Way of theworld Michael Deacon

To fight back against the rise of cancel culture at British universities, Rishi Sunak is reportedly planning to appoint a “free speech” tsar. The favourite for the role is Arif Ahmed, a Cambridge professor who told a student newspaper last year that university “should be an environment where you can say pretty much anything you like”.

This is certainly an encouraging development. If the new appointee is looking for ideas, allow me to suggest the following.

The most effective way to revive free speech on campus would be to curtail it.

At present, all too many students seem not to value free speech. So remove theirs. Shut down their debating societies. Ban their political organisations. Abolish the NUS. Naturally, students will be scandalised by this disgracefully authoritarian move, and will protest against it with righteous fury. All to the good. Because for once, they’ll be demonstrating in favour of free speech, rather than against it. Provided that they’re capable of absorbing this helpful lesson, the ban can then be lifted.

If the plan doesn’t work, however, I fear that the Government may have to resort to something more drastic. In short: abolish all degrees in the arts, the humanities, and any other subjects that don’t require students to be in either a lecture theatre or a laboratory for at least eight hours a day.

This suggestion may sound a little extreme. But it would solve the problem at a stroke. After all, we never read about, for example, medical students no-platforming guest speakers, campaigning to remove “problematic” statues from campus, or demanding the summary dismissal of any member of staff who fails to share their views on trans rights. Of course not. Medical students are far too busy. They’ve got actual work to do. Humanities undergraduates, by contrast, tend to have so little work to do that they inevitably end up falling into bad habits – whether it’s drinking too much alcohol, spending the entire day in bed watching Dickinson’s Real Deal, or staging protest marches against Rod Liddle.

On campus, in other words, the greatest threat to free speech is free time.

For almost the whole of his adult life, the Duke of Sussex appears to have nursed a furious sense of grievance against Paul Burrell. As we’ve learned from Spare, the Duke’s autobiography, he’s never forgiven his mother’s former butler for publishing, in 2003, a “tell-all” memoir about his time in the royal household.

“It made my blood boil,” fumes the Duke. After all, they’d “trusted him implicitly”. And if there’s one thing the Duke can’t stand, it’s people who betray the Royal family’s trust by writing sensational books about them.

Today, however, the Duke is no doubt feeling even more disgusted – because Mr Burrell has, it seems, let slip another royal secret. Speaking to The Sun yesterday, he revealed a possible reason for the rift between the Duke and the Prince of Wales. Sausages.

When the two brothers were little, claims Mr Burrell, their nanny would give William three sausages for breakfast, while Harry would receive only two. When Harry protested, the nanny told him that William “needs filling up more than you” because “he’s going to be king one day”. That, says Mr Burrell, “is what Harry had to contend with, even in his own home”.

If this story is true, it’s little wonder that the Duke feels so badly wronged.

We already knew that, in childhood, he had to endure sleeping in a smaller bedroom than his older brother, and that, in adulthood, he had to suffer the indignity of being given a smaller house with less expensive furnishings. But now we find he was also receiving an astonishing 33.3 per cent fewer sausages. This shocking disparity may well explain why the Duke has taken to speaking out so passionately against injustice and discrimination. He’s experienced them himself.

On the other hand, perhaps we should look on the bright side. The news may present an opportunity to effect a reconciliation between the two brothers. Royal aides should immediately set to work calculating how many thousands of sausages the Duke was deprived of during his childhood, and dispatch a crate to Montecito containing that exact number, in order to make it up to him. Such a gesture may at last help to heal this decades-old wound.

Curiously, the revelation about the young princes’ unequal breakfasts doesn’t appear in Spare. Perhaps the Duke simply found the memory too painful to write about. Then again, there is an alternative possibility.

He’s saving the story for his next book. It’s going to be 400 pages of blistering indignation about sausages.

follow Michael Deacon on Twitter @Michaelpdeacon

read more at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion