Julie Burchill

I didn’t fully realise how much Brexit Derangement Syndrome – the reaction to being on the losing side in the 2016 referendum – had got hold of even people I loved until I complained to a friend that my 2018 play People Like Us (co-written with Jane Robins, who had been asked to leave her North London book group for liking a pro-Brexit Spectator column of mine on Facebook) would close in the small London theatre where it had played for six weeks. It wouldn’t transfer to a bigger London venue, it wouldn’t open in any provincial theatre and it wouldn’t tour – despite selling out before it opened.

Regarding the possible candidates for the Labour leadership, I’ve travelled so far down the nihilistic road to nowhere that I’m afraid I judge politicians these days mostly in terms of how much entertainment they’re likely to provide rather than having one iota of belief they’ll make anything better. Who’d be the most fun up against Kemi at PMQs? The obvious choice is Angela Rayner, but I fear that after her recent shenanigans and shamefacedness, as Glorious Leader she might be regrettably inclined to rein it in. Andy Burnham’s got that more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger look which may well indicate horrid notions about ‘healing’ our multi-fractured body politic. Ed Miliband couldn’t bitch his way out of a recyclable paper bag.

Like most people of my age – I’m 66 – I grew up in a time when politics was a tribal thing, like supporting a football team. My earliest political memory concerned a local election which took place in the 1960s in my working-class neighbourhood of Bristol South. At break time, there was a group of rough boys swaggering around the playground, grabbing other boys and asking bluntly ‘Sam or Doctor?’ These were, respectively, the Labour and Conservative local election candidates; if you said ‘Sam’ you were released but if you said ‘Doctor’ you were shoved roughly between the boys and proffered a punch for your uppity ways.

We’re not used to famous paedophiles having a great talent; perhaps because all of their drive goes into their secret obsession, they’re generally just operators with a lot of front. It’s been easy to slice the cultural contributions of a Huw Edwards, a Jimmy Savile or a Gary Glitter from one’s life and not feel the least absence. If the chattering classes are allowed to keep their Eric Gill, why can’t the dancing classes keep Michael Jackson? On the other hand, we’re inclined to give Caravaggio a pass, as he was such a great painter as well as a boy-abusing murderer – and it was such a long time ago, that the victims can't speak out. The same goes for the paedophile Paul Gauguin, who spent many years spreading syphilis among a proportion of the girl children of Tahiti.

There are times when it seems that violence against women and girls – forever these days being hand-wrung over by useless politicians as their alleged absolute priority – is like a game of Whack-A-Mole; no sooner is the state performatively tackling ‘the Manosphere’ in schools than a sinister new threat to the physical safety of females pops up. Quelle surprise, this time it’s from the trans lobby, via a new organisation called ‘Bash Back’, with an unashamed level of misogynistic violence. The Times reports this week that the ‘militant transgender activist group’ has issued a ‘direct action guide’ to its members, telling them to tool up and carry out illegal attacks on MPs and organisations.

It’s funny that the George Orwell statue outside the BBC's Broadcasting House has a quote etched nearby from a proposed preface to Animal Farm: ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’. It’s almost ‘Orwellian’ in itself – an act of blackwhite Newspeak – that the BBC, of all institutions, have long touted this as their mantra. In recent years, the British liberal establishment – whose propaganda wing is the BBC – have added laugh-or-you’ll-cry modern examples of doublethink, not least telling us that ‘A woman can have a penis.’ The blood runs cold imagining what Orwell would make of it.

They say you can never go home again, but if I think of my hometown of Bristol – and my adopted hometown of Brighton and Hove – the similarities are striking. The rise of the Green Party has much to do with this. When I was growing up in the beautiful, but quiet, West Country city in the 1960s and 1970s, I couldn’t wait to escape to somewhere buzzier. Well, they say be careful what you wish for. Now the two cities share ‘progressive’ politics of the most regressive kind; that distinctive Veruca-Salt-joins-the-Stasi brand which is obsessed with the evil of Israel and the transcendent wonder of ‘trans.’ Voters in Gorton and Denton who helped the Green party win its first by-election this week will come to regret what they've done.