Graham Linehan

We will remember 2025 as the year that a madness which had gripped us for a decade finally succumbed to that most irritating of things, reality – and the edifice it had built began to crumble like a 1970s brutalist building constructed from high alumina cement. It is not quite the case that woke is over, as Piers Morgan believes, simply that its appurtenances have become despised and those who shout most loudly in favour of its idiotic shibboleths are confined to a smaller and smaller tranche of far-left delusionals.

It’s a telling commentary on our times that an Irish man and a Canadian woman have to go to Texas in order to honestly express themselves in public. But that’s how it played out on Thursday night at a suburban Austin “salon” that Cockburn attended. Cockburn, who also frequently travels to Texas to talk out his heterodox opinions, appreciated the hospitality of hostess Trish Morrison and her husband, who’s a catering paella chef, so the food is always good over there.   The Irishman was Graham Linehan, creator of the sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd, among others, and more recently an embattled participant in the transgender wars.

The congratulatory messages started pouring in shortly after 5.30 p.m. on Monday. The Metropolitan Police had just issued a press release saying that the force would no longer investigate ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) and people were chalking this up as a victory for the Free Speech Union, the organisation I run. That may seem a bit of a stretch, but the Met linked the decision to its failed pursuit of Graham Linehan, the comedy writer it arrested at Heathrow airport in September over three tweets taking the piss out of trans-rights activists. It was thanks in part to the FSU, which pulled together Graham’s legal team, that the Met decided to abandon the case. In fact though, the person who deserves most of the credit is Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner.