Nick Cohen

One of the many delusions of the Right is the myth of conservative robustness. Conservatives don’t play the victim card, they say. They tell it like it is, and don't care who knows it. They stand on their own two feet, and take it on the chin. They have guts and backbone too. It’s easy to mock the anatomical clichés, but middle-class leftists should worry. Millions of people are about to vote for Ukip, in part because they resent a modern version of Victorian prudery that has stopped robust debate, and allowed sharp-eared heresy hunters to patrol the nation’s language. If fellow citizens are prejudiced, then there is indeed a case for fighting them.

Islamic State allows its adherents to be both cultists and psychopaths: an L. Ron Hubbard and a Fred West rolled into one. The reasons why young men want to travel across the world to fight its wars and lend a hand to the murder of its victims ought to be brutally and boringly obvious. Psychopaths are always less complicated, less rewarding, less interesting than their victims. They're not hard to explain. Where is the difficulty about Abelaziz Kuwan , for instance? His case opens ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan.

A few days ago Imtiaz, a solar engineer; Aliya, a campaigner for secular education; Sohail, a gay Somali in his twenties; and Sara, a bright student, went to Queen Mary University of London in the East End and made an astonishingly brave stand. Astonishing because they volunteered to step forward to the front line after the Islamist murders of satirists and Jews in Paris and Copenhagen. Before an audience and in front of cameras, they explained why they had left Islam. They had become ‘apostates’, to use a dangerous word, which blackens what ought to be a personal decision that free adults in free countries ought to be free to make without anyone threatening them.

When republicans meet, we console ourselves with the thought that our apparently doomed cause will revive. The hereditary principle guarantees that eventually a dangerous fool will accede to a position he could never have attained by merit, we chortle. With Charles III, we have just the fool we need. I don’t laugh any more. Britain faces massive difficulties. It can do without an unnecessary crisis brought by a superstitious and vindictive princeling who is too vain to accept the limits of constitutional monarchy. If you want a true measure of the man, buy Edzard Ernst’s memoir A Scientist in Wonderland, which the Imprint Academic press have just released. It would be worth reading if the professor had never been the victim of a royal vendetta.

Heaven forbid that such an atrocity should happen, but suppose white racists attacked a mosque today, murdering four people. Crowds gather to show solidarity with the dead. They profess support for their friends and families and their horror at sectarian murder. The assassins killed their victims for no other reason than they were Muslims. That was it. All they had done was stick to their faith. A BBC reporter called Tim Wilcox joins the mourners, and buttonholes an elderly and not very articulate Asian lady. 'The situation is going back to the days of 1930s Europe,' she says, as she recalls the last time racist murders swept the continent. 'Do you think that can be resolved before it is too late?' the reporter asks. Cheeringly, the woman refuses to let despair overcome her.

Religious murderers gunned down European freedom in Paris today. Tonight everyone is defiant. I am just back from a 'Je suis Charlie' vigil in Trafalgar Square, and the solidarity was good to see. I fear it won’t last. I may be wrong. Perhaps tomorrow’s papers and news programmes will prove their commitment to freedom by republishing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. But I doubt they will even have the courage to admit that they are too scared to show them. Instead we will have insidious articles, which condemn freedom of speech as a provocation and make weasel excuses for murder without having the guts to admit it. Tony Barber, Europe editor of the Financial Times was first out of the blocks: 'Charlie Hebdo is a bastion of the French tradition of hard-hitting satire.

It says much about the dismal state of journalism that George Clooney, who is paid to act, has a far better grasp of modern threats to freedom of speech, than writers, who depend on free speech for their livelihoods. Journalists thought the real story was that leaked emails showed  Sony executives called Angelina Jolie 'minimally talented spoiled brat' –  as if you, me or anyone else wouldn’t find careless insults if we could read what others said about us in private. As I began this piece yesterday, some jerk from the BBC on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House was still holding his sides and guffawing a fortnight after the affair began. He called in to his studio a clueless British director, who assured us that 'the fear is completely disproportionate.

Of all the reasons to wish this government gone, Chris Grayling is the largest. He is shutting poor and much of the working and lower-middle class out of the justice system. In matters as fundamental to a good life as housing, employment protection and freedom from domestic violence, he has placed them beyond the rule of law. If they go to court, they have no one to plead their cause, while their landlord or employer or ex-husband can hire lawyers to outwit them. The legal system intimidates most potential claimants. They are too frightened and confused to think of representing themselves. I suspect many middle-class graduates are as nervous. Most don’t and won’t go to court, and what were once strong cases pass by in silence.