming of nebulous notions of “systemic racism”, had the unintended effect of heightening racial tensions rather than weakening them. Children in America were suddenly being taught that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism”, and parents were being encouraged to become “white traitors” and support “white abolition”. Mountebanks such as Robin DiAngelo — a supposed expert in “Whiteness Studies” — were being paid thousands of dollars by major corporations to berate their employees and instruct them to “try to be less white”. In hindsight, it is remarkable that so many were gulled into believing that any of this was progressive.

Worse still, Critical Race Theory (CRT) was being imported into the UK, in spite of the fact that its analytical framework made little sense when applied to any historical context other than the US. Protesters in London were crying “Hands up, don’t shoot” at police officers with imaginary firearms. The American School in London — the most expensive day school in the UK – organised after-school activities in which children were separated by race. Brighton Council introduced an “anti-racist schools strategy” informed by the tenets of American CRT.

Above all, the years of racial identity politics that followed Floyd’s death have served to nourish what was once a dying white identitarian movement. It should surprise precisely no one that when those in power continually insist that human beings should be perceived first and foremost through their group identity, this might provide succour to race essentialists who have always thought in such terms. The phrase “woke right” might be hotly contested, but there can be little doubt that identity-obsessed authoritarians exist across the political spectrum, and that the excesses of the woke movement have rehabilitated racialized thinking to the benefit of some very sinister groups.

In particular, we are seeing the rise of Right-wing conspiratorial thinking that wallows in victimhood and perceives white people to be an oppressed class. The tactics of the woke are being replicated explicitly on the Right. In the midst of the BLM protests of 2020, the Associated Press stated that its style guide would be amended so that “black” was capitalized and “white” was not, a convention that was quickly followed by other outlets. Now, the identical strategy is being embraced by figures on the Right. “Different identity groups will always strive to protect and promote their own interests,” writes Andrew Torba, CEO of Right-wing social media platform Gab. “This is common sense and White people are starting to wake up to this reality and realize that if they don’t advocate for themselves no one else will.”

Similarly, the view that Western society is unregenerable was once the cornerstone of woke thinking, but has now taken hold among what some call the “Very Online Right”. The “degeneracy” of contemporary western culture is taken by some as evidence that it might have been preferable had the allies lost the Second World War. Neo-Nazi discourse is flourishing in the online space, particularly on X, and memes that praise Hitler are becoming more frequent. Kanye West recently posted an image of Hitler along with a goat emoji (“GOAT” means “Greatest of All Time”).

This narrative has been nourished by academics on both sides of the culture war debate, “problematising” the history of the Second World War, and specifically taking aim at Winston Churchill. Many will recall the academic event at the University of Cambridge in 2021 in which a panel of Left-wing activist academics sought to frame Churchill as an irredeemable racist. One panellist, Kehinde Andrews, branded him the “perfect embodiment of white supremacy” who helmed an empire that was “far worse than the Nazis”. Over the past year, many Right-wing culture warriors have made identical or similar claims. Most notoriously, podcaster Darryl Cooper appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to denounce Churchill as the “chief villain” of the Second World War.

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That one form of authoritarian grievance-rooted identity politics might birth another, albeit from an opposing political tribe, should not have been all that tricky to anticipate. The notion of color-blindness advocated by the likes of Martin Luther King was once widely agreed to be the ideal, meaning that identitarians from the Left and the Right found it difficult to gain traction. The culture war has destabilized this consensus. For many on both sides of the political spectrum, racial identity is now their lodestar.

As for BLM, many of its key figures failed spectacularly in their self-appointed roles as champions of their communities. Having raised approximately $90 million in the aftermath of Floyd’s death, only a third actually went to charitable bodies. By May 2023, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation was facing bankruptcy. One of its co-founders, Patrisse Cullors, was found to have spent $3.2 million on luxury homes, although she claimed these were private funds. Its tax filing of May 2022 revealed expenditure on luxury properties to the tune of $12 million, with significant sums paid to Cullors’s relatives for security services.

Moreover, the legacy of BLM has been anything but positive for people it purported to represent. The defunding of police has meant that crime in black areas has soared, black businesses were looted and destroyed, and black victims of murder were mourned only when the perpetrators were white. As the Equiano Project — a forum for debate about race and politics — has pointed out, radical politics was prioritized over the material challenges facing black communities: “Instead of focusing on crime, education, or work, BLM UK pushed anti-capitalism and identity-based ideology.”

In short, the BLM movement has been a disaster for race relations. Quite apart from the myriad failings of the movement, the push for social justice through authoritarian means — censorship, intimidation and public shaming — was always guaranteed to generate resentment from those who would eventually learn to mimic their tactics. We may quibble with the term “woke right”, but the phenomenon it describes is becoming impossible to ignore, particularly when one considers the new emboldened form of white nationalism and pro-fascist messaging on social media. It is regrettable those who sought to redress racism in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd might have created the conditions within which it can flourish.

While a literal cull of the experts might be a step too far, most of us will have grown weary of those who seem to believe that the “argument from authority” fallacy is a persuasive way to settle a debate. We are experiencing what the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas described as a “legitimation crisis”, by which the public has lost trust in figures of authority. Journalists, academics and those in positions of political power have continually deceived the public in service of woke ideology. As their era gradually comes to an end, we will be left with the fallout. And as we move into the next phase of the culture war, one of our principal challenges will be the repairing this damage.

Anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed that those who complain of “misinformation” (unintentional misrepresentation) and “disinformation” (intentional deception) are typically those who have been most responsible for it. Just last week we had the BBC apologizing for airing a supposedly impartial documentary about Gaza fronted by the son of a Hamas official. One interviewee was heard praising the deceased terrorist leader Yahya Sinwar for his “jihad against the Jews”, while the BBC’s subtitles mistranslated her phrase as “fighting and resisting Israeli forces”.

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Salwan Momika had a right to blaspheme

By Andrew Doyle

Then there is the mainstream media’s continual attempts at historical revisionism. Last month, we heard CBS’s Margaret Brennan claiming that the Holocaust was caused not by rabid and genocidal antisemitism, but by the weaponization of free speech. Around the same time, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was trying to eliminate gay men and women from their own history by insisting that the Stonewall uprising in June 1969 was “a riot by trans people”. The Guardian made the similarly fraudulent claim that the riots were “led by trans women of color” and that a black trans woman called Marsha P. Johnson “threw the first brick”. By his own admission, Johnson was a drag queen who did not identify as female and was not even present when the riots began. This isn’t journalism; it’s propaganda.

This kind of truth-twisting is an inevitable feature of human discourse, which is why a reliable press is an essential feature of a functioning democracy. Yet just last week BBC News was observing the “preferred pronouns” of a rapist of children as young as three years old. In September 2023, Joan Smith wrote a piece for UnHerd about how editors at the Financial Times had instructed her to insert a deliberate untruth into a review to promote the tenets of genderism. The reason for this became clear last March, when whistleblowers at the Financial Times exposed the extent to which the publication is ideologically captured, leaking its “Diversity and Inclusion Toolkit” to writer James Esses. There are few mainstream publications operating today that do not prioritize fealty to this dying ideology over accurate reporting.

The problem of academia is even more pronounced. In the most comprehensive recent survey of academics, the University and Colleges Union found that 56% of its members believed that freedom of speech in higher education was in decline and that “self-censorship is very common”, and 19.1% of respondents in European Union countries admitted to censoring themselves at work, as compared to 35.5% of teaching staff in the United Kingdom. The report outlined how “many staff have had their academic freedom abrogated and thereby been subjected to cruel and degrading treatment by their peers, on account of their academic views” and that the practice of self-censorship was the major factor in preventing “the incidence of bullying, psychology pressure and other unconscionable behavior from being even higher”.

The conclusion was harrowing: “self-censorship at this level appears to make a mockery of any pretense by universities of being paragons of free speech and that of being advocates of unhindered discourse in the pursuit of knowledge and academic freedom.” In his new book Bad Education, Matt Goodwin calls this the “secret code of silence” in academia — which he compares to the Mafia concept of omertá — by which “no matter how glaringly obvious the crisis becomes, no matter how visibly these once great institutions are failing our young people, you just never, ever tell people on the outside”.

The humanities are not immune either. Recently, I had my own brush with the entrenched ideological thinking of art historians. I had written a piece for the Washington Post about Leonardo da Vinci’s lost masterpiece The Battle of Anghiari, a painting which might possibly still exist behind a fresco in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. For years, experts have been claiming that Leonardo never painted it in the first place, and yet I was able to quote numerous historical accounts from 16th-century writers who claimed to have seen it. Rather than address the evidence, the experts who responded simply restated their flawed hypothesis, as though asserting something multiple times will magically make it true.

A letter to the Washington Post from Francesca Fiorani, professor of art history at the University of Virginia, exemplifies the problem. She telepathically asserts that my argument is based on “obsession”, as though one article in a two-decade writing career qualifies as monomania. Fiorani either could not, or would not, deign to address any aspects of the evidence I presented. I would have welcomed arguments against the authenticity of these sources, but none were forthcoming. She should have heeded Aldous Huxley’s observation that “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored”.

While we might assume that academics would be more objective, there are good reasons why the opposite is often the case. Those working in higher education are particularly susceptible to groupthink. Their work is based on the notion of superior knowledge, and so egos are easily bruised when they are proven wrong.

Moreover, the cleverest among us are also those who are able to rationalize and justify the most improbable of theories. Consider the claim by the Scientific American that the “inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports”. So the reason why men run faster than women has nothing to do with muscle mass, heart size, lung capacity or longer strides, but is attributable to sexist stereotyping. Even a child could explain the flaw in this reasoning.

And while the suggestion that the Covid pandemic was the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is now widely accepted as credible, it was not so long ago that it was dismissed by leading experts as a “racist conspiracy theory”. When molecular biologist Alica Chan and writer Matt Ridley published a defense of this theory in their book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times claimed that the authors were placing “a conspiracy theory between hardcovers to masquerade as sober scientific inquiry”. Hiltzik’s certainty was premature. In December 2024, the United States government’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its final report confirming that the lab-leak theory was most likely true.

According to many members of the political class, censorship is the solution to the problem of a public that will not accept these fabricated narratives. Seemingly without irony, the unelected president of the European Commission — Ursula von der Leyen — has announced her intention to create a “European Democracy Shield” to protect EU citizens from online “disinformation”. Apparently, voters are too fickle to listen to arguments and make judgments for themselves; all it takes is a few social media posts from Russian bots and they’ll be marching, automaton-like, into the voting booths to do the bidding of malevolent foreign powers. Such is the esteem in which these EU bureaucrats hold the people they supposedly represent.

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Worse still, von der Leyen has compared free speech to a virus. Speaking last year at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit, she had this to say: “As technology evolves we need to build up societal immunity around information manipulation. Because research has shown that pre-bunking is much more successful than debunking. Pre-bunking is basically the opposite of debunking.” She then added: “In short, prevention is preferable to cure. Perhaps if you think of information manipulation as a virus. Instead of treating an infection, once it has taken hold, that is debunking. It is much better to vaccinate so that the body is inoculated. Pre-bunking is the same approach.”

As a new synonym for “censorship”, “pre-bunking” is up there with “pre-crime”, “thoughtcrime” and “public safety” in the dystopian lexicon. The unanswerable retort to this was written by the Roman poet Juvenal almost 2000 years ago: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (“who watches the watchmen?”). The authority of the censor presupposes a kind of omniscience. As John Milton put it in his Areopagitica: “How shall the licencers themselves be confided in, unless we can confer upon them, or they assume to themselves above all others in the land, the grace of infallibility and uncorruptedness?”

I for one do not trust von der Leyen or any of her ilk to arbitrate on the difference between reality and fiction. I no longer trust academics, the mainstream media or politicians to prioritize facts over convenient falsehoods. As we move into the post-woke era, we are going to have to find a way to rebuild the reputations of our captured institutions. I do not claim to know how this legitimation crisis can be rectified, but it will only be possible once those in authority overcome their contempt for the public and rekindle their respect for the primacy of truth.

The symbolism of a burning book is, therefore, the repudiation of the very notion of freedom. And yet this same freedom means that we must be able to burn books if we so desire. The Nazis, of course, were destroying the property of others, an authoritarian act designed to eliminate whole branches of thought. This is not to be conflated with an individual who chooses to vandalize his or her own property. The trans activists who burn J.K. Rowling’s books and post the footage online are making fools of themselves, but they are also exercising their right to do so in a free society.

This is a distinction worth bearing in mind when we consider the murder of anti-Islam campaigner Salwan Momika, an Iraqi man who had been awaiting a verdict in Sweden for the crime of “agitation against an ethnic or national group”. Momika had publicly burned a number of copies of the Quran during the summer of 2023. He was shot dead during or just before a live stream on TikTok at his home in Södertälje on Wednesday. The details are as of yet unclear, but there are suggestions that the assassination may have involved a foreign power.

Momika had been granted temporary residence in Sweden in 2018, although his frustration with his adopted country’s lackluster commitment to freedom of speech led him to seek asylum in Norway in March 2024. After just a few weeks, the Norwegian authorities had him deported back to Sweden. According to Momika, the prosecutor in his trial had been seeking his extradition back to Iraq because of his criticisms of Islam. Back in August, he had posted the following on X: “Sweden and Norway have identified me as a threat to their security. Yes, I am a threat to the Islamization project of the West, which is being pursued by your Leftist communist government that is deceiving the citizens and making the country Islamic. So I have come to awaken the people and thwart the Islamization project of the West, and I will not be afraid of you.”

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In cases of this kind, it has become depressingly inevitable that commentators will seek to blame the victim. After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for the author’s murder. Instead of taking a united stance against a foreign regime threatening the life of a British citizen, pundits and politicians engaged in endless debates about whether Rushdie had brought this on himself. Crime novelist John Le Carré stated that “there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity”, and that “there is no absolute standard of free speech in any society”. It should go without saying that powerful theocrats do not require protection from the hurtful words of novelists.

Last month was the 10th anniversary of the massacre at the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Initially, world leaders were united in their condemnation of terrorists who had butchered cartoonists for drawing satirical caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. Thousands gathered at vigils and held placards bearing the words “Je Suis Charlie”. PEN America — an organization devoted to the principle of free expression — created a “courage award” for Charlie Hebdo. That was until dozens of members of PEN, including writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Junot Díaz, signed an open letter in protest. Charlie Hebdo, they claimed, had mocked a “section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled and victimized”. This was, of course, to misidentify the target. The cartoonists weren’t “punching down” at the Muslim minority, but rather “punching up” at the authoritarianism of institutionalized religion.

We never seem to learn that appeasement of religious extremists only makes them stronger. Our collective failure to take a firm stance for artistic liberty in the Rushdie affair has made it more difficult to uphold the principle today. That Momika was on trial in the first place suggests that Sweden’s commitment to freedom of expression has been subordinated to the creed of multiculturalism. According to the BBC, following Momika’s campaigns in 2023 the Swedish government had “pledged to explore legal means of abolishing protests that involve burning texts in certain circumstances”. Yet Momika’s copies of the Quran were his own property, and he was free to dispose of them as he wished. We might take the view that his method of protest is insensitive or provocative, but in a free society such behavior is a matter of individual conscience.

The victim-blamers have been predictably vocal. Within hours of the news of Momika’s murder, television personality Bushra Shaikh posted the following on X: “Some of you may disagree but the public desecration of any holy book should be viewed as a hate crime and the offender should face consequences”. She later clarified that by “face consequences” she was not supporting murder, but rather the principle that the “government decides on the punishment”. And yet Shaikh’s logic defeats itself. Her post has been widely interpreted as hate-filled and authoritarian. Does this mean that, if the government were to designate the public advocacy of blasphemy laws a “hate crime”, she would be content to be prosecuted?

Those who endorse authoritarianism, in other words, are laying a trap for themselves. If we look to the state to punish our detractors, where does that leave us when the values of those in power no longer align with our own? Momika has been blamed for the riots and the international diplomatic rows that ensued following his campaigns, but the peaceful protester is not responsible for those who break the law in response. Last summer, the Guardian published a piece that presented his Quran-burning as evidence of a “racism crisis”. One of the Swedish Muslim interviewees was quoted as saying: “I understand you are allowed to think and feel what you want, this is a free country, but there must be boundaries. It’s such a pity that it has happened so many times and Sweden doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes.”

Those of us who still believe in liberal values will balk at the suggestion — and the implied threat — in claiming that we are mistaken to support freedom of expression. Moreover, there is nothing racist about burning a copy of the Quran. Islam is a belief-system, not a race. The criminalization of “Islamophobia” makes about as much sense as prosecuting citizens for “Marxistophobia” or “Freemarketcapitalismophobia”. Had Momika burned a copy of The Communist Manifesto, would there be calls to modify the law to see him incarcerated?

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Increasingly, Western societies are pandering to religious zealots who are willing to resort to violence to achieve their aims. Members of the ruling class are undeniably afraid. During Prime Minister’s Questions in November 2024, the Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, Tahir Ali, asked Keir Starmer whether he would establish “measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions”. Starmer replied: “I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms.” A better response would have been: “Blasphemy laws are incompatible with the values of a free country.”

It is undeniably the case that Islamic theocracies are intolerant to dissent, but we have only ourselves to blame if we capitulate to pressure from foreign powers to undermine our commitment to secularism. Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan, for instance, blamed the radicalization of Islamic terrorists on the French president Emmanuel Macron’s tolerance for the right of citizens to blaspheme against Islam. In October 2020, he tweeted: “President Macron has chosen to deliberately provoke Muslims, incl his own citizens, through encouraging the display of blasphemous cartoons targeting Islam & our Prophet PBUH.” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey even cited Momika’s Quran-burning in an attempt to scupper Sweden’s bid to join Nato in 2023.

But blasphemy only makes sense to the faithful. Stéphane Charbonnier (known as “Charb”), the cartoonist and editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo who was among the victims of the 2015 atrocity, addressed this point in an “open letter” completed just two days before his death. “God is only sacred to those who believe in him,” he wrote. “If you wish to insult or offend God, you have to be sure that he exists… In France, a religion is nothing more than a collection of texts, traditions, and customs that it is perfectly legitimate to criticize. Sticking a clown nose on Marx is no more offensive or scandalous than popping the same schnoz on Muhammad.”=

This is the spirit of secularism — the French tradition of laïcité — that other countries in the western world should emulate. The problem is not the complaints from those who seek the implementation of sharia in democratic nations, but those in power who fail to reject such demands unequivocally. The murder of Salwan Momika should be a wake-up call for the West. Continued appeasement will only guarantee further bloodshed. For all the short-term risks of defending free speech, our long-term security depends upon it.

Even with my love of melodrama, I cannot sustain such histrionics. While it’s enjoyable to momentarily inhabit the caricature of the Andrew Doyle that exists in the minds of my detractors, the truth is far less exciting. On a recent appearance on the Jordan B. Peterson podcast, I let it be known that I am leaving the United Kingdom to work with the actor and comedian Rob Schneider on a new production company called No Apologies Media. Some of my friends have assumed that I am flouncing away out of a desperate conviction that all is lost. The reality is a little more nuanced.

While I do not believe that we live under tyranny, there are serious threats to liberty that ought to be addressed. Many members of the ruling class have scant regard for freedom of speech, as evidenced by the existence of hate speech laws, the recording of “non-crime hate incidents”, draconian jail terms meted out for offensive social media posts and continued calls for online censorship. These are not the hallmarks of an authentically free country, but one in which the authoritarian instinct has not been successfully tamed. As for the artistic industries, they are now similarly beholden to an ideology that demands self-censorship and punishes nonconformity. For creatives, this means finding ways to work within a system that is antagonistic to genuine free expression.

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I was the target of Guardian misinformation

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We often hear practitioners in the arts claiming that “cancel culture is a myth” and that “nobody is being censored”. This is an easy claim to make if your views are naturally in lockstep with the prevailing orthodoxies of the time, but it does suggest a degree of solipsism. The energy it must take to studiously ignore the continual stream of reported cases of artists being cancelled would be sufficient to keep the Large Hadron Collider running indefinitely.

Like many of those with unfashionable views, I have been dragged unexpectedly into the culture war. Whereas I once made my living solely from writing plays, musicals and performing stand-up comedy, in recent years I have found myself drawn to punditry. I have hosted a weekly show called Free Speech Nation on GB News for the last three years, written numerous articles and two books in defence of liberal values, and satirised the worst excesses of culture warriors through my satirical character Titania McGrath.

But while I feel a compulsion to address the ongoing threats to free speech in our culture, and recognise the importance of challenging a journalistic monoculture, I do miss working in the creative field. It is my hope that relocating to Arizona to work with Rob will bring greater opportunities to focus on writing and producing comedy and drama. Rob’s commitment to freedom of speech is absolute and uncompromising. Under the aegis of his new company, I’ve already begun writing a sitcom with Graham Linehan and Martin Gourlay which we hope to be filming early next year. In addition, we have plans for other television projects with a focus on political and social commentary. This culture war isn’t over yet.

It’s quite the team. And it goes without saying that Graham is one of the foremost comedy writers of our times. If you ever find yourself in a conversation with someone who claims that cancel culture doesn’t exist, it might be worth asking how it is that the creator of hit sitcoms such as Father Ted and The IT Crowd has been unable to work in the UK television industry for six years simply for airing his opinions. You won’t get a coherent answer, but it’ll be entertaining to watch the attempt.

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For myself, I’ve never been cancelled. One could even accuse me of finding a way to capitalise on my heterodox perspectives, given that much of my career has depended upon me expressing my views openly and satirising the intolerance of those who would rather I shut up. Yet isn’t it strange that a commitment to freedom of speech, individual autonomy, and equal rights to all irrespective of immutable characteristics, should be considered “heterodox” at all?

Rather than facing cancellation, I have experienced what Helen Dale has described as the “silo effect”. Although most of my political views would traditionally be described as “Left-wing”, my stance on the culture war has meant that I have been pigeonholed as being on the Right. So while I do not hold allegiance to any ideology, the insistence that I must be classified with one particular “side” means that my employment prospects will always be limited. The digital crèche of social media, with its insistence on political tribalism, binary thinking and purity spirals, has infected the mainstream. For many commentators, it’s now a matter of “you’re either with us or against us”.

The first time I became aware of an opportunity missed due to ideological factors was when a senior member of staff at the Soho Theatre in London told me candidly that I had been taken off the shortlist for a new playwriting scheme because I was white and male. Years later, when I taught stand-up courses at the Soho Theatre for up-and-coming comedians, I was informed that my contract could not be renewed because one of the members of the group felt “unsafe” after reading a joke I had tweeted. This impact for me was negligible — I didn’t rely on the work financially and was only continuing out of a sense of loyalty — but it did concern me that a leading theatre had such a casual disregard for the importance of artistic freedom.

A career in the creative arts should not be contingent on toeing any specific ideological line, but such incidents are now, unfortunately, the norm. The groupthink that currently predominates in theatre, film, television, comedy, publishing and all other branches of the arts has catalysed some promising pushback. The choreographer Rosie Kay and arts producer Denise Fahmy have established “Freedom in the Arts”, a project specifically aimed at tackling these restrictive conditions. One of their mission statements is “to protect freedom of expression and make sure that the arts are the place where difficult ideas can be addressed, explored and discussed”. What should be a prerequisite is now an ideal that we must struggle to reclaim.

In the current climate, artists are expected to be activists, to ensure that their work promotes the approved message. In other words, conformity is being demanded of those whose vocation ought to make them the most freethinking. When art is expected to be didactic and propagandistic, very little of interest will be produced. Rather than tailor their output to the whims of prissy moralists, artists should be aspiring to William Blake’s precept: “Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s”.

That is not to say that creatives cannot fall in line with intersectional dogma if they so choose, but we have seen how the arts quickly become enervated when this is the default expectation. Widespread self-censorship is inevitable when commissions are conditional on whether they reinforce voguish political trends. This does not mean that there are not exceptionally talented artists currently producing good work, but it does mean that their output is often sanitised.

Of course, the true artistic geniuses — those who emerge once or twice in a generation — can always find a way to play the game. There’s a very good reason why Shakespeare’s masterful narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are preceded by dull and dispensable panegyrics to his patron Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Michelangelo’s talents were so unquestionable that he was given licence to create explicitly erotic imagery for his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. When the Papal Master of Ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, complained that his nudes were more fitting for a bathhouse, Michelangelo painted the naked figure of Minos in the underworld with Biagio’s face, and for good measure added donkey’s ears and a snake biting his genitals.

We can’t all be Michelangelo. For us lesser mortals, we have to find a way to muddle along as best we can in an industry that expects us to be sheep to the establishment shepherds. I have no idea what my move to America will bring, but it is my hope to find a creative climate in which all this tribalistic nonsense is considered irrelevant. If nothing else, it’ll be an adventure.

Other users have followed suit, with an exodus of accounts from X to Bluesky, a social media platform that resembles in style the pre-Musk Twitter. Taylor Swift fans are flocking in their thousands and former CNN anchor Don Lemon posted a lengthy statement outlining his own reasons for relocating. The official account of the Clifton Suspension Bridge and Museum posted a similar statement, which has led to candlelit vigils and a mass outpouring of public grief.

After the Guardian’s announcement, many users were quick to point out that misinformation, far from being the publication’s chief concern, appears to be its speciality. Since Musk has introduced “community notes” to X, journalists who post falsehoods or misleading articles have quickly been corrected. Inevitably, the Guardian has been slapped with community notes on numerous occasions, which might help explain its decision to withdraw. On its website, the Guardian proudly boasts that it “delivers fearless, investigative journalism — giving a voice to the powerless and holding power to account”. But whether its executives admit it or not, the publication has developed a reputation for extreme ideological bias.

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The frequent “community-noting” on X suggests that this reputation is not unfounded. For instance, when the Guardian posted a piece entitled “England riots: how has ‘two-tier policing’ myth become widespread?”, notes were quickly added to provide links to the various articles in which the Guardian has asserted that “two-tier policing” based on race and sexuality is rife. When it published an article entitled “How many more children like Sara Sharif will be killed before smacking is banned?”, the community notes quickly explained that the victim had not merely been smacked, but had suffered extreme beatings and multiple forms of torture. All such hideous acts are, of course, already illegal.

The political theorist Patrick J. Deneen has argued that ideology always fails because once its inherent “falsehoods become more evident, the gap grows between what the ideology claims and the lived experience of human beings under its domain”. Those currently scurrying away from X are effectively retreating from the battlefield of ideas envisaged by John Milton in his Areopagitica (1644) in which Truth and Falsehood are seen as antagonists. “Let her and Falsehood grapple,” he wrote, “who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

I was the subject of the Guardian’s misinformation tactics only the other week. Reporting on a short course on the “woke” movement that I will soon be teaching at the New College of Florida, the Guardian described me as a “controversial British media personality and culture warrior”. It is of course entirely predictable that culture warriors would brand their critics as “culture warriors”, but quite how my consistent defence of liberal values is “controversial” is anyone’s guess.

The article’s author, Jason Wilson, went on to claim that I am guilty of “courting rightwing opinion” because I have been interviewed by Jordan Peterson and Tucker Carlson. I have also appeared on shows hosted by Left-wing commentators such as Hugo Rifkind and George Galloway, but thus far I have not been accused of “courting leftwing opinion”. Perhaps Wilson is simply unfamiliar with the concept of engaging in dialogue with people of opposing views?

Wilson further claimed that the course at the New College of Florida had been “reinstated”, which is odd given that it had never been cancelled in the first place. But the most egregious factual inaccuracy came when Wilson, in pointing out that I have written for Spiked, described the magazine as “hard-right”. Spiked began its existence as Living Marxism, and has consistently supported free speech, the values of democracy and liberal immigration policies, while vehemently opposing all forms of racism and white nationalism. Mislabelling Spiked as “hard-right” is either outright dishonesty or staggering ignorance. It’s what happens when journalistic standards are subordinated to propaganda.

The crowning moment of Wilson’s inadvertent self-satire was when he admitted, in light of my forthcoming course on the “woke movement”, that he had been actively searching for non-profit organisations which might qualify as members. He writes — and I am not making this up — “The Guardian’s search of IRS non-profit records indicate that while there are some 20 nonprofits with the word ‘woke’ in their names, none have reported any income in their most recent filings, and most appear to be inactive.” Wilson genuinely seems to believe that one can only subscribe to an ideology if it is registered with the government and has applied for tax exemptions. This is a species of literal-mindedness so colossal that it must surely be eligible for some kind of award.

On reflection, I got off lightly. A far more egregious example of the Guardian’s mendacity was the controversy over the Wi Spa in Los Angeles in 2021. A video of a woman who calls herself “CubanaAngel” on Instagram was posted online, in which she could be seen complaining to the staff about a naked man in the women’s jacuzzi area. The man in question, Darren Agee Merager, was a registered sex offender with previous convictions for indecent exposure, and it was alleged that the complainant at the Wi Spa had seen him semi-erect. “So it’s okay for a man to go into the women’s section and show his penis around the other women, young little girls — underage — in your spa?” she had said to staff, who defended his right to be there on the grounds of self-identification.

Josephine Bartosch outlined the sequence of events in an article for The Critic. After the video went viral, protests outside the spa were organised by women’s rights campaigners. These were quickly smeared as “far right” and mobbed by so-called “anti-fascist” protesters. The Guardian, having spent years promoting the notion that womanhood is an identity category rather than a biological reality, and having faced allegations of driving female journalists from its staff for their gender-critical views, then produced two articles in quick succession that implied CubanaAngel’s complaints were a hoax. The writers claimed that the incident “provided clear evidence of the links between anti-trans and far-right movements”, while Guardian columnist Owen Jones called the entire incident a “campaign of lies”.

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Even when it emerged that Merager had been charged for indecent exposure at the Wi Spa, the Guardian continued to conflate the female protesters with the far-Right agitators who had turned up to exploit the situation. As Bartosch puts it, “For all the Guardian’s handwringing about #metoo, when it comes to believing the women who complained about Merager’s crime, rather than ‘giving a voice to the powerless’ they pretended his victims didn’t exist. Women like CubanaAngel are ideological inconveniences.”

The combination of Musk’s successful Twitter bid and a forthcoming second term for Donald Trump has curdled many once sensible minds. Those who were comfortable with the echo chamber that Twitter had formerly established, where users were routinely banned for pointing out that no human being has ever changed sex, are now looking for an alternative. It is the psychological equivalent of the “safe space” mentality, one which led Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy to establish a “Self-Care Suite” after Trump’s victory. Here students could isolate themselves and process their trauma by playing with Lego, drawing with crayons, and bingeing on milk and cookies.

And now we have the digital milk and cookies of Bluesky, where users can be shielded from the disorientation that occurs where plurality of opinion is permitted. Such online echo chambers are of course largely to blame for the escalation of political tribalism that we have seen in recent years, and also for the sense of shock that many experience when elections don’t go their way. While it is true that Musk has reinstated accounts on X that post some genuinely objectionable material, this is the price one pays for an open marketplace of ideas.

This desire to avoid any challenges to one’s ideological certainties is becoming more widespread, and there is a sense in which we are entering a new phase in the culture war. I am not celebrating the departure of activists to Bluesky, because I would rather hear their views and see them participate in these important debates. By insulating themselves from criticism, and seeking platforms where their misrepresentations will not be flagged, the Guardian and its ilk are doing themselves no favours. If they are serious about their goals, they should reconsider their resolution to speak only to those who will unquestioningly cheer them on. Those who withdraw from the debate stand no chance of winning it.

It’s all too easy to miss the early warnings of an impending disaster. Today’s culture wars are often interpreted as the symptoms of an ephemeral fad. Most can feel the tremors — restrictions on free speech, public shaming of those with unfashionable views, regressive identity politics masquerading as “progress” — but there is a widespread sense that if we ignore the problems, they will simply disappear. But what if these rumblings presage something far worse to come? What if, like the people of Pompeii, we are at risk of civilisational collapse but are misinterpreting the signs?

Further tremors have reverberated recently with renewed attacks on the First Amendment to the US Constitution, perhaps the final bastion of free speech in the West. Speaking at the World Economic Forum earlier this month, former Secretary of State John Kerry argued that when it comes to “disinformation”, the “First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence”.

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The First Amendment codifies a “negative liberty”, not a licence for certain behaviour but rather a protection from government interference. It reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” It can function as a kind of barrier to the worst excesses of the illiberal Left, even at a time when their party of choice occupies the White House.

Such challenges to the First Amendment began around 10 years ago with the emergence of the Critical Social Justice (or “woke”) movement, which sought to promote equity according to group identity through authoritarian means. In March 2018, an article appeared on the website of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) which noted that by this point it was “common” for Leftist activists “to call for lower legal protections for speech”. The writer concluded that such calls were misguided, describing the First Amendment as “our most powerful tool to keep the government from regulating the conversations that spark change in the world”.

But other activists took a different view from the ACLU. In 2018, two of the founders of Critical Race Theory, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, republished their 1997 book Must We Defend Nazis?: Hate Speech, Pornography, and the New First Amendment. This version of the book was modified according to the shift in activists’ demands, and the subtitle was now Why the First Amendment Should Not Protect Hate Speech and White Supremacy. In that same year, activist and legal scholar Justin Hansford argued in the Yale Law Journal Forum that, when it comes to race, the “marketplace of ideas” does not apply. “When ideas on race that would disrupt the racial hierarchy of white over Black emerge,” wrote Hansford, “the First Amendment is disproportionately applied to trample that dissent”.

The “woke” movement had always taken a pro-censorship stance, but by 2018 the First Amendment was clearly identified as the key obstacle to their aims. This was developed further in The Cult of the Constitution (2019), in which legal scholar Mary Anne Franks took aim at “First Amendment fundamentalism”. An entire chapter was devoted to what Franks calls “the cult of free speech”, a chilling phrase that recalls Labour MP Nadia Whittome’s belief that “we must not fetishise ‘debate’ as though debate is itself an innocuous, neutral act”. Authoritarians frequently resort to this kind of sophistry rather than admit outright that they find the concept of free speech inherently rebarbative.

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In October 2019, former editor of Time magazine Richard Stengel continued this disturbing trend with an article for the Washington Post entitled “Why America needs a hate speech law”. Stengel rehashed the typical concerns about “false narratives” and “lies”, as though any kind of speech regulator could possibly be immune from deceptive or misleading behaviour. He also repeated the “direct effects theory” which posits that people act on cue from social media posts, even though more than six decades of research into media impact on public behaviour has seen such notions fully discredited. The First Amendment, Stengel argued, “should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw”.

A snobbish mistrust of the masses lies at the heart of the opposition to the First Amendment, a feature that we can trace to the Frankfurt School and the French postmodernists of the Sixties, two groups that have substantially influenced the philosophy behind Critical Social Justice. According to this view, popular culture has created a society of unthinking clones. What Herbert Marcuse described as the “one-dimensional man” is irredeemably blind to his own subjugation and reacts mechanically according to decrees from above. According to this perspective, “hate speech” has the power to rile up one group against another, even though the evidence for this claim is scant.

Those of us familiar with the concept of the “long march through the institutions” will be aware that these theories take time to percolate and to infect the mainstream. John Kerry’s recent remarks would suggest that First Amendment scepticism has finally made the leap from academic activism into the political sphere. Whether it gains traction in its new home should trouble us all.

The signs are not promising. This week, Hillary Clinton weighed into the debate during an interview with CNN. “We should be, in my view, repealing something called Section 230,” she argued, referring to the section of the Communications Decency Act introduced in 1996 that protects online platforms from liability for comments posted by users. Without these protections, big tech would have little choice but to implement draconian censorship measures. The consequences for free speech, in the de facto public square of our digital age, would be catastrophic.

Clinton stopped short of a call for a ban on “hate speech”, but how long before other mainstream politicians are echoing Kerry’s assessment of the First Amendment as a “major block”? There was a telling moment in the recent vice-presidential debate, in which Tim Walz interjected to claim that “hate speech” is excluded from First Amendment protections. The remark was so fleeting that it was not even included in the official CBS News transcript, but it was perhaps the most significant moment of the evening. If the Democrats are triumphant in the election, Americans will be governed by an administration that does not believe the First Amendment is fit for purpose.

History teaches us that legal proscriptions against offensive viewpoints do not have a mitigating effect; bad ideas that are driven underground tend to fester and multiply. We also know that laws against offensive speech soon become expanded to incorporate any viewpoints that are not approved by those in power. In 1644, John Milton published his Areopagitica, a counterblast to the Licensing Order of June 1643 which decreed that all printed texts be passed before a censor in advance of publication. In this essential defence of liberty, he pointed out that censors do not “stay in matters heretical” but inevitably broaden their remit to “any subject that is not to their palate”.

Once a state has been empowered to set the limits of speech, to introduce legislation against vague and indefinable concepts such as “hate” or “offence”, the groundwork for future tyranny is firmly established. One thinks of Juvenal’s famous question: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (who will watch the watchmen?). Kerry, Clinton, Walz et al seem to believe that those in authority can be trusted to distinguish between fact and fiction, but this was roundly disproved during the Covid pandemic when the lab-leak theories, now widely accepted as credible, were censored as “disinformation”.

Any attempt to carve out exceptions to the First Amendment for “hate speech” will inevitably empower the state to curb freedom of expression at will. The hopelessly subjective notion of “hate” means that this will be tantamount to a censor’s charter, a means by which political opposition can be stifled with the backing of the Constitution. As more and more political figures are willing to openly question the validity of the First Amendment, the threat to free speech in the West is now palpable. The tremors are becoming more frequent, and we ignore them at our peril.

But how about this?

“Sympathise with me, indeed! Ah, no! Cast your sympathy on the chill waves of troubled waters; fling it on the oases of futurity; dash it against the rock of gossip; or, better still, allow it to remain within the false and faithless bosom of buried scorn.”

Such is the stirring overture of Irene Iddesleigh (1897) of Amanda M. Ros, a woman whose name is now invariably followed by the descriptor “the worst novelist in history”. On one level, it’s an astonishing accomplishment for the wife of a humble stationmaster in County Antrim: someone who was destined for obscurity rather than ignominy.

Her fate, however, was sealed from the moment an early review by the humourist Barry Pain — under the mean-spirited headline “The Book of the Century” — brought her to the attention of the literary elite. “It is enormous,” Pain had written of Irene Iddesleigh. “It makes the Eiffel Tower look short; the Alps are molehills compared to it; it is on a scale that has never before been attempted.”

Pain’s review generated so much interest among the cognoscenti that an “Amanda Ros Club” was soon established in London, where members would share their favourite passages and compete to write imitations of their own. Mark Twain said that Irene Iddesleigh was “one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time”. At meetings in Oxford, C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their fellow “Inklings” would regularly challenge each other to read aloud excerpts from Ros’s books without laughing.

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Her plot lines are conventional enough. The titular heroine of Irene Iddesleigh is in love with her tutor, Oscar Otwell, but is pressured by her adoptive parents into marrying the wealthy Sir John Dunfern. Inevitably, the relationship soon sours, and Dunfern is driven to a jealous rage on discovering that his wife’s true affections reside elsewhere. He imprisons her in a kind of oubliette that he calls his “room of correction”, but not before he unleashes a blistering castigation:

“Was I falsely informed of your ways and worth? Was I duped to ascend the ladder of liberty, the hill of harmony, the tree of triumph, and the rock of regard, and when wildly manifesting my act of ascension, was I to be informed of treading still in the valley of defeat?… Speak! Irene! Wife! Woman! Do not sit in silence and allow the blood that now boils in my veins to ooze through cavities of unrestrained passion and trickle down to drench me with its crimson hue!”

Ros had no more interest in subtext than in the opinions of her critics. And yet with some reflection she might have been grateful for Barry Pain’s scathing review. Just as Walter Pater’s reappraisal of Botticelli in his book Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) reinvigorated interest in this neglected artist, Pain had immortalised the works of Ros.

Ros didn’t quite see it that way. She responded to Pain’s review with a lengthy diatribe as a preface to her second novel Delina Delaney (1898). “This so-called Barry Pain,” she wrote, “has taken upon him to criticise a work the depth of which fails to reach the solving power of his borrowed, and, he’d have you believe, varied talent.” Her scalding review of a review even went so far as to suggest that Pain “must either have been in love, desperate love, with Irene or the author”. It was sexual tension, not literary taste, that accounted for Pain’s antipathy.

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One of the most enthusiastic notices came from the pen of Aldous Huxley, who compared Ros’s highly wrought and mannered prose style to that of John Lyly, one of the “university wits” of Shakespearean England. Recommending Delina Delaney as “Mrs. Ros’s masterpiece”, Huxley went on to commend her for perfecting the style of “Euphuism” which takes its name from Lyly’s prose works Eupheus: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Eupheus and his England (1580).

Huxley marvelled that Ros, being completely unfamiliar with the school of Euphuism, had somehow “arrived independently at precisely the same stage of development as Lyly and his disciples”. Like these early writers, Ros had become intoxicated with the joys of verbal artifice, often at the expense of artistry, and was therefore “an Elizabethan born out of her time”.

Yet I’m not entirely convinced that Ros was oblivious to the impact of her works. I have little doubt that her first novel was published in earnest, but is it not possible that once her reputation was established she learned to play along, making those who mocked her the butt of the joke? If you read her three novels consecutively, it is clear her most derided habits seemed to escalate over time. The metaphors become more tortuous, the alliteration more insistent, the plot twists more improbable (in Delina Delaney, a supposedly long-dead cousin is eventually identified by the six toes on her right foot). Besides, Ros’s continual declarations of her own genius must surely be put down to mischief rather than delusion. At one point, she decided that her literary legacy was so secure that she was “sistering Shakespeare, Milton and Blake”.

Ros has an astonishing capacity to extend her metaphors beyond their natural remits. Mere sunlight is tedious to her, and so in Chapter III of Irene Iddesleigh she envisages a moment “when the hottest ray of that heavenly orb shall shoot its cheerful charge against the window panes”. By Ros’s standards this is restrained, and so by Chapter XVII the metaphor has sprawled beyond any sane reader’s expectations:

“The mighty orb of gladness spreads its divine halo over many a harrowed home — it encircles the great expanse of foreign adventure and home-hoarded enterprise, and wields its awakening influence against the burthened boroughs of bigotry and lightened land of liberty to a sense of gilded surprise.”

Immortal stuff, obviously. And yet I suspect it is also a sign that the author must have realised that this was precisely the kind of verbiage her fanbase craved. She could not have been unaware of the criticisms; she spent a good deal of her time seeking out all press cuttings relating to her work, even from the harshest of her detractors. In one letter to a friend, she wrote:

“I would be glad to see the critique you mentioned which appeared in the Daily Express, no matter how bad the beast described his effortless effort to sting the Author, who loves to see she can wring from the critic crabs their biting little bits of buggery! Every critique you see, cut it out and let me have it, please.”

What is this if not the knowing attitude of the professional goader? Note how Ros refers to herself in the third person, as though “the Author” is simply another one of her imaginative creations.

Over the course of her career, Ros became better and better at writing badly, and her popularity soared as a result. In this regard, she bears comparison with the New York socialite and singer Florence Foster Jenkins (1868–1944), whose operatic warbling was so popular that tickets for her show at Carnegie Hall sold out within two hours. Perhaps Ros was living in a permanent state of cognitive dissonance, or perhaps she accepted the ridicule as consolation for her fame. A more intriguing possibility is that she was engaged in an elaborate form of trolling.

When her biographer Jack Loudan once asked her why she had named one of her principal characters Lord Raspberry, Ros looked puzzled for a moment and then replied: “What else would I call him?” Loudan took this as evidence of “her complete inability to realise why people found her books amusing instead of the serious works she intended them to be”, but I’m not so sure. There are so many elements to Ros’s novels and poems which are clearly meant to be funny that I find it funnier still that they have been overlooked.

For instance, it’s striking that no critic has commented on the preface to Delina Delaney, in which our author takes a full page to bemoan the fact that she is expected to write a preface. And are we really to believe that Ros did not appreciate the humour in opening a poem about Easter with the line: “Dear Lord the day of eggs is here”? From the same volume, Fumes of Formation (1933), we have the oft-quoted “On visiting Westminster Abbey”:

“Holy Moses! Take a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer…”

As for Lord Raspberry in Helen Huddleson (published posthumously in 1969), he leads a cast of characters that includes Cherry Raspberry (his sister), Mrs Strawberry, Mrs Greengage, Sir Peter Plum, the Earl of Grape, Madam Pear, Sir Christopher Current and Lily Lentil. Is this unintentional comedy, as Mark Twain insisted, or the brilliant chicanery of one who, as one former school friend recalled, was “gay, lively and always ready for a prank”?

I’m inclined to think that Ros explicitly revealed her satirical intent in her epigraph to Poems of Puncture: “if the ‘cuddy-brained’ can’t see / Where lies the joke — Just think of me!”. A “cuddy” is an old Irish term for “donkey”, and one gets the feeling that it is perhaps the sneering intellectuals who were being led all along. When I read of poor Helen Huddleson, whisked away to a brothel known as “Modesty Manor” by the evil Madam Pear, and kissed not by her captor’s lips but by “a pair of polluted rims of rouge”, I cannot help but sense the ghost of Amanda Ros laughing along with the rest of us.

On Friday, the new Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson notified Parliament of her intention “to stop further commencement” of the Act and “to consider options, including its repeal”. Few further details are provided, other than her awareness of “concerns that the Act would be burdensome on providers and on the OfS [Office for Students]”. Upholding campus free speech, it seems, is just too much of a hassle.

During the dying days of the Conservative regime, many of us feared that this new Labour government would use its new powers to continue waging its culture war, and this is not the first red flag. Phillipson had already announced her intention to compel free schools and academies to teach the national curriculum, and that it will be rewritten under the guidance of Professor Becky Francis, an academic whose publication history has a clear activist bent. While head of UCL’s Institute of Education, she launched the Centre for Sociology of Education and Equity, which prioritises “equity and social justice” in schools. The emphasis on “equity” rather than equality is telling: it is a keystone of intersectional ideology, meaning that equality of outcome is sought over equality of opportunity.

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In light of this, it makes sense that the next step would be to ensure that dissenting views continue to be stifled in higher education. After all, the introduction of the Higher Education Act was a much-needed attempt to make sure that universities uphold freedom of speech and plurality of opinion. It requires universities to guarantee academics the freedom “to question and test received wisdom” and “to put forward controversial or unpopular opinions” without risk to their livelihoods or future job prospects. It protects visiting speakers from being disinvited for controversial views. And it demands that governing bodies formulate a Code of Practice which upholds these responsibilities, and that these are annually brought to the attention of all students. The intended effect, suffice it to say, is to cultivate a more intellectually open climate by promoting academic freedom and the importance of free speech within the law.

In a sense, it is disappointing that such ideas require legislation at all. Partly this is due to an activist contingent within academic circles that has become adept at intimidating colleagues into silence. The result has been the development of a new monoculture in higher education in which self-censorship is rife. A 2020 report, for instance, found that one in three Right-leaning scholars censor themselves “for fear of consequences to [their] career”. A further study in 2022 found that three in four conservative academics occasionally self-censored while at work.

But censorship isn’t binary, and Left-wing academics are also increasingly at risk, notably those who are sceptical about activists’ demands that the highly contested belief in “gender identity” ought to supersede biological sex in matters of public policy. As far back as 2011, Julie Bindel was officially “No Platformed” by the National Union of Students (NUS), when delegates at the LGBT conference passed a motion called “This conference believes Julie Bindle is vile”. They couldn’t even be bothered to spell her name correctly. In the decade to come, she would be joined on the list of undesirables by a number of leading feminist thinkers: Linda Bellos, Selina Todd, Kathleen Stock and Jo Phoenix, to name a few.

One of the key ways in which the Higher Education Act would address these problems is its creation of a “free speech tsar” at the Office for Students, a role until now fulfilled by Professor Arif Ahmed. Initially, part of his job was to design a “free speech complaints scheme”, whereby universities who fail in their responsibilities could be fined. There was also a “statutory tort” provision, which enabled academics who had lost their jobs for exercising their free speech to sue their universities. However, peers in the House of Lords attempted to see this aspect of the Bill jettisoned and, after it was reinstated by the Commons, a watered-down version was passed.

And now it seems that it is going to be binned in its entirety, in spite of previous cross-party support. However this situation unfolds, it should remind us that the threat to free speech is very real, and its erosion is often accelerated by those in power. The universities have been the laboratories for the creeping authoritarianism of our times, and so it seems clear that the problem needs to be tackled at the source. Only a few weeks ago, the new culture secretary Lisa Nandy was declaring that “the era of culture wars is over”. It looks, however, as though it’s only just begun.

When it comes to songs about friendship, Michael Jackson’s first US number one “Ben” (1972) is among the best known and the most sentimental. But unlike others of the genre — such as “Lean On Me” by Bill Withers (1972), or “With a Little Help from My Friends” by The Beatles (1967) — the key difference is that the subject isn’t human. “Ben” is a rat.

That this mawkish song about a boy and his pet rodent could have catalysed the career of one of the biggest pop stars of all time is only one aspect of the strangeness of this story. The inspiration for the song can be traced directly to a Belfast seed merchant and CND activist called Stephen Gilbert who, in 1968, published the novel Ratman’s Notebooks about a man who trains rats to wreak vengeance on his enemies. When this was filmed in 1971 as the movie Willard, the reissued paperback of the novel sold over a million copies. And it was for the sequel, Ben in 1972, that Michael Jackson provided the theme song.

All art is imitative. Even the greatest geniuses, those for whom there is seemingly no precedent, have learned their craft in the observation of other artists. The canon of literature is not formed at the behest of academics issuing decrees from their ivory towers, but rather from those works that are most emulated and admired by creatives. And this applies as much to popular culture as it does to high art. Take, for instance, T’Pau’s breakthrough hit “China in Your Hand” (1987) which was inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Some of these ripples of influence are admittedly more arbitrary than others. But there is something especially gratifying about being able to trace the work of a relatively obscure Northern Irish novelist such as Stephen Gilbert all the way to the “King of Pop”, who died 15 years ago to the day..

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I remember speaking to a senior member of the Northern Irish Arts Council who was lamenting his country’s poor track record of sustaining the legacy of its creative sons and daughters. Of course, the likes of C.S. Lewis need no further promotion, but what of the lesser-known names? When I attempted to arrange a blue plaque for the birthplace of Belfast novelist Forrest Reid, I was met with bafflement from one of the decision-makers. Even this person so steeped in local culture apparently had no idea that Reid was considered Northern Ireland’s foremost novelist by E.M. Forster, and had won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1944. Such is the fickle nature of literary trends.

As for Gilbert, you won’t find his work on any of the shelves of Belfast’s bookshops. But there is much to admire in the five novels that were published during his lifetime. Reading these books, one is immediately struck by the sheer imaginative range on display. The Landslide (1943) is a fantastical tale about a boy who encounters primeval creatures in his village that have been brought back into existence after a landslide exposes their long-dormant eggs. Bombardier (1944) is a vivid and compelling roman à clef about the author’s experiences as a gunner in France during the war which includes some fascinating insights into the evacuation of Dunkirk from the soldier’s perspective. Gilbert followed this with Monkeyface (1948), an eccentric story about an ape boy who is brought from a forest in South America and raised in a Belfast suburb. Then came The Burnaby Experiments (1952), in which Gilbert seems to take revenge on his mentor Forrest Reid by casting him in the role of a voyeuristic villain with supernatural powers. (The intense love-hate relationship between Reid and Gilbert is far too complex and intricate to explore here.) Ratman’s Notebooks finally appeared in 1968, an outlandish horror story to round off this bizarrely varied catalogue of work.

That Ratman’s Notebooks was destined to become famous due to a Hollywood adaptation was a source of some irritation for Gilbert. He died in 2010 having refused to watch Willard, its sequel Ben, or the 2003 remake of Willard starring Crispin Glover. He wasn’t happy with the studio’s decision to christen his unnamed narrator Willard Stiles, and to relocate the story to California. His instincts were right; this off-kilter tale is far better suited to a provincial rather than a cosmopolitan setting. Ratman’s Notebooks concerns a discontented man, dominated by a scornful mother and bullied by his boss, who resorts to acts of horrific violence. Somehow this all makes so much more sense in Belfast, a city with a troubled history and where the borderland of reality and fiction has always felt malleable.

Ratman’s Notebooks is often dismissed as a lurid and dispensable work of pulp fiction, but its influence on the horror genre has been hugely significant. The critic Kim Newman has argued its success following the release of Willard “made rampaging vermin a major horror theme of the 1970s and ’80s” and has pointed out that even Stephen King’s debut Carrie (1974) follows the same story archetype of the “turning worm” revenge fantasy.

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Gilbert presents Ratman’s Notebooks in the form of a diary, and opens with the arresting line: “Mother says there are rats in the rockery.” Although it would be wrong to see the narrator as a fictionalised version of Gilbert, there are certainly parallels with the author’s life. After the death of his father in 1934, the family had been compelled to adapt to more meagre circumstances. They moved from Kensington Park in East Belfast to a relatively modest terrace house just off the Antrim Road. Having grown accustomed to an affluent way of life, they were forced to make many changes; the car was sold, along with many items of furniture. “Tea isn’t high tea anymore,” Gilbert wrote in his unpublished autobiography. “Just tea, with bread, jam and margarine. Mother watches us all to make sure nobody spreads the jam or the margarine too thickly.”

In tone and substance, this could have been a line from Ratman’s Notebooks. This theme of social decline seemingly obsessed Gilbert, and recurs continually in his novels. The narrator of Ratman’s Notebooks is forced to suffer the indignity of having to work as a subordinate in a company once owned by his deceased father, a scenario that bears some resemblance to Gilbert’s own experience. As our anti-hero’s bitterness festers, so too does his desire for revenge, not solely against those who have directly wrong him, but against society as a whole.

Gilbert was born in 1912 in Newcastle, County Down. He was one of four children, although his father William also had two other daughters from a previous marriage. William was the manager of Samuel McCausland Ltd, a Belfast-based seed merchants, the business that Stephen was later to inherit. His early life was relatively privileged; the family could afford to put him through boarding school, first in England at the Leas in Hoylake, Merseyside, and then at Loretto School in Edinburgh. His headmaster at Loretto, James Greenlees, once wrote a prescient remark about Gilbert: “I think it more than probable that he will eventually do something quite out of the ordinary, as he has an original way of looking at things.” In Ratman’s Notebooks, Gilbert was to prove Greenlees right.

In the archives at Queen’s University one can read Gilbert’s immense unpublished four-volume autobiography, in which he makes clear that Ratman’s Notebooks was his final attempt to fulfil his lifelong ambitions. “My service to Mammon”, he writes, “has kept me from serving literature”. His ultimate aim, “to leave business and become a whole-time writer”, never came to fruition. That said, he enjoyed a highly successful career in the seed industry and realised his goal “to marry and have four children – two boys and two girls”. As far I am aware, I am the only person to have read his autobiography. To open the pages, I first had to clear away layers of cobwebs and desiccated spiders.

The Gilbert archives at Queen’s University gives us a fascinating insight into his creative process. He was a meticulous researcher; there are handwritten notes about rats detailing their feeding habits, and the physical and behavioural characteristics of various species. One of Gilbert’s many idiosyncrasies was to record the precise times that he began and completed his novels. For this reason, we know that he started work on the eventual version of Ratman’s Notebooks at 6:30am on St Patrick’s Day, 1967, and finished his first draft at 7:31am on Tuesday 10 October of the same year. The first outline of the novel dates from 1938, which shows that the idea had been germinating for over a quarter of a century.

A number of manuscript drafts of Ratman’s Notebooks are still extant, some of which contain tantalising annotations regarding the various directions the novel could have taken. In one handwritten note — “Ben can read” — Gilbert has even toyed with the possibility of making the story explicitly supernatural. Another note sees his unnamed narrator make the claim that “there is nothing wrong with homosexuality except that it is entirely unfashionable”. Where such a line of thought might have taken the plotline is anyone’s guess.

It is perhaps no surprise that Gilbert’s sole foray into the horror genre turned out to be his most successful book. He was instinctively drawn to the fantastical, as evinced in works such as Monkeyface, The Burnaby Experiments and the unpublished dystopian novel The Labyrinth. “I need something out of the ordinary to work round,” he wrote in his journal on 29 October 1999, “which is what has taken me to Fantasy”. His body of work is infused with a baleful darkness relating to issues of morality and human corruption. Ratman’s Notebooks is not just a revenge story, but a study of hubris. The narrator makes himself into a kind of deity to the rats, who become engines of his most malevolent desires.

And so it is remarkable that such a bleak story should ultimately lead us to Michael Jackson’s “Ben”. The lyrics by Don Black included a middle eight which Jackson later said were his favourite in all his songs: “I used to say ‘I’ and ‘me’; now it’s ‘us’, now it’s ‘we’.” This sentiment seems so far from Gilbert’s original conception that it is curious to reflect on the connection. But it’s a reminder that an artist’s legacy does not necessarily end with the work itself, and there are myriad and unexpected ways in which it might endure.

I recently took a stroll through Gordon’s supposed Eden, and must confess to sensing a certain kinship with his romantic speculations. To enter the Vallée de Mai, a forest of almost 50 acres on the island of Praslin, feels like a small adventure, a throwback to a time when the kind of burly colonialists envisaged by H. Rider Haggard would hack their way through dense undergrowth with machetes. It is what conservationists call a “primary forest”, an uninterrupted ecosystem that has been relatively unscathed by human interference. I can understand why Gordon thought he had stumbled upon the terrestrial paradise. 

It only takes a few steps into the Vallée de Mai before the vegetation engulfs you on all sides. You can no longer see the road, only patches of sky through the ceiling of immense overlapping fanlike leaves. The forest’s isolation for millions of years has meant that it is home to many unique forms of flora and fauna, and it is now a Unesco World Heritage Site. “This is a special place,” my guide tells me. She isn’t wrong.  

Gordon’s belief that this was mankind’s original home was expressed in a letter to the botanist Sir William Thiselton-Dyer, then assistant director of Kew Gardens. His case was based on multiple factors. Gordon was one of many religious thinkers of the time who subscribed to the belief in the lost continent of Lemuria, which was said to be the source of human life and to have sunk beneath the Indian Ocean. Before we learnt about plate tectonics, this hypothesis made sense of the corresponding natural features of Africa, Australia and the Indian subcontinent. In his letter, Gordon employs some creative and tortuous logic to connect the underwater clefts at the seabed, one of which runs in the direction of the Seychelles, with the four rivers mentioned in the Book of Genesis.  

After spending some time in the Vallée de Mai, one senses a profound connection to a primordial era. While fantasies of Lemuria have long been discredited, there is a plausible theory that the area is a remnant of Gondwana, the supercontinent that broke apart approximately 140 million years ago. Its most famous plant, the coco de mer, bears a seed that is far too heavy to be dispersed by natural means. It is endemic only to Praslin and the nearby island of Curieuse, although it has been successfully grown elsewhere. One tree was imported to the Palm House at Kew in 1994, and another flourishes at the botanical gardens on Mahé (the largest island in the Seychelles), planted there by the late Duke of Edinburgh in 1956.  

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Let’s talk about that seed. I am ashamed to say it took me two attempts to lift it; in my defence I was hungover and unprepared for its weight. Each seed can be as heavy as 25kg, and can grow up to half a metre in length, making it the largest in existence. But it is the shape that has made it legendary. Once the husk is removed, it resembles female genitalia, complete with hair at the pubic region and buttocks at the back. One of the seed’s botanical names, lodoicea callipyge, comes from the Greek for “beautiful rump”.  

Naturally, the seed has always been a symbol of fertility, and there are traditions that the pulpy kernel — apparently delicious — is an aphrodisiac. It is sometimes known as a “love nut” or the suggestive “double coconut”, and one London shop specialising in sex toys and lingerie has called itself “Coco de Mer”. As a symbol, the seed is everywhere on the Seychelles; it is mounted in hotel lobbies, and its image is emblazoned on souvenirs and tourist advertisements. At the Vallée de Mai gift shop you can even buy a perfume which incorporates extracts from the fruit.  

Even before its origins were understood — back before the Seychelles were first inhabited by French settlers in the mid 18th century — the seeds were said to have talismanic properties. When their shells would wash up on the shores of countries around the Indian Ocean (they will only float to the surface once the interior has decayed), locals assumed that they must grow on some underwater tree and that they had “fallen upwards”. In the Maldives, beached coco de mer nuts were automatically the property of the king. Those who kept them for themselves were executed. Today, poaching the seeds from the Vallée de Mai carries a prison sentence, a point that my guide is keen to emphasise. One would have thought that my difficulty in lifting the thing would make me an unlikely thief. 

Naturally, these shells became expensive gifts popular among royalty, a tradition we can trace from the mediaeval period until the present day. The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II purchased one for 4,000 gold Florins in 1602, and had it etched with nautical motifs and fashioned into an ornamental ewer (a photograph can be viewed on Oxford University’s Cabinet website). And having spent their honeymoon in the Seychelles in 2011, the Prince and Princess of Wales were presented with a coco de mer seed by the country’s foreign minister. It’s a socially acceptable version of the saucy wedding gift for aristocrats. 

The erotic impression becomes even more pronounced when one considers that the coco de mer trees are dioecious rather than hermaphroditic, which is to say that the species is divided into male and female. While the female trees bear yonic seeds, the males have catkins that are decidedly phallic in appearance and can grow to over a metre long. This has given rise to the local myth that, after nightfall, the boy trees uproot themselves and fornicate with the girls, like a pornographic version of The Day of the Triffids.

The trees must be strong, given that they can reach over 30 metres in height, carry dozens of these hefty fruits, and still stay upright during monsoon season. My guide explains how this is achieved by showing me the remnants of a dead coco de mer, a basin of wood which lies embedded in the ground for six decades after each tree’s death. This natural mechanism is similar in concept to a human knee, so that as the palms are thrashed about in the winds the bulbous base swivels in this socket and remains standing. It’s one of those incredibly sophisticated natural features that might prompt even the staunchest of evolutionists to entertain thoughts of an omnipotent designer.

But there is so much more to this forest than the coco de mer. Without a guide, I would have missed it all. She was adept at pointing out the tiny native Praslin snails that adhere themselves to palms. She identified the call of the black parrot, unique to the Vallée de Mai, often heard but rarely seen. She told me about the threats to the forest from invasive species, and in particular the influx of “yellow crazy ants” that spray acid into the eyes of geckos and skinks and other creatures that are essential to a functional ecosystem. Specialists have found methods to reduce this malevolent ant population, but preserving this little ancient realm is no easy feat. The risk of fire is another persistent worry. Forest fires tend to break out on Praslin every few years, and there was an especially severe one in April 1958 that would have totally destroyed the Vallée de Mai were it not for the expertise of a small group of local firefighters.

“As we generally believe that there was a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and a Tree of Life,” wrote General Gordon, “actual trees, set aside for a time to be imbued with mystic powers, there is no reason why these trees should not exist now.” He was convinced that the Tree of Life still existed in the form of the breadfruit tree — the edible fruit of which is often fried into chips — and that the Tree of Knowledge was an ancestor of the coco de mer.

Whether Gordon really believed this or not is perhaps beside the point. The dream itself has a certain poetic grandeur about it and, as he pointed out in his letter to Kew, “if it will save the Coco de Mer species from extinction or go some way towards it you will pardon it”. I personally doubt that the Vallée de Mai was the scene of Adam’s temptation, not least because Eve would have required the biceps of Charles Atlas to pick its fruit and pass it on to her husband. Then again, in this world of natural marvels, maybe anything is possible

In those early days, the sense of an angel of death targeting a particular community seemed like the realisation of a nightmare. When it first emerged in the US it was known as GRID (gay-related immune deficiency). An article appeared in the New York Times on 3 July 1981 with the ominous headline: “Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals.” Some called it the “gay plague”.

Confusion turned into widespread panic, not limited to the gay community. The first time I heard of the disease was during a PE lesson at primary school. Such was the general ignorance that our teacher warned us not to borrow each other’s plimsolls or we’d catch Aids. Some time later I saw the government’s public health advert on the television; I remember little about it except the large tombstone with the dreaded four-letter acronym as an epitaph.

In the 40 years since the virus was identified, there has been a sea-change in attitudes. Whereas the government’s campaign set out to frighten people with the message “it’s a deadly disease and there’s no known cure”, a recent advert by the Terrence Higgins Trust reminds people that those diagnosed with HIV “can live a healthy, happy life just like anyone else”. Much of the stigma has dissipated.

The same is true of homosexuality itself. One could say that the while the Aids crisis exacerbated the hatred and mistrust against an already beleaguered community, it also spurred activists onto the pathway to normalisation. Whereas the pursuit of a gay lifestyle was romanticised — or demonised — as a dance of Eros and Thanatos, a way to ensure that one remained beyond the scope of civilised society, today the very notion of being orientated towards one’s own sex is largely perceived as unremarkable. Those who bleat about their oppression as gay people in a climate of widespread tolerance are luxuriating in a kind of perverse nostalgia for a reality they could never comprehend.

For those who lived through it, the Aids crisis was a moment when the concept of a “gay community” actually meant something. Lesbians were instrumental in providing support for their gay brothers, and amid the loss there was a sense of greater solidarity. I remember seeing a production of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart in New York in 2004. The audience mostly comprised of older gay men, and Kramer was among them. Afterwards, people were visibly shaken from watching the worst of their past so unflinchingly dramatised. One man approached Kramer and, through his sobs, I heard him simply say: “thank you”.

Kramer has been credited as a kind of Cassandra figure, one who had warned that the hedonism of gay life in the late Seventies would lead to trouble. His novel Faggots (1978) was loathed by conservatives for its graphic depiction of the sexual free-for-alls of New York’s bathhouse culture, but it was also mistrusted by the gay community for its moralising implications. Its lead character is on an impossible quest to find meaningful love in a world of fleeting sexual encounters. Kramer was criticising what he saw as a sybaritic and morally vacuous culture, and the sense of an impending reckoning has led to the novel being interpreted as predicting the outbreak of Aids.

When the crisis exploded, Kramer was one of those calling on gay men to exercise sexual temperance, and to shut the bathhouses until the virus could be contained. For this he was accused of being a puritan and a traitor to the gay lifestyle. His play The Normal Heart is set around this time, and in one furious monologue a character rails against a Kramer-type figure for trying to make gay men feel ashamed of their own liberation.

For the ultra-religious, Aids was seen as a righteous punishment from God. Many had been appalled at the promiscuity that inevitably arises when women are no longer in the equation. Male sexuality has always been contained to a degree by the institution of marriage, but gay men had been forced to exist on the periphery. There was no need to abide by sexual mores, because the rules had clearly not been written with them in mind. In other words, sex became an integral aspect of their own defiance against the society that had shunned them.

It always seemed a catch-22. Gay men were loathed for their sexual licentiousness, and at the same time excluded from the very ethical framework that would, to a degree, offer some kind of incentive against it. In his 1982 lecture, “Rediscovering gay history”, the historian John Boswell addressed this fundamental contradiction and argued for the need for a gay archetype or moral aspiration. He pointed out that when a straight man cheated on his wife, he at least knew that he was falling short of society’s expectations. But the same could not be said for gay men:

“I think that part of the reason for the ambivalence of the intellectual establishment in the United States is that they can’t tell when they read a book like Edmund White’s States of Desire, whether the life of casual promiscuity it depicts represents a homosexual ideal or the failure of an ideal. Are they reading about what gay people should do, what they do, or both, or neither? So they don’t know how to fit it into their usual critical apparatus. They don’t understand what would be a departure from homosexual ethics because they don’t know what homosexual ethics would be. And neither do we.”

Boswell was right that this ambivalence existed within and without the gay community. When William Friedkin’s film Cruising was released in 1980, the most vehement opposition came from gay campaigners who feared that it would depict them as being inherently deviant. And yet the movie had been shot in the leather bars of New York City, and the real-life sex acts that were filmed were hardly atypical. This subculture may not have been reflective of gay society as a whole, but it certainly existed.

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Perhaps it could be said that the activists who sought to ban Cruising won out in the end. Their implicit goal was that gay people could be brought under the aegis of heterosexual respectability — that they could, in other words, live as conventionally as everybody else. It didn’t surprise me at all, therefore, that it was a conservative government in the UK that eventually legalised same-sex marriage. It would appear that we have seen the cultivation in the Western world of the kind of shared ethical ideals that Boswell seemed to crave. Gay monogamy is no longer seen as an oxymoron.

Many gay rights groups, of course, opposed same-sex marriage. To them, it was a way to control gay people, to bring them within the same heteronormative yoke that dominated the rest of society. This debate echoed those of The Normal Heart, where there was a fear of an attempt to “civilise” those who had found freedom in occupying a realm outside of social convention. To be gay was to be different, and for many this was a source of pride. An older gay man once told me that sex was far more exhilarating when it was illegal. It meant that even the most casual sexual encounter was a little act of rebellion.

But even as tolerance has increased, anti-gay feeling has not gone away. The Aids crisis galvanised such prejudices, and of course religious fundamentalists have always opposed those who they deem to be acting against the wishes of their various gods. Today, these prejudices are resurfacing through the obsession with gender identity, an ideology that shames gay people for not being attracted to members of the opposite sex and has been responsible for the government-funded medicalisation of gay youth. In many ways, this is a “progressive” rehash of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, with its prohibition in schools against the “promotion” or “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.

The instinctive disgust that many people feel towards those who do not share their own sexual inclinations is seemingly hard-wired, and so what we call “homophobia” will always emerge in one way or another in a majority heterosexual culture. But at least to be gay is no longer defined solely by the sexual act, and that for one man to fall in love with another is widely considered to be an unexceptional fact of life. The gay rights activists of yesteryear weren’t necessarily calling for universal indifference, but perhaps we’ll get there in the end.

It was sadly inevitable that the AIDS crisis would exacerbate this ancient prejudice. A headline in The Sun declared that “perverts are to blame for the killer plague”. And while a writer for the Express held “those who choose unnatural methods of self-gratification” responsible for the disease, letters published in its pages followed suit. One reader called for the incarceration of homosexuals. “Burning is too good for them,” wrote another. “Bury them in a pit and pour on quicklime.” Someone had been reading his Dante.

I happened to come out in a much less hostile climate. In the early 2000s, we were enjoying a kind of Goldilocks moment, neither too hot nor too cold. We weren’t generally on the receiving end of homophobic slurs, but nor were we patronised by well-meaning progressives. My memory of this time was that no one particularly cared, and I was more than happy with that. Being gay for me has never been an identity, it’s simply a fact, as unremarkable as being blue-eyed or right-handed.

And so it has been troubling to see a resurgence in the last few years of the kind of anti-gay rhetoric that was commonplace in my childhood. Of course, it could be argued that the rise of social media has simply exposed sentiments that were previously only expressed in private. As Ricky Gervais has pointed out, before the digital era “we couldn’t read every toilet wall in the world. And now we can.”

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Yet the most virulent homophobia appears to be coming from a new source. Whereas we have always been accustomed to this kind of thing from the far-Right — one recalls Nick Griffin’s remark on Question Time about how he finds the sight of two men kissing “really creepy” — but now the most objectionable anti-gay comments arise in online spheres occupied by gender ideologues, from those who claim to be progressive, Left-wing and “on the right side of history”. The significant difference is that the word “cis” has been added to the homophobe’s lexicon. Some examples:

“Cis gay men are a disease.”

“Cis gay men are truly some of the most grotesque creatures to burden this earth.”

“I hate cis gay people with a burning passion.”

“If you’re a cis gay man and your sexuality revolves around you not liking female genitalia I hope you die and I will spit on your grave.”

“Cis gays don’t deserve rights.”

“There’s so many reasons to hate gay people, most specifically white gays, but there’s never a reason to be a transphobe.”

“It’s time to normalise homophobia.”

Of course, any bile can be found on the internet, but these kinds of phrases are remarkably commonplace among certain online communities. Even a cursory search will reveal innumerable examples of gender ideologues casually branding gay men “fags” or “faggots”, praising the murder of gays and lesbians, and claiming that the AIDS epidemic was a positive thing. Many thousands of examples had been collated on Google Photos under the title “Woke homophobia: anti-gay hatred & boxer ceiling abuse from trans activists & gender-identity ideologues”. The site was taken down last year, presumably because it violated Google’s policy on hate speech — or perhaps because it revealed the toxicity of the ideology the company has spent so long promoting.

If such ideas were restricted to the demented world of internet activism, we might be justified in simply ignoring it. But we now know that the overwhelming majority of adolescents referred to the Tavistock paediatric gender clinic were same-sex attracted. Whistleblowers have spoken out about the endemic homophobia, not simply among clinicians but also parents who were keen to “fix” their gay offspring. And of course there was the running joke among staff that soon “there would be no gay people left”.

And now a series of leaked internal messages and videos from WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health), has revealed that clinicians in the leading global organisation for transgender healthcare have openly admitted in private that some teenagers mistake being same-sex attracted for gender dysphoria. The result of the “gender-affirming” approach has amounted to what one former Tavistock clinician recently described as “conversion therapy for gay kids”. Homosexuality was removed from the World Health Organisation’s list of psychiatric disorders in 1993, and yet here we are medicalising it all over again.

So how did we reach the point where gay conversion therapy is being practised in plain sight by the NHS? Much of the responsibility has to lie with Stonewall, a group that once promoted equal rights for gay people but now actively works against their interests. It has even gone so far as to redefine “homosexual” on its website and resource materials as “same-gender attracted”. It should go without saying that gay men are not attracted to women who identify as men, any more than lesbians should be denounced for excluding those with penises from their dating pools. What trans activists call discrimination, most of us call homosexuality.

Indeed, activists often claim that “genital preferences are transphobic”, or that sexual orientation based on biological sex is a form of “trauma”. The idea that homosexuality is a sickness was one of the first homophobic tropes I encountered as a child. Now it is being rebranded as progressive.

As for Stonewall, its former CEO Nancy Kelley went so far as to argue that women who exclude trans people as potential partners are analogous to “sexual racists”. She claimed that “if you are writing off entire groups of people, like people of colour, fat people, disabled people or trans people, then it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions”. It is worth remembering that Stonewall is deeply embedded in many governmental departments and quangos, as well as corporate and civic institutions. Anti-gay propaganda is being reintroduced into society from the very top.

Meanwhile, the Crown Prosecution Service has been meeting with trans lobby groups such as Mermaids and Stonewall to discuss changes to prosecutorial policy in cases of sex by deception. Since these meetings — only revealed after sustained pressure from a feminist campaigner who submitted Freedom of Information requests — the CPS has recommended what Dennis Kavanagh of the Gay Men’s Network has described as “a radical trans activist approach to sex by deception prosecutions that would see them all but vanish”. In trans activist parlance, the barriers to having sex with lesbians and gay men are known as the “cotton ceiling” and “boxer ceiling”. Now it seems the establishment is attempting to support the coercion of gay people into heterosexual activity.

Consider a recent post on X by Stephen Whittle, OBE, a professor of equalities law at Manchester Metropolitan University. In a reply to LGB Alliance’s Bev Jackson, Whittle took issue with the notion that “love is all about genitals” (an argument that Jackson has never made). Having dismissed this straw man as “a very hetero/homo-normative perspective”, Whittle then claimed that “a lot of gay men can’t resist a young furry ftm [female-to-male] cub”.

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While it is true that there are some bisexuals who identify as gay, it is simply not the case that homosexual men “can’t resist” certain kinds of women. As Jackson rightly noted in her response, this is rank homophobia, “disturbed and disturbing on every level”. Yet it has been expressed by an individual who has been described as a “hero for LGBTQ+ equality”. With heroes like these, who needs villains?

Another example is Davey Wavey, a popular online influencer, who has encouraged gay men to perform heterosexual acts in a video called “How to Eat Pussy — For Gay Men”. It may as well have been called “Gay Conversion Therapy 2.0”. We are firmly back in the Eighties, where gays are being told that they “just haven’t found the right girl yet” and lesbians are assured that they just “need a good dick”. And yet now these demeaning ideas are being propagated by those who claim to be defending the rights of sexual minorities.

The Government’s recent guidance on how schools are to accommodate trans-identified pupils — in which biological sex will take precedence over identity — has been met with horror from gender ideologues. One of the common refrains one hears from activists is that it represents “this generation’s Section 28”. But this is to get it precisely backwards. Gay rights were secured on the recognition that a minority of the population are same-sex attracted. In dismantling the very notion of sex and substituting it for this nebulous concept of “gender identity”, activists and their disciples in parliament are undoing all of the achievements of previous gay rights movements.

The widespread homophobia of the Eighties, epitomised by Section 28, was based on the notion that homosexuality was unnatural, dangerous and ought to be corrected. Present-day gender identity ideology perceives homosexuality as evidence of misalignment between soul and body. In other words, it seeks to “fix” gay people so that they fit into a heterosexual framework. It is no coincidence that so many detransitioners are gay people who were simply struggling with their sexuality. Gender identity ideology is the true successor to Section 28.

The proponents of this revamped gay conversion therapy dismiss our concerns as “transphobia” and “bigotry”, or as part of a manufactured “culture war”. Worse still, the new homophobia is being cheered on by those it will hurt most. While prominent gay figures continue to feed the beast that wishes to devour them, we are unlikely to see this dire situation improve any time soon. It was bad enough in the Eighties, when gay people were demonised and harassed by the establishment. Who thought we would have to fight these battles all over again?

Of course, this didn’t actually happen, because people don’t talk like that in real life. Many do, however, engage in this way on social media, typically towards total strangers. This week I’ve been trending on X (or Twitter, as I stubbornly still call it) following a mass pile-on instigated by several gender-critical activists. This particular bombardment resulted in my decision to temporarily deactivate my Twitter account, to the glee of my critics and transactivists alike.

Having since been contacted by friends within the gender-critical movement, I have learned that many of them are exasperated by the “intolerant elements” within their community who seek to destroy anyone who does not conform to every single aspect of their worldview, even if it means that the cause is fatally undermined. They describe a “civil war” being waged by a small but intimidating minority who maintain that any slight point of disagreement is a form of heresy, that language has the capacity to shape reality, and that those found guilty of wrongspeak ought to be publicly shamed and alienated. Remind you of anyone?

This civil war within the gender-critical movement is, of course, a boon to the high priests of gender identity, those authoritarians who have been conducting a frighteningly effective campaign to reorganise society around the metaphysical belief that “gender” should take priority over sex when it comes to spaces, sports and human rights. Given that the stakes are so high, not least for women, children, and gay people, it might be worth considering what this in-fighting is all about and how it might be avoided in the future. In order to do this, I should first explain the background to this week’s furore.

I host a weekly show on GB News called Free Speech Nation, which explores all aspects of the culture wars and has a particular emphasis on the ongoing attacks on women’s rights in the name of “progress”. Even before last Sunday’s show had aired, I was contacted by regular viewers who had taken issue with me for inviting the trans writer and teacher Debbie Hayton to appear for an interview. As an admitted autogynephile — a heterosexual man who presents as a woman out of an erotic attraction to himself — Hayton is something of a hate figure for many in the movement. By conducting this interview, I was deemed guilty of “enabling” and “promoting perversion”, in spite of Hayton’s gender-critical beliefs.

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Further context is required here. The day before my show, a profile appeared in The Times in which the interviewer, Janice Turner, referred to Hayton with female pronouns. Turner clarified her reasoning in a tweet: “The issue of pronouns is becoming absolutist on BOTH sides. Stonewall demands even bearded rapists be called “she”, GC ultras refuse to call any trans woman “she”. I reject both positions. I never call male sex offenders she/her. But I will be courteous to those who respect women.”

For many, the issue of pronouns has become a red line in the gender wars, and Turner’s efforts at compromise are seen not only as wrongheaded, but traitorous. It is widely held that trans-identifying individuals must never be described as anything other than their true biological sex, and cries of “hold the line” are often heard. Not only are the likes of Turner demonised for attempting to find a middle ground, but they are also told that they have been “groomed” by the men who are insisting that other people’s language must be modified in deference to their sense of self.

This tactic, of suggesting that an opposing view is the result of a delusion, is common to all ideological movements. Marxist theorists have often dismissed unbelievers as suffering from “false consciousness”. Similarly, many transactivists insist that those of us who believe that sex is immutable have been “radicalised online”. Yet this is also the identical approach of those gender-critical campaigners who deny the individual agency of their comrades and claim they are the victims of “grooming”. I suppose it is easier to explain away disagreement as the product of some collective fantasy rather than accept that not everyone thinks the same way as you.

The inevitable firestorm following Turner’s piece provided the backdrop to my own interview with Hayton on Sunday night. Initial feedback was cordial and productive: many feminists were pleased that I had listened to their concerns and asked questions about the use of toilets, single-sex spaces, and a schools guidance policy that Hayton had co-authored for the teachers’ union NASUWT in 2017. There were also many critical comments, which I welcomed and took seriously.

The first signs of trouble occurred when one of my critics began repeatedly railing against “the gays” in her posts. She complained that I had used the pronoun “her” in relation to Debbie in one of the introductory pieces to camera (as it happens, this was simply because the producer had written it that way in the autocue). I explained that I use pronouns to denote biological sex, and certainly when it comes to reporting on the news, because I do not believe in gender identity. But I also said that when it comes to personal friends who identify as the opposite sex, I have occasionally adopted their preferred pronouns and names. I have done this to avoid needless distress, not to signal that I share their belief-system. It would be like bowing my head for a prayer at a friend’s family meal, even if I didn’t believe in their particular god.

I respect and understand criticisms of this approach. Women are facing the erosion of their spaces and rights, and this is being actuated by gender-identity ideology and the compelled use of pronouns. I have written previously about the need to resist this pressure to conform to pronoun declaration, and I am particularly vexed by the tendency of journalists to describe rapists, paedophiles and other male criminals as “she” or to use nonsensical phrases such as “her penis”.

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Therefore, I answered many of my critics by agreeing that my view may be flawed, and that I was open to persuasion regarding their “slippery slope” argument. It was only when multiple anonymous accounts starting branding me a liar, a grifter and a hater of women, and outright telling me to “fuck off” that I realised this was beginning to turn nasty.

One of my traducers claimed that I lacked credibility and integrity because I adhere to “a deranged homophobic, sexist ideology”, even though I have consistently and outspokenly opposed it over many years. This struck me as an absurd overreaction, the kind of “you’re either with us or against us” purity demand that one has come to expect in these tribalistic times.

From there, matters escalated at a dizzying rate. I was repeatedly accused of being a misogynist, something which I find odd, given that over the past few years I have covered the rising threats to women’s rights on my show with a tenacity that has been notably absent in other media outlets. Every week I have invited women to appear, including Helen Joyce, Maya Forstater, Jo Phoenix, Julie Bindel, Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, Milli Hill, Kellie-Jay Keen, Dr Jane Clare Jones, Jo Bartosch, Mara Yamauchi, Holly Lawford-Smith, Sarah Phillimore, Kate Coleman, Rosie Kay, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Sharron Davies. If my critics are correct, and I am indeed a rabid misogynist, surely I at least deserve some credit for going to such elaborate lengths to disguise it?

Many of my detractors took the view that my homosexuality was the issue. One self-declared feminist confessed to being “a raging homophobe” and wrote: “I don’t like gay men anymore. I think most of them are miso[gynist] pieces of shhh [sic] that mock women and platform AGPs”. Another was more direct: “The gays are definitely to blame as well. First off, sticking a penis inside a man’s asshole is unhealthy. If you can’t admit this then you are part of the problem.” Another went with “I hate men in general”, and then clarified her misandry in an oddly specific way: “Gay MEN. Straight MEN. White MEN. Black MEN. All MEN. I don’t discriminate. I view you all with equal amounts of derision”. Then there was an especially malicious attack from law scholar Dr Alessandra Asteriti, who called me a liar and resorted to the defamatory claim that my objective was to “harm women and children”.

Despite the onslaught, I should emphasise that this kind of sociopathic behaviour is far from typical in the gender-critical movement. Yes, there exists a small contingent who despise gay men and seek to bully and harass anyone who takes a different view. But this is most definitely not the norm, and the overwhelming majority of women I have encountered in this fight have been generous, compassionate and incredibly courageous in the face of threats and wholly unfounded accusations of “hate” and “transphobia”. It is only thanks to their hard work that we have seen a recent sea-change in public understanding of the dangers of this ideology.

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Naturally, at the time, I found it difficult to distinguish between legitimate criticisms and outright abuse. And once I started becoming defensive, it of course made matters worse. It’s always worth bearing in mind that, in the eye of a Twitter storm, one does not see individuals, but rather an army determined to see you crushed. At that point, nuance becomes impossible.

And while I am fully aware that most of those participating in the pile-on would have been appalled by the excesses of the few, that isn’t much consolation. This had all begun with one woman griping about “the gays” and ended hours later with complete strangers on my timeline discussing why gay men are so vile, invariably misogynistic, and have a tendency towards paedophilia (the most repugnant and common prejudice of them all). By the time someone posted an audio recording of one of my detractors saying that she would enjoy murdering gay men, I was out.

And of course, transactivists noticed the abuse I was receiving and were quick to weaponise the situation. One of them emailed me directly: “I don’t want to say ‘I told you so’ but… ha.” Many have since boasted on social media that the attacks were karma for my stupidity in associating with this brood of reactionaries. They have shared screenshots of the worst tweets and taken this as confirmation of what they have been alleging all along: that the gender-critical movement is a front for far-Right homophobes.

My experiences this week have certainly alerted me to a dark element within gender-critical circles, one that has become a source of considerable concern for many women in the fight. I have retreated from Twitter and instead launched a Substack, in the hope that I may continue these conversations with those who are able to remain civil even while robustly disagreeing. I now understand that serious discussions about this issue are simply not possible on Twitter, and my mental health has to come first.

For all that, gender-critical feminism remains an essential force in protecting our rights in these maddening times. The genuinely bigoted elements of the movement may be aberrations, but they are increasingly being perceived as the norm. If this cannot be rectified, it will prove a disaster not just for women and gay people, but for truth and sanity itself.

It may not be the funniest joke, but that’s because it’s an anecdote from The Lives of the Caesars by the Ancient Roman historian Suetonius. The comedian in this case was a senator called Aelius Lamia whose wife had left him for the Emperor Domitian. For making this casual quip, Domitian had Lamia put to death. Now that’s a bad review.

It might be worth keeping this anecdote in mind when the usual debates flare up about whether comedy “goes too far”. The notion of people being offended by jokes is as old as comedy itself, and often people react angrily if humour isn’t to their taste. The current manifestation of this age-old debate takes the form of a simple dichotomy: “woke comedy” versus “anti-woke comedy”.

Already we are in treacherous waters. It is very unwise to define whole genres by terms that have no settled definitions. The actor Kathy Burke believes that “woke” simply refers to people who are neither racist nor homophobic, which would surely mean that the overwhelming majority of us would happily embrace the term. But for those who have been on the receiving end of the bullying, harassment and intimidation by activists who self-define as “woke”, it is clear this issue is not so straightforward.

Over the past few years, we have seen the emergence of a new comedy movement, one branded by commentators as “anti-woke”, that seeks to push back against the orthodoxies of our time. Its closest historical precedent is the “alternative” comedians of the Eighties, who also took aim at establishment norms and were often similarly blunt in their approach. The key difference today is that there is no broad agreement about where the power in society lies, and so while “anti-woke” comedians see themselves as anti-establishment, their critics insist that the opposite is true.

Consider the example of Ricky Gervais, whose new Netflix stand-up special Armageddon has sparked this most recent round of discussions about the supposed red lines in comedy. Some have accused Gervais of taking a reactionary stance, most notably because of jokes relating to migrants and disabled children. Gervais has been branded an “anti-woke” comedian, but I doubt very much that he would see it in such reductive terms. Anyone familiar with his work will know that he has always lampooned closed systems of thought, and it just so happens that “wokeness” currently represents the dominant incarnation. There was a time when many of Gervais’s critics were perfectly happy to see him take a wrecking ball to the certainties of religious faith. It would appear they take a different view when it’s their own belief system taking a battering.

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A simplistic reading of “woke” versus “anti-woke” comedy is that the former “punches up” while the latter “punches down”, but such rules are incoherent when applied to an inherently anarchic medium. Besides, it simply is not true that there exists a growing number of comedians who are seeking fame and easy laughs by taking aim at the most marginalised in society.

As I have said, it comes down to a question of how one perceives power. Too often the culture war is misconceived as a conflict between Left and Right, with “woke” aligned with the former and “anti-woke” with the latter, but “wokeness” carries with it the kind of clout that transcends the political binary. In their 13 years of government, the Conservatives have presided over the worst excesses of this identity-obsessed ideology and the havoc it has wrought on society. Far from fighting a “war on woke”, they have been actively enabling it.

So where does the real power lie? Is it with governments that can be voted out if the public tires of them? Or is it with activists who now have significant influence in all cultural, educational, political and corporate institutions, and who cannot be dislodged by means of any democratic process? These are the same zealots who have fostered racial division in the name of “anti-racism”, jeopardised the rights of women and gay people through the promotion of gender identity ideology, destabilised the very notion of empirical truth, attempted to rewrite our history and reconstruct our culture, and launched a relentless assault on free speech and the achievements of social liberalism. Just because they describe themselves as being “on the right side of history” doesn’t make it true.

And so, when we read an article in the New Statesman lamenting the “tedious world of anti-woke comedy”, we can be fairly sure that the criticism is political. Does the writer sincerely believe that these performers are simply trying to attack minorities and cause as much offence as possible? This is the least generous of all suppositions, one born out of a fundamental misunderstanding of the art of comedy. It strikes me that many of those who dismiss stand-ups as “anti-woke” are simply berating them for taking an anti-establishment stance and for believing that those in power ought to be ridiculed rather than eulogised. But what is the point of a court jester who acts as a propagandist for the king?

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Another common reaction from critics has been to imply that certain topics ought to be ring-fenced, and that joking about them is tantamount to a form of violence. The charity Scope has lambasted Gervais’s new show for containing “ableist slurs” and claimed that “language like this has very real consequences”. But those of us who have seen Armageddon would have to concede that the most obvious consequence appears to be the laughter of audience members who are clearly enjoying themselves. What Gervais’s critics mean is that jokes are like toxins, and that popular culture — if not carefully regulated — has the power to corrupt the Great Unwashed. Mary Whitehouse made the identical argument many decades ago.

Fortunately, her fears were unfounded. Over half a century of research into “media effects” theory — the hypothesis that the public will modify its behaviour according to the mass media it consumes — has seen it roundly discredited. Jokes do not cause violence, unless you are talking about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars, or the Emperor Domitian lopping off the occasional head.

The history of comedy shows us that its practitioners will always cause offence, so why do we continue to squabble over where the red lines ought to be drawn? No matter how many times you shift the boundary, it will still end up being crossed. I am not implying here that there is anything wrong with criticism, however puritanical it might be. Comedians who violate popular sensibilities have always faced pushback and resentment. The problem arises when the offended parties seek to impose their tastes on everyone else. So while I support anyone’s right to criticise Gervais’s show, I am disturbed by those who have called on Netflix to censor the offending material.

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Personally, I have always relished those comedians who have no clear affiliations, who take aim in all directions and unsettle as much as they entertain. But today’s comedy industry is not a hospitable environment for these sorts of freethinkers. For some years now, there has been an undeniable strain of groupthink among those in positions of power: promoters, commissioners, critics and even some performers. Acts who conform have been rewarded, while those who refuse to do so have been shunned. It hasn’t taken much for up-and-coming comics to realise that it is more profitable to be seen to convey the “correct” message rather than to develop their craft in innovative and individual ways. The impulse to serve Mammon rather than the Muses has enervated the comedy scene, and self-censorship is now the norm.

The writer Graham Linehan is living proof of how heretics are treated in the current climate. For blaspheming against the holy creed of gender identity ideology — one embraced wholesale by the gatekeepers of the comedy industry — he has been unable to work for six years. In his new memoir, Tough Crowd, he discusses how his musical adaptation of Father Ted has been scotched, either because the bosses at Hat Trick Productions (which owns the rights) are too cowardly to be seen promoting his work, or because activist elements within the company disapprove of his views.

Only a couple of decades ago, it was virtually unheard of for comedy promoters to take seriously complaints from audience members claiming to be “offended”. Now, it takes little more than a few disgruntled tweets for venues to panic and cancel bookings. But the backlash is palpable. Many of us have grown weary of comedians toeing the establishment line and substituting agitprop for jokes. Some “anti-woke” comedy may lack sophistication and subtlety, but maybe that’s a small price to pay to redress the balance and reenergise the art form. If you want to smash taboos, sometimes you need a sledgehammer.

We might see this as a cautionary tale for our times. After all, it isn’t only Turco-Mongol conquerors who find themselves punished for Quran-burning. Last week, the Danish parliament voted to ban the desecration of all religious texts following a spate of protests in which copies of the Qur’an had been destroyed. Inevitably, the new law has been couched as a safety measure. This burning of the book, claims justice minister Peter Hummelgaard, “harms Denmark and Danish interests, and risks harming the security of Danes abroad and here at home”.

He has a point. Even unconfirmed accusations of Quran-burning can be sufficient to prompt extremist violence. In 2015, being accused of defiling the holy book, Farkhunda Malikzada was beaten to death by a ferocious mob in Afghanistan while bystanders, including police officers, did nothing to intervene. Many filmed the brutal murder on their phones and the footage was widely shared on social media. In 2022, a mentally unstable man called Mushtaq Rajput was similarly accused and tied to a tree and stoned to death in Pakistan. Earlier this year in Iran, it was reported that Javad Rouhi was tortured so severely that he could no longer speak or walk. He was sentenced to death for apostasy and later died in prison under suspicious circumstances.

But while we might anticipate that the desecration of the Quran would be proscribed in Islamic theocracies, it is troubling to see similar laws being passed in secular nations such as Denmark. The government had not been so faint-hearted when faced with similar problems in 2005. After cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed were published in Jyllands-Posten, a global campaign from Indonesia to Bosnia demanded that the Danish authorities take action. The government stood firm and the judicial complaint against the newspaper was dismissed.

In a free society this is the only justifiable response, albeit one that takes considerable courage. And the climate of intimidation that has descended since is a product of our collective failure to defend freedom of speech against the demands of militants. When the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his fatwa on Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, one would have hoped for a unified front on behalf of one of our finest writers. Instead, much of the literary and political establishment abandoned or even censured him. In the Australian television show Hypotheticals, the singer Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, implied that he would have no objections to Rushdie being burned alive.

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That a work of fiction such as The Satanic Verses could not even be published today gives us some indication of the extent to which we have forsaken the principle of free speech. If we are so squeamish about the burning of Qurans, why were so many of us indifferent to the burning of Rushdie’s book on the streets of Bolton and Bradford? Yusuf Islam’s remark about the author’s immolation might have been flippant but, as Heinrich Heine famously wrote: “Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people too.”

The ceremonial burning of books in Germany and Austria in the Thirties has ensured that the act will always have a unique charge, and a disquieting, visceral effect. It is why, for instance, the most memorable scene in Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan is when the villain Steerpike sets fire to his master’s library. It is a gesture designed to repudiate the very heights of human achievement, to hurl his victim into a spiral of despair. When Rushdie saw his own novel publicly incinerated, he confessed to feeling that “now the victory of the Enlightenment was looking temporary, reversible”.

The burning of the Quran leaves many of us similarly troubled. We do not need to approve of the contents to sense that the destruction of a book is symbolic of a desire to limit the scope of human thought. When activists post footage of themselves gleefully setting fire to copies of Harry Potter, one cannot shake the similar suspicion that they would happily substitute the books with the author herself.

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But while many of us find the burning of books instinctively rebarbative, to outlaw this form of protest is essentially authoritarian. And to reinstate blasphemy laws by specifying that only religious books are to be protected is fundamentally retrograde. Of course, such laws already exist in most Western countries in an unwritten form. In March, a 14-year-old autistic boy was suspended from his school in Wakefield, reported to the police, and received death threats after he accidentally dropped a copy of the Quran on the floor, causing some of the pages to be scuffed. He may not have committed a crime, but many people behaved as though he had.

And the same unwritten laws are in force in the fact that few would be brave enough to publish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed after the massacre at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Five years later, the schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded on the streets of Paris simply for showing the offending images during a lesson on free speech. Closer to home, a teacher at Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire is still in hiding after showing the images to his pupils and stirring the ire of a righteous mob.

The failure of the school’s headmaster, as well as the teaching unions, to support this man against the demands of religious fundamentalists is revealing. Why must those who claim to be defending the dignity of Muslims treat them as irascible children? At the same time, as Sam Harris recently pointed out, there is an oddity in the fact that so many Muslims do not appear to be alarmed that “their community is so uniquely combustible”.

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The bitter reality is that terrorism works, particularly when so many governments across the Western world are seemingly willing to fritter away our bedrock of liberal values. This has been actuated, in part, by an alliance of two very different forms of authoritarianism: ultra-conservative Islamic dogma and the safetyist ideology of “wokeness”. The latter has always claimed that causing offence is a form of violence, and the former has been quick to adopt the same tactics. This is why protesters outside Batley Grammar School asserted that the display of offensive cartoons was a “safeguarding” issue, and the Muslim Council of Britain criticised the school for not maintaining an “inclusive space”. The same censorious instincts have been updated, and are now cloaked in a more modish language.

In a civilised and pluralistic society, the burning of a holy book might provoke a variety of responses — anger, disbelief, or just a shrug of the shoulders — but it should never lead to violence. Back when The Onion still had some bite, the website satirised this “unique combustibility” through the depiction of a graphic sexual foursome between Moses, Jesus, Ganesha and Buddha. The headline said it all: “No One Murdered Because Of This Image”.

Freedom of speech and expression still matters, and if that means a few hotheads and mini-Tamburlaines might burn their copies of the Quran then so be it. It is unfortunate that we have reached the point where Islam must be ring-fenced from ridicule or criticism, whether due to fear of violent repercussions or a misguided and patronising effort to promote social justice. But for this state of affairs we ultimately have only ourselves to blame, and in particular our tendency to capitulate to religious zealots when they seek exemption from the liberal consensus.

Republican senator Tom Cotton has called for those who express support for Hamas to be deported, and Donald Trump has promised to do so if re-elected. In France, Emmanuel Macron has outlawed pro-Palestine rallies on the grounds of maintaining public order, although his decree has been largely ignored. Closer to home, a pro-Palestinian protest has been scheduled in London for Armistice Day, a tactic surely intended to generate as much outrage and attention as possible.

In that respect, it has already succeeded. Rishi Sunak has stopped short of a ban, but has called on the Met Police to make “robust use” of its powers to prevent the Remembrance events being disrupted. In this, he is out of kilter with the majority of the country: only 18% believe it “should be allowed to go ahead”.

Liberalism has always been a tricky prospect, cherishing personal autonomy and freedom of speech up to the point where our behaviour encroaches on the rights of others. To ideologues, it is a poison, because it rejects their insistence that we ought to follow a preordained set of rules. Some even claim that liberalism is itself an ideology, though I see it as the precise opposite: it is the repudiation of ideological thinking — because it refuses to accept oversimplified interpretations of reality, or to outsource our decision-making capacities to an already established creed. This is why there are liberals on the Left, the Right, and everywhere in between.

Yet it has been dispiriting to see our commitment to Enlightenment values being assaulted on multiple fronts. There are theocratic extremists who oppose free speech and would happily see blasphemers and apostates executed. There are Western activists intoxicated by the moonshine of intersectional identity politics calling for censorship and other restrictions. And now, we have those who once considered themselves to be “liberal” pronouncing that there should be limitations to freedom of speech and assembly.

Even those who have previously decried “cancel culture” appear to be relishing its impact on their opponents. A lecture at Liverpool Hope University by Professor Avi Shlaim, a critic of Israel, was cancelled out of concern for the “safety and wellbeing” of students; Michael Eisen, a geneticist at UC Berkeley, was fired as editor-in-chief of eLife magazine for sharing a satirical article from The Onion which took a pro-Palestine stance. Eisen, some have pointed out, had previously questioned whether cancellation really exists. But while a degree of schadenfreude is understandable, it is hardly helpful.

That there are no rulebooks to consult is liberalism’s major appeal to those of a free-thinking disposition, but it is also the source of its instability. The authoritarian has no need to engage with his detractors; he can simply have them eliminated. By contrast, the liberal must find a way to coexist with those who yearn to see his freedoms quashed, to somehow reconcile himself to the multiplicity of human outlooks and their inherent incommensurability. But how can you run a marketplace of ideas while there are hooligans trying to overturn the tables?

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This essential vulnerability is always tested in moments of crisis. Governments enact “emergency powers” when at war because short-term authoritarianism seems preferable to the alternative. So when protesters at pro-Palestine marches in London are holding signs that openly celebrate the slaughter, rape and kidnapping of civilians, and an official advisor to the Met police is filmed leading a chant of “from the river to the sea”, there will always be pressure from a justifiably incensed public to resort to authoritarian remedies.

Even in peacetime, liberalism is susceptible to changing trends within the nation state. What happens, for instance, when the majority of any given population rejects the liberal values upon which their society is based? What if a government has implemented reckless migration policies that grant citizenship to those who do not recognise the value of individual freedoms? In such circumstances, the principle of democracy could be its own undoing.

Sweden is often considered to be a case in point. According to its national police chief, the rapid surge in migration over the past decade has led to an “unprecedented” rise in gang warfare between those who do not respect the rule of law. On a recent trip to Stockholm, I found myself discussing the implications with a group of residents. One woman expressed the view that Swedish people tended to take liberalism for granted, and that they had assumed newcomers would be eager to adopt the values of the nation that had welcomed them. Now many fear that this was warm-hearted naivety, and that the government had not done enough to ensure widespread integration.

Liberal countries acknowledge their moral responsibility to offer asylum for those in need, and typically take a compassionate view towards foreigners seeking a more prosperous life. At the same time, there must be a degree of societal consensus for the ethos of these nations to survive at all. For where such a consensus is jeopardised, either through mass immigration or radical domestic political movements, the temptation to dispense with liberal values is inevitable. But to call for the deportation of citizens who actively seek the demolition of our culture is to surrender our principles to the very people who oppose them. It is to resign oneself to authoritarianism in a perverse effort to defeat it.

Inevitably, one thinks of Karl Popper’s famous paradox that “in the name of tolerance” we should claim “the right not to tolerate the intolerant”. This is often invoked by activists to defend censorship of their opponents, typically in the form of a well-known cartoon meme that decontextualises and misreads Popper’s formulation:

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

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Popper’s next sentence is often omitted, in which he emphasises that so long as public opinion and rational argument can “keep them in check”, suppression of intolerant views would be “most unwise”. Protesters who take to the streets to celebrate murder fall into this category because they are self-discrediting. They are impervious to reason, but their sentiments are so essentially rebarbative that there is no risk of public opinion shifting in their favour.

But, some might respond, if liberalism is so delicate and continually under threat, why bother with it at all? In short: because it works. For all the claims by identitarian activists that the Western world is a racist hellhole, few living in the era of Jim Crow could have conceived of the advances we have made since then. The triumph of social liberalism is evident in multiple studies that show how Western societies are the most tolerant and diverse to have ever existed. It is no coincidence that all of the major civil rights movements — for black emancipation, feminism and gay rights — have traditionally been underpinned by a commitment to free speech and liberal ideals.

Of course, it is only natural that our patience is wearing thin. Having already witnessed pro-Palestine protesters in London throwing fireworks at police, and chanting in support of “Intifada” on the Tube, there can be no guarantees that such behaviour won’t be repeated on Saturday. The timing seems not only calculated to maximise publicity, but also as a declaration of contempt for British values and history.

But even if unruly and disrespectful, it would be self-defeating to ban the protest, or to insist on deportations for the worst offenders. Taking action against direct incitement to violence is one thing, but compromising on our key values is another. If we renege on our principles at the very moment when they are most imperilled, we risk undermining the very foundations upon which our civilisation is built. The authoritarian instinct may be a human constant but, with vigilance, it can be forestalled.

It is no great leap to suppose that this kind of talionic thinking decided the fate of one Leendert Hasenbosch, a soldier and bookkeeper for the Dutch East India Company, who was marooned on Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean on 5 May 1725 as a penalty for sodomy. Hasenbosch had committed an act that was deemed contra naturam — against nature — and had thereby removed himself from the domain of human society. His punishment, then, was an extension of his crimes. He was to live out his days in isolation and despair.

While doing so, Hasenbosch kept a diary. It was discovered by British sailors in an abandoned tent in January 1726. The first of three English translations, Sodomy Punish’d, was published that very year. Its prelude anticipates cynicism on the part of the reader. “I know there are some People who are naturally credulous,” writes the publisher, “and it is probable such will pay but little regard to the Veracity of this Narration.”

The tradition of authors dressing up fiction as fact has never fallen out of fashion. The entire second half of James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), for instance, is presented as a document that the author has found. Similarly, in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), an epilogue tells us that the book has been transcribed by historians from cassette recordings. Most germane is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which is presented as autobiographical.

But if Sodomy Punish’d is part of that tradition, the author has taken great pains to conceal it. The sheer banality of his quotidian activities — the text includes regular updates on how he secures his tent with stones — would surely be off-putting for readers seeking the thrills of another Robinson Crusoe. Furthermore, we know from corroborating documentation from the Dutch East India Company that an officer called Leendert Hasenbosch was indeed sentenced “to be set ashore, as a villain” on Ascension Island. The original diary has not survived, but the most likely conclusion is that Hasenbosch did keep an account of his final days, even if it was subject to fictionalised embellishments during translation.

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Sodomy Punish’d makes for uncomfortable reading. Many of the diary entries recount Hasenbosch’s ongoing search for drinkable water. He was unaware that Ascension Island had two natural springs, and the one source that he happened upon soon dried up. He resorted to drinking his own urine and killing turtles in order to drink their blood. And even those contemporary readers who baulked at his “obnoxious Sin to God and Nature” would surely have been moved by Hasenbosch’s desperate yearning for rescue:

“It would be endless to take Notice, how often my Eyes are cast o the Sea to look for Shipping, and how my Imagination forms every Trifle for a Sail, then look till my Eyes dazzle, and immediatley [sic] the Object disappears.”

The captain had assured him that ships often passed by Ascension Island at this time of year. Was this a harmless lie to comfort a condemned man, or an added cruelty — an attempt to stir hopes that could only ever be dashed?

No specific details of Hasenbosch’s crimes survive in the records. “I was a Sodomite,” he tells us in his diary, but this designation is unclear: “Sodomy” did not necessarily connote sex between males, but had since the medieval period operated as a kind of catch-all term that could encompass infidelity, bestiality, and a variety of other transgressions. John Boswell, author of an excellent book on Christianity and homosexuality, discounts the term as “so vague” as to be “virtually useless”.

Even usury could be deemed a form of sodomy. In Thomas Pie’s Usuries Spright Coniured (1604), we are told that “to make money breed… is against nature: for money hath no such gendring, or procreating nature, being naturally barren”. The usurer finds a method to make money reproduce, whereas the sodomite removes the reproductive possibility from the act of sexual intercourse. “Therefore,” Pie writes, usury “is called a kinde of Sodomie.” It is no coincidence that Dante depicts the sodomites and the usurers as occupying the same sub-circle of Hell.

Theologians have never been able to agree on the original sins of Sodom that provoked God’s wholesale destruction of the city. While “sodomite” has long been established as a pejorative synonym for a male homosexual, passages in Genesis and Ezekiel suggest that the destruction of Sodom was due to a range of other sins, including pride, dishonesty and inhospitality. Besides, this story of an attempted gang-rape of two angels, and a father who offers his daughters as satiation for the mob, is surely too bizarre to qualify as a straightforward cautionary tale against the consequences of sex between men.

Especially because sodomites could be women. In the marginal gloss to Deuteronomy 23.17 in the King James Bible of 1611, we find the term “sodomitess” offered as an alternative to “whore”. A 13th-century French legal treatise (Li Livres di jostice et de plet) cites either castration or clitoridectomy as punishment for sodomy, depending on the sex of the perpetrator. Most strangely, the jurist Edward Coke (1552-1634) wrote that women who commit bestiality were guilty of sodomy and liable to execution in accordance with the Buggery Act of 1533, specifying the rather curious example of “a great Lady” who “had committed buggery with a Baboon, and conceived by it”.

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For all these ambiguities, we can be fairly certain that Hasenbosch was punished for homosexual activities. An Authentick Relation, the second version of the diary to be published, clarifies that his sin was that of a homosexual nature:

“I hope this my Punishment in this World may suffice for my most heinous Crime of making use of my Fellow-Creature to satisfy my Lust, whom the Almighty Creator had ordain’d another Sex for”.

And although Sodomy Punish’d offers no explicit details, there are hints that he had been intimate with another man. He claims to be haunted by an apparition, “the Resemblance of a Man I had been well acquainted with”, who materialises so often that he soon becomes acclimatised to his presence. Hasenbosch is “afraid to mention” his name.

Hasenbosch is tormented not only by this apparition but also by various “devilish Spirits” throughout his time on Ascension Island. Of course, we must be alert to the possibility that such events are fictitious embellishments on the part of the publisher. But it is also possible that these were hallucinations brought on by severe dehydration and hunger, perhaps projections of a guilty conscience. In Sodomy Punish’d, one of these spirits identifies Hasenbosch as a “Bougre”, the Anglo-Norman root of “bugger”; like “sodomite”, this term was linked broadly with heresy and other abominations.

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An Authentick Relation and Sodomy Punish’d read like translations of the same text, though we have no way of knowing which is the more accurate. It may be that the publisher of Sodomy Punish’d excised the direct references to homosexuality out of prudence. It is equally feasible that the publisher of An Authentick Relation invented such features as a warning against readers who shared Hasenbosch’s inclinations. Certainly, the added emphasis on ghosts and demons in the latter text would suggest that its editors were keen to capitalise on the diary’s moralising impact.

There was a third translation, too: The Just Vengeance of Heaven Exemplify’d. More judgemental than the other two, it insists that Hasenbosch’s skeleton was discovered along with his diary. For added dramatic effect, this version finishes mid-sentence, as though he perished in the act of writing. There is even an illustration of the skeleton splayed out on the shore. All of this was presumably to reassure the God-fearing reader that our narrator got his comeuppance. But it was a lie; Hasenbosch’s remains were never found. His eventual fate is unknown.

In some ways, the uncertainty is apt. Much of gay history is a patchwork affair, with the lives of same-sex attracted individuals often misrepresented or erased entirely. We are left mostly with intimations and glimpses, and the diary of Leendert Hasenbosch is one such example. An added note to Sodomy Punish’d speculates that he might have committed suicide, or that he might have been rescued by a passing ship. At the risk of incurring the wrath of God, I do hope that this particular sodomite lived to see another day.

Stella Benson (1892-1933) was a novelist, poet, travel writer and early campaigner for women’s rights, her feminism galvanised by Emily Davison’s protest at the Epsom Derby in 1913. In the fervid debates between the suffragists and the suffragettes, she eventually favoured the latter’s more militant approach. Yet even as this distinction became a feature of her first novel, Benson did not spare her compatriots her satirical gaze. “How superbly you’ve done the snake that was the soul of the suffrage movement,” wrote Dame Rebecca West. “How lucky you are to have written the only novel of genius about the Suffrage.”

I Pose, in other words, has a wide-ranging ambition that exceeds the merely polemical. Benson’s art is concerned with authenticity, and whether it is even possible within the constraints of our human vulnerabilities. We are performative creatures, insists Benson’s narrator, with an array of “poses” at our disposal. The gardener and the suffragette are never named, but their individuality burns through all the same. Benson may be fascinated by the prison of identity, but has more to say about its occasional ruptures.

Even the novelist is assuming a pose. Describing the suffragette, Benson tells us that “her eyes made no attempt to redeem her plainness, which is the only point of having eyes in fiction”. Her narrative voice is continually reminding us of the futility of its own commentary. She notes that “the gardener had a morbid craving for unpopularity, it was part of the unique pose”, but then adds a kind of rationale: “Unpopularity is an excellent salve to the conscience, it is delicious to be misunderstood.” What is the value of these observations, Benson seems to imply, when they are based on the choices that the author has made about her own creations?

Surprisingly, the result is never alienating; we do not experience in these pages the novelistic equivalent of Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect). This is doubtless a consequence of Benson’s elegant prose style, and a deft poeticism that shimmers with passion and wit. Consider this passage in I Pose concerning the aftermath of a deadly earthquake:

“Distracted men and women panted and moaned and tore at the wreckage with bleeding hands. A little crying crowd was collected round a woman who lay nailed to the ground by a mountain of bricks, with her face fixed in a glare of terrible surprise. By the cathedral steps the dead lay in a row, shoulder to shoulder, with the horrid uniformity of sprats upon a plate.”

As a simple and poignant coda to this scene, a small dog scurries amidst the chaos, “looking for its past in the extraordinary mazes of the present”.

As for women’s rights, Benson teases those readers who might be put off by the prominence of the suffragette in her story. “You need not be afraid,” she writes. “There is not going to be so very much about the cause in this book.” This joyously self-referential quality was to become a recurring feature of Benson’s work. In Pipers and a Dancer (1924), she describes her protagonist Ipsie as possessing a “forest of poses” and being one who “could not escape from the sight of herself”. Ipsie later admits that she is “only copying the heroine of one of Stella Benson’s novels”.

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I particularly like Benson’s pose as the strongarmed author in This Is the End (1917), grudgingly following the conventions of her craft: “I might as well introduce you to the Family before I settle down to the story. From careful study of press reviews I gather that a story is considered a necessary thing in a novel, so this time I am going to try and include one.” Uncommon for their time, these kinds of metafictional gestures are rarely intrusive. Benson has an instinct for comic timing and restraint, and the narrative voice never veers from the mischievous to the outright cynical.

Benson sustains this delicate balance throughout her work. It is most notable in her characterisations, which can be barbed without being cruel. Edward in The Poor Man (1922) must surely rank as one of the finest studies of masculine fragility in all fiction. He gropes for our pity and we oblige, while nervously detecting our own foibles in his behaviour. The novel is punctuated with small asides that are intensely revealing. “Edward never, in the whole course of his life, forgot any derogatory personal remark made about himself in his hearing. He luxuriated too much in the criticism of others to forget it.”

It is in this kind of blistering economy that Benson shines. Where some authors might spend whole paragraphs describing their characters, Benson successfully conveys so much of their inner lives through the most seemingly trivial of details. There is Mrs Lorne in Goodbye, Stranger (1926) who “spent every minute regretting the last minute”. As for her husband: “He was a small man of about forty-five. He looked like a large man in miniature.” Even a seemingly throwaway description of a cat in The Poor Man is more suggestive than it needs to be. “It was a parasite of a cat; it prided itself on being a member of an ancient civilisation. It never moved except to move away.”

Such anthropomorphic playfulness is not merely for humorous effect. In Benson’s vision, the natural world is invested with agency, a form of animism that sees humankind as subordinate to a greater, invisible will. Her novels allow us brief glimpses of an oneiric realm, accessible simply by an effort of the imagination. Before the First World War, Benson had volunteered as part of a charity organisation to help the underprivileged in Hoxton. This scenario became the basis for the character of Sarah Brown in Living Alone (1919), who is eventually lured away from her charity work to a house of witches and ghouls. It is one of many instances of the author reinterpreting her own life experiences through a phantasmagorical lens.

One particularly memorable chapter sees two witches — one English and one German — battling on their broomsticks high in the London skies during an air-raid. Whereas Benson’s work often has flavours of magical realism, Living Alone is an episodic prose poem whose entire internal logic is more akin to a dream. Some have connected the author’s affinity for fantasy to her own physical incapacities as a child. She grew up continually on the verge of death, suffering from bronchitis and pleurisy. Her survival was almost certainly a matter of sheer tenacity. “I insist on ignoring the whole condition,” she wrote. “If I must die, I’ll die as alive as I can.”

But if Living Alone is a form of feminist escapism, This is the End is a rebuttal to such indulgences. It tells the story of Jay, a young woman who has run away from home to become a bus conductor. I would describe her as the novel’s heroine, only Benson forbids it. “I cannot introduce you to a heroine,” she writes, “because I have never met one.” Jay does not inform her family of her new occupation, but rather spends her working days plunged in reveries of a mysterious house by the sea. In their attempts to locate her, the family eventually reach the imaginary house Jay has described so vividly in her letters. In doing so, they destroy it.

That Benson was largely confined to her bed for most of her childhood may account for her later determination to explore the globe. She produced two travel books – The Little World (1925) and Worlds Within Worlds (1928) — in which the reader is offered a series of lively anecdotes ranging from America to the Far East. This wanderlust was the stimulus for much of her fiction. Most of her novels are set abroad, and I Pose was inspired by a cruise trip she took with her mother to Jamaica.

Yet Benson’s fascination for unfamiliar cultures might also prevent any possible revival of her literary reputation. The later part of I Pose, located in the West Indies, contains descriptions of indigenous people that are shocking by today’s standards, and would doubtless see Benson dismissed as a racist. Her narrator certainly holds views that are rightly abhorred today, but the fact that no contemporary reviews of the novel commented upon these features should be sufficient evidence that they were unremarkable at the time. Benson’s racial prejudices, in other words, can be readily accounted for by the fact that she had the disadvantage of being born in 1892.

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Perhaps Benson’s lineage would be considered even more damning. Her mother was from aristocratic stock, and her family made its fortune in the 18th century through the managing of slaves. Given that the British Library was recently compiling a “watchlist” of authors with family connections to the slave trade, and that activists masquerading as academics are frantically engaged in the “decolonisation” of curricula, the fashions of the moment are clearly unfavourable for Benson’s work to be widely rediscovered.

“A curious feeling: when a writer like Stella Benson dies,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary, “that one’s response is diminished; Here and Now won’t be lit up by her: it’s life lessened.” Benson’s death from pneumonia in 1933 in what is now northern Vietnam cut short a talent that was still on an upward trajectory. Her last published novel Tobit Transplanted (1930) was her most acclaimed (Woolf wrote to Benson to say that she envied her for this work) and an unfinished novel published posthumously in 1935 as Mundos could well have surpassed it in completed form.

So while a renewal of interest remains unlikely, Benson’s work cannot be recommended enough. To read her books is to glean a thrilling insight into a singular worldview, one driven by a passion for the unseen and the unknowable. Like the gardener and the suffragette, we become fellow travellers on a strange and exhilarating journey.

Wishful thinking only explains so much. A cynic might take the view that all this talk of “distraction” is a way to minimise the significance of the culture war, a tactic likely to appeal to those who support the creeping authoritarianism of our times. But perhaps the better explanation is that culture warriors have been so successful in misleading the public when it comes to their methods and objectives. The claim that the culture war is a “distraction” is, in other words, a distraction.

This is not to deny that some tabloid “woke-gone-mad” stories are frivolous. It is, of course, eminently sensible to shrug off bitter screeds about vegan sausage rolls or reports of young people tweeting about how old sitcoms are “problematic”. All conceivable opinions are available on social media if one searches long enough. Just as the devil can cite scripture for his purpose, so too a lazy tabloid columnist can quote “the Twitterati” to confect some juicy clickbait.

That said, these kinds of trivialities are often symptomatic of a much deeper cultural malaise. We may laugh at the university that appended a trigger warning to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, informing students that it contains scenes of “graphic fishing”, but the proliferation of such measures is an authentic concern. It points to an increasingly infantilising tendency in higher education, one that accepts the dubious premise that words can be a form of violence and that adults require protection from ugly ideas. Worse still, it is related to growing demands that certain forms of speech must be curtailed by the state. Only this month, a poll by Newsweek found that 44% of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 believe that “misgendering” should result in criminal prosecution.

Such developments are anything but a distraction. What has become known colloquially as the “woke” movement is rooted in the postmodernist belief that our understanding of reality is entirely constructed through language, and therefore censorship by the state, big tech or mob pressure is fully justified. In addition, this group maintains that society operates according to invisible power structures that perpetuate inequality, and that these can only be redressed through an obsessive focus on group identity and the implementation of present discrimination to resolve past discrimination. This is why the most accurate synonym for woke is “anti-liberal”.

When James Davison Hunter popularised the term “culture war” in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, he was describing tensions between religious and secular trends as well as alternative visions of the role of the family in society. He was using the term in its established sense, where any given “culture war” has clearly defined and oppositional goals (such as the Kulturkampf of the late-19th century, which saw the Catholic Church resisting the secular reforms of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck). Hunter’s application of the term mapped neatly onto accepted distinctions of Right versus Left in American politics, which is perhaps why the notion of a “culture war” is still so often interpreted through this lens.

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But our present culture war is not so simple. The goals are certainly oppositional, but the terms are vaguely defined and often muddied further through obfuscation. Rather than a reflection of antipathies between Right and Left, today’s culture war is a continuation of the age-old conflict between liberty and authoritarianism. John Stuart Mill opened On Liberty (1859) with an account of the “struggle between Liberty and Authority”; the only difference today is that the authoritarian impulse has been repackaged as “progressive”. This would help explain why a YouGov poll last week found that 24% of Labour voters believe that banks ought to be allowed to remove customers for their political views.

The idea that defending liberal principles is a kind of “distraction” amounts to an elaborate form of whataboutism. Contemporary critics of Mill might well have argued that in writing On Liberty, he was allowing himself to be distracted from more pressing causes. Why wasn’t he writing about social reform, for instance, or the Franco-Austrian war? Similarly, while some commentators ask why we are discussing climate change during a cost-of-living crisis, an environmentalist might well ask why we are discussing the cost-of-living crisis in the midst of climate change. The extent to which we are being “distracted” is very much dependent on our individual priorities.

That is not to suggest that there are not important issues that are being neglected. Matthew Syed has observed the curious lack of interest in the possibility that we are facing self-annihilation due to our rapidly advancing technology. As he points out, in an age when the full sequence of the Spanish flu can be uploaded online and reconstructed in a laboratory, “how long before it is possible for a solitary fanatic to design and release a pathogen capable of killing millions, perhaps billions?” And why, Syed asks, aren’t world leaders devoting time and money to confront these existential threats?

Syed writes persuasively, and I certainly share his concerns. But I part company when it comes to his diagnosis of our culture war as “a form of Freudian displacement”, that “the woke and anti-woke need each other to engage in their piffling spats as a diversion from realities they both find too psychologically threatening to confront”. Syed is right that there are some who specialise in the trivial, but there are many more who are undertaking in earnest the crucial task of halting the ongoing erosion of our freedoms.

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The liberal approach to redressing injustices, one now routinely dismissed as “anti-woke”, has a long and illustrious history. We might look to Mary Wollstonecraft, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King and many others who understood that freedom of speech and individual liberties were fundamental to human progress. Identity politics in its current form is directly opposed to the ideals of these great civil rights luminaries. While many of today’s culture warriors promote polarising narratives of distinct and incompatible group identities, the proponents of universal liberalism — as embodied in the movements for black emancipation, second-wave feminism and gay rights — have always advanced individual rights in the context of our shared humanity.

Far from being a distraction, then, our culture war still cuts to the heart of what kind of society we wish to inhabit. While it continues to be misapprehended as a conflict between Left and Right, those of us who are urging vigilance when it comes to the preservation of our freedoms will continue to be mistrusted and maligned. The likes of Matthew Parris are free to assert that ignoring the agents of authoritarianism will make them “go away”, but I am not aware of any historical precedents that support this view. When it comes to the culture war, apathy is tantamount to surrender.

And so it is with some trepidation that I learn of an imminent remake of Clue (1985), the hilarious whodunnit written and directed by Yes Minister’s Jonathan Lynn. Like all the best cult films, this one was a commercial failure on its release and was rescued only by the loyal fanbase that developed thanks to the advent of VHS. Fans have been tantalised with the possibility of a remake for years now, but with Ryan Reynolds apparently confirmed to star, it looks like it’s soon to become a reality.

As an adaptation of the board game Cluedo, Clue really should have been awful. It succeeded because Lynn followed the lead of Murder by Death (1976), in which screenwriter Neil Simon observed the conventions of the murder-mystery genre while simultaneously sending them up. Where we might have expected a perfunctory script with two-dimensional recreations of the game’s characters, Clue offers a series of farcical set pieces interspersed with snappy dialogue from an ensemble cast whose quality would surely be impossible to replicate today. Are there any young actors currently working in Hollywood who could possibly rival the comedic dexterity of Madeline Kahn, Eileen Brennan, Christopher Lloyd or Tim Curry?

And yet, I wonder whether my fears are rooted in pure nostalgia, a sentimental need to protect the memories of my childhood from desecration. As a boy, I would marvel at Tim Curry’s shapeshifting virtuosity. I remember my utter astonishment on learning that the villain Rooster from Annie, the killer clown from the mini-series It, and the impossibly muscular 10-foot-tall demon from Legend were all played by the same actor.

Clue was a particular favourite. Curry’s performance is the beating heart of this improbable farce, in which his capacity for razor-sharp comic timing and physical buffoonery is showcased to perfection. Rewatching the movies of our youth always carries a degree of risk; more often than not, we are confronted with the realisation that our favourites were utter dross, only bearable when seen through callow eyes. But revisiting Clue as an adult has been a pleasure. It’s completely daft, of course, but it has no pretensions to high art and is executed with clockwork precision, building gradually to its three frenzied climaxes.

And so it seems unfeasible that another actor could improve upon Curry’s star turn as the butler Wadsworth. We have already seen the experiment carried out in the case of one of Curry’s other best-known roles: the transvestite alien Dr Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Laverne Cox was impressive in the 2016 television version, but one could not quite shake the feeling that there was an imposter in those fishnet tights. Richard O’Brien, the show’s creator, once remarked to me that Curry’s interpretation of Frank N. Furter was “definitive”. So why bother attempting to improve on the unimprovable?

Creatives in Hollywood are often accused of laziness in rehashing tried and tested formulae. Yet the attempt to recreate an already popular film takes a certain chutzpah that I can’t help but admire. Has there ever been a remake that has satisfied fans in every respect, or that hasn’t been damned from the moment of its inception? The task is Sisyphean. The filmmaker is trying to win over an audience that is bound to be hostile.

One solution is the “requel”, a combination of a sequel and a reboot that follows on from previous storylines but introduces new characters to supplement the original cast. This technique is engineered, one might say cynically, to satiate the nostalgic appetites of older fans while cultivating new ones. Jurassic World: Dominion (2022) allowed moviegoers the opportunity to be reacquainted with the key figures from 1993’s Jurassic Park (played by Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum), alongside some new younger cast members to take care of the more physically demanding action sequences.

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But requels are invariably a mess. The Han Solo of The Force Awakens (2015) feels like a dioramic approximation of his former self, and the Luke Skywalker of The Last Jedi (2017) is a veritable changeling. When Prince Akeem returned to our screens in 2021 for a requel of Coming to America (1988), the traits that made him so compelling had been mercilessly sanitised. The effect of all such character revivals is akin to our frustration at the Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor, a strange doppelganger with none of the flair or caustic genius of the fat knight of the Henry IV plays.

But perhaps we ought to resist our natural cynicism. Yes, remakes are about milking cash cows — usually ageing ones with desiccated udders — but there’s nothing new in the reworking of popular stories. With the exception of Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, Shakespeare always borrowed his major plotlines. As You Like It was written barely a decade after the publication of Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, the text upon which it is based.

Of course we forgive Shakespeare because he always surpasses his sources, but there is an ideal here that writers might wish to emulate. Poets of the Elizabethan era were informed by the imitation theory of the Roman rhetorician Quintilian. That is to say, great art could be produced through a combination of both imitation and invention. We might apply this concept to cover versions of pop songs. These can often amount to little more than karaoke but, in some cases, can surprise us with the audacity of their reinterpretation.

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The same can be said of movie remakes. Those that succeed only do so because they are able to blend imitation with invention. One thinks of John Sturges’s transposition of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) to the American wild west in The Magnificent Seven (1960). Then there is Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), Franz Oz’s remake of 1964’s Bedtime Story. Steve Martin and Michael Caine are able to generate more explosive comedic chemistry than David Niven and Marlon Brando in the original, and the added feminist twist at the end is masterfully done.

Gus Van Sant’s 1998 version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) was mauled by critics who resented the very concept of a shot-for-shot remake, one that copied the camera tracking and editing of the original. To put this criticism in the terms of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, our auteur had committed the sin of pigritia (indolence) by failing to invent in the act of imitation. This criticism was seemingly universal, but it was based on a false premise. There are significant differences in Van Sant’s version — which I will not spoil here — and these are all the more potent due to their infrequency. To my mind, the remake is a success, precisely because it is able to modify our perspective of the original in surprising and sinister ways.

So perhaps we ought to embrace the inevitability of the remake. The retelling of existing stories is the oldest story of them all, and some of our greatest artists have produced their best work by drawing on the collective imaginations of their predecessors. The miserable quality of current Hollywood remakes isn’t so much proof that the concept is flawed, but rather that the leading practitioners of the cinema seem to lack the ingenuity to reignite our interest.

As such, I am keeping an open mind when it comes to the remake of Clue. Madeline Kahn is, of course, irreplaceable, and whoever assumes the role of Mrs White may as well steel themselves for the unflattering comparisons. Yet if the filmmakers can avoid pandering to modish identity politics, and find some inspiration in that febrile no-man’s- land between the expectations of a devoted fanbase and the need to innovate, it is possible that our inevitable disappointment can be assuaged.

That these stories are unlikely to be true is beside the point; Tiberius’s reputation has done wonders for the tourist trade here on Capri. The historians Suetonius and Tacitus started the rumours and, with the help of successive generations of sensationalists, established a tradition that was to persist for almost two millennia.

All of which serves as a reminder that reputations can be constructed and sustained on the flimsiest of foundations. Suetonius and Tacitus were writing almost a century after the emperor’s death, and many of their lurid stories were doubtless echoes of those circulated by his most spiteful enemies. Or perhaps it’s simply a matter of prurience. Who can deny that the more lascivious and outlandish acts of the Roman emperors are by far the most memorable? One thinks immediately of Caligula having sex with his siblings and appointing his horse as consul. Or Nero murdering his own mother, and taking a castrated slave for his bride, naming him after the wife he had kicked to death. For all their horror, who doesn’t feel cheated when such tales turn out to be false?

Our reputations are changelings: protean shades of other people’s imaginations. More often than not, they are birthed from a combination of uninformed prejudice and wishful thinking. And we should be in no doubt that in our online age, when lies are disseminated at lightning speed and casual defamation has become the activist’s principal strategy, reputations are harder to heal once tarnished.

I am tempted to feel pity for future historians. Quite how they will be expected to wade through endless reams of emails, texts, and other digital materials — an infinitude of conflicting narratives and individual “truths” — really is beyond me. At least when there is a dearth of primary sources it is possible to piggyback onto a firm conclusion. “Suetonius said…” has a satisfactory and definitive air, but only because there are so few of his contemporary voices available to contradict him.

As the culture war rumbles on, and I have found myself ostracised by former friends who now interpret even minor political disagreements as evidence of malevolence, I have learned that reputation is invariably a form of fiction. One such friend used to complain endlessly about a certain conservative commentator, asserting that he was a mendacious hatemonger whose every action was motivated by contempt for marginalised communities. These ideas were so frequently repeated in conversation, and confirmed by others within our circle, that I had no doubt they must be true. Imagine my confusion, then, when I eventually became well acquainted with this man, and found him to be both generous and empathetic. It’s like meeting Beelzebub and finding that he has been secretly baking cupcakes for the poor.

The same sense of bewilderment has struck me whenever I have happened upon bad-faith critics attempting to summarise my views. I have been variously described as “far-Right”, “bigoted”, “racist”, “sexist” and even “homophobic”. Of course, I would not expect total strangers to know my mind, but given that my actual opinions are freely available to anyone with a search engine, it does feel odd to be so wildly mischaracterised.

I am not alone in this. That false narratives can be more powerful than reality is, of course, the reason why our opponents so readily resort to distortions and smears. A colleague recently alerted me to one of the more bizarre hit pieces that has been written about me in an online magazine. The strategy was at least novel: the writer had contacted former students from my time as a teacher in order to trawl for unflattering anecdotes. According to one account, I had sent a pupil out of the classroom because he dared to disagree with me about the use of metaphorical language in Of Mice and Men.

But perhaps funnier than the story itself is that the author of this article was gulled into repeating it as though it could possibly be authentic. It is a reminder that reputations are often cultivated by those who must first suspend their critical faculties. This kind of nonsense is harmless enough, of course. It falls far short of defamation and, as RuPaul so neatly put it: “what other people think of me is none of my business.”

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For all that, more serious attacks on people’s reputations can be devastating. Three years ago, I lost a friend to cancer after he had been falsely accused of sexual assault. In his final days he told me that he had no doubt that the years of intense anxiety following the trial had exacerbated his illness. The source of his distress wasn’t even so much the initial accusation, which was easily disproved in court, but rather the gossip that continued to reverberate and the loved ones who no longer picked up the phone.

In the past, I have often made the mistake of assuming the worst of my detractors, simply because a scurrilous lie has seemed more appealing than a complicated truth. Few of us who have been dragged into the deranging ideological skirmishes of the past few years will have avoided making these mistakes, but these days I like to keep in mind Philip Roth’s remark in The Human Stain: “our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong.”

No doubt it is hopelessly optimistic to assume that this approach will become the default. Our brains are hardwired to take mental shortcuts — known as heuristics — and we are generally more willing to believe the worst of others than make the effort to consider that we may have been misinformed. Worse still, the inherent appeal of scandalous and titillating tales means they will be propagated at an accelerated rate, so that even outright lies can quickly become received wisdom. We tend to accept that there is “no smoke without fire”, when more often than not it’s just a few troublemakers with a dry ice machine.

So perhaps we ought to give Tiberius the benefit of the doubt. In that spirit, let us consider one of Suetonius’s more flattering accounts. While living on the island of Rhodes, Tiberius remarked that he ought to visit all the sick people in the town. His servants assumed that this was some kind of decree, and the local invalids were hastily summoned. Rather than turn them away, Tiberius took the time to speak to each one and apologise for the misunderstanding. This story may not satisfy our appetite for murder and depravity, but at least it might be true.

The diplomat Sir Thomas Elyot wrote these words in 1531 but, with a little tinkering, they could pass for the kind of rigid assertions currently gaining traction among a handful of prominent conservative commentators. Social media influencer Andrew Tate, for instance, has gained a huge online following for promoting conventional roles for men and women, equating male success to wealth, physical strength and a duty to protect a timorous and tractable wife.

It is no coincidence that such views are enjoying a resurgence at the same time that, conversely, certain Left-leaning activists are doing their utmost to advance a social constructionist view of both sex and gender. The result has been a curious theoretical alliance between gender ideologues — for whom outmoded stereotypes are taken to signify an authentic self — and traditionalists who similarly feel that male and female behaviour ought to be strictly defined.

But that Elyot’s ideas about men and women do not seem out of place is a striking reminder that we have been here before. In early 17th-century England, debates about gender proliferated, largely due to a combination of the rise of Puritanism, concerns over cross-dressing, and the accession of a king (James I) who would openly kiss his boyfriends at court. The Puritans were particularly exercised by the influence of the theatre, perceiving it as a decadent distraction from the worship of God and liable to corrupt the soul.

Most famously, the lawyer and polemicist William Prynne produced his Histrio-Mastix (1633), in which he condemned the theatre as the “chief delight of the Devil”. England was unusual in banning women from the stage and Prynne dismissed actresses as “notorious whores”. He saw the male actors in women’s attire as “an inducement to Sodomy”, an affront to scripture and natural law. As for theatregoers, they were “adulterers, adulteresses, whoremasters, whores, bawds, panders, ruffians, roarers, drunkards, prodigals, cheaters, idle, infamous, base, profane, and godless persons”. Who knew the theatre could be such fun?

Inevitably, these anxieties found their way into the work of dramatists. In John Fletcher’s Love’s Cure (c. 1612), the boy Lucio is raised as a girl to protect him from becoming the victim of a vendetta between feuding families. Lucio’s manner of speech approaches what we would now call “high camp”, and one cannot help but imagine a young Kenneth Williams in the role. Here Lucio is complaining to the family servant Bobadilla:

“Go fetch my work: this Ruffe was not well starch’d,
So tell the maid, ’t has too much blew in it,
And look you that the Partridge and the Pullen
Have clean meat, and fresh water, or my Mother
Is like to hear on’t.”

An exasperated Bobadilla exclaims to the audience: “Oh good St. Jaques help me: was there ever such an Hermaphrodite heard of?”

The premise of Fletcher’s comedy is that having been socialised as female, Lucio cannot help but embody stereotypically feminine traits. Eventually, Lucio learns how to fight and his inherent masculinity is restored through marriage. Just as the homoerotic relationship between Antonio and Sebastian in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (c.1602) is contained by the eventual marriage of the latter to Olivia, Fletcher is free to explore gender non-conformity so long as it is “fixed” by the end of the play.

This desire to ensure that sexual orientation and gendered behaviour is aligned with biological sex is similarly prominent in today’s culture wars. In her new book Time to Think, Hannah Barnes has revealed that between 80-90% of adolescents who were referred to the Tavistock paediatric gender clinic were same-sex attracted. Other writers, such as Helen Joyce, have already drawn on studies that confirm a strong correlation between gender non-conformity in youth and homosexuality in adult life. Members of the staff at the Tavistock itself joked that soon “there would be no gay people left” and whistle-blowers revealed that homophobia was endemic.

Such findings suggest that many of the achievements of feminists and gay rights activists over the last 50 years have been reversed. Heteronormative expectations and gender stereotypes are back in fashion, and young people who do not naturally fulfil these expectations appear to be the casualties. It all reminds me of an anonymous pamphlet from 1620 called Hic Mulier: Or, The Man-Woman, which sees gender non-conformity as a problem to be rectified. Women who cross-dress and embody masculine tropes are described as “an infection that emulates the plague”.

A form of reply came in a subsequent publication entitled Haec-Vir: Or, The Womanish-Man (1620), in which a feminine man and a masculine woman discuss their respective conditions.  The pamphlet takes the form of a dialogue, and their ultimate resolution is to swap their identities. Haec-Vir declares:

“We will here change our attires, as we have chang’d our minds, and with our attires, our names. I will no more be Haec-Vir, but Hic Vir, nor you Hic-Mulier, but Haec Mulier: from henceforth deformity shall pack to Hell: and if at any time he hide himself upon the earth, yet it shall be with contempt and disgrace.”

Our culture, then, is clearly not the first to develop an obsession with gender roles and how they might be subverted, although it is perhaps the first to entertain the notion that sex itself is a kind of fiction. “It’s not correct that there is such a thing as biological sex,” claims Dr Nicholas Matte of the Sexual Diversity Studies programme at the University of Toronto. For Amia Srinivasan, Oxford philosopher, sex is “a cultural thing posing as a natural one”. Such faddish ideas have trickled from the most obscure niches of academia into mainstream thought, which is why the women’s rights group Action Aid claimed that “there is no such thing as a ‘biologically female/male body’”.

It is significant that activists who insist that stereotypes of male and female behaviour are suggestive of an innate “gender identity” should also seek to deny the reality of sexual dimorphism. The view that sex is a “spectrum” has even infiltrated major academic literature, including the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. Arguably, such pseudo-scientific notions have much in common with medical discourses of the early modern period, derived in part from the theories of Galen, which saw women as defective men, a mere diversification from what Thomas Laqueur has described as “the one canonical body”. These ideas had the advantage of establishing sex as inherently hierarchical, meaning that patriarchy was not so much a philosophical proposition as a condition of natural law.

According to the prevailing view of the time, men’s genitals were external because they had been forced out by their innate heat. As Helkiah Crooke, court physician to King James I, put it in his Mikrokosmographia (1615), women’s genitals “remain within, because their dull and sluggish heat is not sufficient to thrust them out”. There is even an essay by Michel de Montaigne from 1574 (“On the power of the imagination”) in which he describes a young woman called Marie whose genitals one day emerge from her body as she takes a particularly masculine stride.

The fact that activists are returning to this notion of sex as a spectrum is a sure sign that their movement is fundamentally regressive. But such outright denial of reality is only ever likely to exacerbate the biological essentialism of conservatives who demand that boys and girls behave in their “natural” way. Nor is it persuasive to insist, in accordance with a minority of feminists, that gender is entirely socially constructed. The reality, of course, lies somewhere in between: gender is a product of a complex relationship between biological and cultural factors. This has been true since these debates started raging all those centuries ago. Today, in our new modern era, isn’t it time we moved on?

Victor Hugo had a particular seascape in mind when he wrote these words in Les Travailleurs de la mer (usually translated as Toilers of the Sea). He is describing what his hero Gilliatt sees from the “Douvres”, a set of sea stacks upon which the steamboat Durande flounders as it travels from France to Guernsey. These impressive rock formations are a fictionalised rendering of Les Autelets on the west coast of the island of Sark, with their unobstructed view of the Grand Ruau, one of the world’s most treacherous stretches of water.

It is worth seeing for yourself. Good timekeeping is essential; this area of Sark is only accessible at low tide, and the return route is quickly swallowed up by the swelling waters. Once you have made your way through the natural arch of rock at the Port du Moulin, and clambered over a series of large boulders, Hugo’s “Douvres” rise into view. “The blocks of granite are hideous and enormous,” Hugo writes, “everywhere perpendicular wall — the severe inhospitality of the abyss”.

I was there again on Boxing Day, testing the theory that open-air activity is the best remedy for a hangover. As usual, I wanted to see the small shipwreck near to the Grand Autelet, the larger of these natural landforms. The wreck emerges for only a couple of hours a day, when the tidewater has retreated sufficiently for its spoils to be exposed. It’s more a vague outline than a shipwreck, really; the steel frames that were once welded to the keel are splayed out upon the shore, scabbed with rust and limpets.

There is a kind of poetry in the landscape here at Port du Moulin, something intangible and a little frightening. The shipwreck adds another detail; it seems to represent the indifference of nature to the achievements of human civilisation, a major theme of Toilers of the Sea. It seems apt that this decaying artefact is all that remains of a filmed adaptation of the novel from 1936. Directors Ted Fox and Selwyn Jepson had constructed a replica of the Durande and deliberately crashed it against Les Autelets. The project was eventually abandoned, much like the wreckage of their expensive prop.

Hugo was a masterful storyteller with a keen insight into human nature, but he was also determined to tackle epic themes. In his three greatest works — The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), Les Misérables (1862) and Toilers of the Sea (1866) — he addresses what he describes, from the Greek, as the triple ananke of humankind: the necessities of religion, society and nature. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame denounces the folly of dogmas. Les Misérables depicts the injustice of an oppressive state. Toilers of the Sea explores our eternal conflict with the natural world.

Yet while Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame have been adapted numerous times across various media, Toilers of the Sea has been curiously overlooked. Sea Devils (a Rock Hudson vehicle made in 1953) was supposedly based on Hugo’s novel, but beyond the shared character names and locations the resemblance is minimal. A silent movie adaptation in 1923 by director Roy William Neill has been lost. Fox and Jepson’s version, as we have seen, shared the fate of the Durande. There is currently a campaign to raise money for a new film, but it is still in the fundraising stages.

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For all its metaphysical power and elusive allegories, Toilers of the Sea can be enjoyed purely on the level of spectacle and adventure. It is one of those novels that is cinematic in its vision, but one suspects that — in the current climate, at least — Hollywood would be incapable of delivering a faithful version. With this new tendency in filmmaking to produce homilies disguised as entertainment, Hugo’s story would doubtless be pruned and refashioned to better reflect our voguish obsessions with diversity and identity politics. This would, of course, be a disservice to the profundity of Hugo’s masterwork. Thematically speaking, intersectional grievances are surely far less compelling than the futility of human aspiration against the inexorability of nature.

Yet events over the past few weeks have nonetheless seen Hugo dragged against his will onto the cultural barricades of the present day. Outside the city hall of Besançon, Hugo’s birthplace, a bronze likeness of the author has become the focus of a bizarre struggle over the growing influence of le wokisme. Sculpted in 2003 by the Senegalese artist Ousmane Sow, an attempt has been made to restore the original colouring of the statue, but not everyone has been happy with the result. It has left the author’s skin looking somewhat darker than one might expect. “We’ve gone from Victor Hugo to Morgan Freeman,” one critic remarked.

The local council responsible for the restoration has been accused of an act of “frenzied wokery”, but surely they would not have sanctioned what amounts to a form of historical blackface? Sow’s widow has complained it “was never Ousmane’s intention” to create “a black Victor Hugo”. Inevitably, politicians and media commentators have been weighing in, and the statue’s face has even been vandalised with white paint by students some claim are far-Right activists.

Our “culture wars” are never more tedious than when they encroach on the arts. And regardless, Victor Hugo has already suffered one genuine “cancellation”, a period of exile in the Channel Islands for his opposition to Napoleon III. Having failed to provoke a revolution in Paris, he fled first to Jersey — where he continued to write his anti-establishment treatises — and eventually settled on Guernsey from 1855 to 1870. It was here that he wrote Toilers of the Sea, his lasting paean to the island that had embraced him.

It is a book to which I often return, one whose epic theme is framed within a deeply intimate and human story. It concerns Gilliatt, a Guernsey fisherman, who undertakes to retrieve the machinery of the Durande after it is wrecked on the Douvres. Its owner, Lethierry, agrees that in return Gilliatt may marry his daughter Déruchette, a woman for whom Gilliatt holds an intense passion.

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This deceptively simple premise does little justice to the intensity of the reader’s experience and the virtuosity of Hugo’s execution. The bulk of the novel recounts Gilliatt’s voyage to the Douvres. With only his ingenuity and a few simple tools, our hero braves the torrential storms of the archipelago to dismantle the engine of the wreck of the Durande, reassemble it on his sloop, and sail it back to Guernsey. He is forced to survive for weeks in the crags of the granite bluffs, nourished only by rainwater and raw sea creatures, before his final confrontation with the “devil-fish”, a giant blood-sucking octopus.

Even in translation, the novel is exhilarating. The reader is battered about in the same maelstroms and tempests that have bludgeoned the seafarers of Guernsey for centuries. Gilliatt’s obsessive love for Déruchette is at once liberating and self-destructive; for all his little triumphs along the way, his dreams mean nothing to the indifferent chthonic forces of the ocean. The octopus that Gilliatt must defeat is a “terrible sphinx propounding a terrible riddle; the riddle of the existence of Evil”. This key moment was inspired by a real-life octopus in the Boutique Caves on Sark which once chased Hugo’s infant son while he was bathing.

One senses that Toilers of the Sea could only have been written on an island. I spent some time in Guernsey over the festive period, and as usual I was struck by that air of unreality that islands tend to foster. As D.H. Lawrence put it, on islands “the souls of all the dead are alive again, and pulsating actively around you”. Hugo’s novel teems with the ghosts and fairies of Guernsey’s past. The narrative voice appears to sympathise with the superstitious fisherfolk who so mistrust Gilliatt. He lives alone in a house known to be haunted, keeps mysterious books, and never attends church. His neighbours have even seen him conversing with a toad. There are no toads on Guernsey, and so they are right to be suspicious.

On Guernsey you can walk in Hugo’s footsteps and pay a visit to Hauteville House — his home for 15 years — located on a hill above Saint Peter Port. At the very top of the house is his “Crystal Room”, a glass-panelled observatory which overlooks the harbour and Havelet Bay. It was in this room, from this vantage point, that Hugo wrote both Toilers of the Sea and Les Misérables.

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Although not a supernatural tale, Toilers of the Sea has spectral origins. After his exile from France, Hugo conducted numerous seances in which he would he commune with an impressive array of historical guests, including Shakespeare, Socrates and Joan of Arc. He also had a conversation with the ocean, a ghostly personification that hoped to compose a piece of music to reflect its own vastness and incomprehensibility. Hugo summoned the spirit of Mozart to lend a hand.

And this is why we should not be surprised that the principal character of Toilers of the Sea is really the ocean itself. In the words of F.C. Green, the ocean is “Gilliatt’s most formidable opponent” with “her sinister accomplices — the rocks, the winds, the rain, the fogs — all of which acquire, under Hugo’s magic pen, a malignant individuality”. Perhaps Hugo ought to have retained his original title for the novel: L’Abîme (“The Abyss”).

And so while culture warriors squabble over the colour of a statue’s face, or obsess over Hugo’s “straight while male privilege”, the work itself transcends such trivialities. Hugo addresses themes that the liberal humanists might once have called “transhistorical” or “universal”, before such notions were tossed onto the pyre of postmodernism. Toilers of the Sea in particular serves as a reminder that, for all the shallow bickerings of the present, there are great depths of the past still waiting to be explored.