For publicly defying today’s suffocating orthodoxy, I’ve paid a price in my private life as well. For 13 years I’d been good friends with a well-known novelist whose name I will not disclose — I don’t even shop my ex-friends — until she happened to catch my appearance on Question Time in 2019. The next day, this writer with the usual package-deal progressive views emailed to cancel our dinner date for the following week and never spoke to me again. My inexcusable sins on TV? Making a joke about the NHS and objecting that comparing a woman in a burka to a ‘letterbox’, hardly a customary pejorative, didn’t seem all that insulting. She-who-shall-not-be-named is ambitious, and I’m confident that this novelist felt she could no longer afford to be associated with me. I had become a professional liability, and proximity to my dodgy opinions could damage her literary reputation. Most of all, those dodgy opinions clashed with her righteous opinions, which were more sacred to her than our friendship. I suspect I’m not the only person in this room who’s seen a relationship go up in flames over unpardonable departures from politically correct catechism, and it’s always the party further to the Left who lights the match. For most of us during the last 10 years, loyalty, bravery, genuine tolerance and congenial agreement to disagree have been thin on the ground.

Like the Soviets before them, today’s progressives regard art as a promotional tool of ideology.

My response to rules I don’t accept is to break them. That’s why, for example, two novels back in The Motion of the Body Through Space I gleefully conjured a black female character who was an incompetent diversity hire — to more than one reviewer’s predictable horror. In fact, for me personally the real threat of this poisonous period isn’t ‘cancellation’ but becoming too reactive, too trapped into battling a petty, mean-spirited, vengeful dogma that will not and cannot last, and consequently squandering my precious, finite literary energies on unworthy subject matter.

It was disappointing to me that this amazingly honest White-people-getting-screwed (twice) background story became nothing more than that, a small sub-plot. The author went nowhere with it. In fact, she reverted at one point. At some point Serenata noted that the MettleMan competition, the business of it, and the family and fans too, were predominantly White. She didn't make anything of that, until one paragraph that I couldn't find right now, in which she seemed to see that as a problem. OK, that was the book character, but was this an effort at plausible deniability by Mrs. Shriver? I don't know why she brought it up in the first case then.