WELCOME TO THE WOKE TRIALS

HOW IDENTITY KILLED PROGRESSIVE POLITICS

JULIE BURCHILL

Academica, 256pp, £24.95

For her fans, Julie Burchill always delivers. To publicise Welcome to the

Woke Trials she penned a characteristically splenetic article in the Daily Mail (illustrated, inevitably, with a photo of Meghan Markle): ‘Wokeness is the roar of the entitled mediocre, desperate to hold centre stage and terrified by any challenge to their flimsy sense of self – a temper tantrum with a socially concerned alibi.’

However, the book only just made it onto the shelves, the author having fallen foul of the very attitudes she derides. It couldn’t have been better timing, publicity-wise. In Areo magazine, Brandon Robshaw filled us in: ‘Hachette Book Group had originally agreed to publish it, but dropped the deal after Burchill engaged in a spat on Twitter that it deemed problematic. She then placed it with Stirling Publishing (Edinburgh), but this time she pulled the plug, after it emerged that its director had links to a far-right group. The book was finally published in November 2021 by Academica, a press based in London and Washington, DC, that specialises in scholarly nonfiction.’

Burchill loves a spat but few newspaper reviewers took up the cudgels. In the Times, it was left to Burchill’s fellow traveller Quentin Letts to sound a deliriously approving klaxon. Her book had the ‘force of epic poetry’, he wrote: it was ‘a long, filth-flecked yell against the illiberalism of “the woke insanity”.’ Burchill is ‘lewd, loud and careless of polite opinion’, Letts went on. ‘She writes breezily about her bisexual bed-hopping and drug-taking and jobs from which she has been sacked. She moons at convention and roars at fashion’s wind.’

As Robshaw put it: ‘if you want an entertaining, over-the-top, anti-woke rant, full of scorn and spleen and sarcasm, fill your boots.’