Sam Leith

It seems to get earlier each year, doesn’t it? It's not yet even December, and the Mail on Sunday has splashed on 'NOW THE WOKE ‘BLOB’ TRIES TO BAN CHRISTMAS'. Lordy be. I say this every year and every year my woke comrades fail to learn. We have a leak, a chatty flake, I say. Someone’s feeding our plans to the Mail on Sunday, I say. We need a major overhaul of woke blob op-sec if we’re ever going to get this whole Christmas-banning thing done, I say. And do they listen? To be honest, I thought we were onto a good one this time. It was subtle. As the paper reports, our attempt to ban Christmas came in an innocuous guise.

We are told that the Prince of Wales had no idea at the time that his underlings were offering to sell honours to random zillionaires. That’s lucky. Instead of being tarred by the sticky brush of corruption, then, he emerges from this minor scandal as a benign old nitwit, shovelled from one place to another by his suited aides, shaking hands and offering tea to this Russian biznizman, that Chinese philanthropist, that Saudi moneybags ('Mahfouz bin Mahfouz, Sir. Very important chap. Great benefactor.' 'Yes, jolly good. Have you come far, Mr Mahfouz?') I’m inclined to take the denial that he knew what was going on pretty much at face value.

Look, I don’t know much epidemiology. Can’t pretend to. So what follows is, necessarily, a personal finger to the wind. But perhaps it chimes with your experience.  First time round — back in the days when we were all huddled indoors, leaving the house only to stand on the doorstep of a Thursday night to bang pans with a wooden spoon, or making solo expeditions to a denuded supermarket where we do-si-dohed around each-other in the aisles… yes, back in those days, I didn’t know very many people who got Covid. Acquaintances, the odd friend. Some scary stories. Some scarier statistics. But not so many ‘rona stricken friends. Could we inch towards herd immunity down a road scattered with corpses rather than heaped with them?

A Tory MP last week raised the delightful possibility that the big family of what we might call the terrorism community should be expanded yet further. Speaking to a group of activists at party conference, Jonathan Gullis declared: “The term 'white privilege' is an extremist term. It should be reported to Prevent, because it is an extremist ideology. It’s racist to actually suggest everyone who’s white somehow is riddled with privilege.” Goodness. Even now I see it: online social studies graduates and right-on corporate HR functionaries hauling on the old orange PJs and trooping glumly into their cells in some British equivalent of Guantanamo Bay, alongside the murderous jihadists of IS, pipe-bomb prone neo-Nazis, incel spree-killers and armalite-toting provos.

There is a picture book, by the excellent David McKee, of which my youngest child was very fond. It’s called Two Monsters, and its protagonists are, as promised, two monsters. The blue one lives on the west side of a mountain, and the red one lives on the east side of the mountain. They communicate verbally but never see each other. It all kicks off when one evening the blue monster calls: 'Can you see how beautiful it is? Day is departing.' The red monster shouts back: 'Day departing? You mean night arriving, you twit!' Cantankerous words are exchanged before bedtime and both sleep badly. The following morning the blue one shouts: 'Wake up, you numbskull, night is leaving.' Red responds: 'Don’t be stupid, you peabrain! That is day arriving.