Oh please don’t go all frothy and woke on us now, Boris

LIKE many of my generation, I feel conflicted about this brave new woke world of ours. For example, when it comes to the trans debate, of course I want trans people to feel valued and secure in their lives. Why ever would I not?

Equally, I don’t see why this has to happen at the expense of others, most notably women and impressionable young children who might make irreversible decisions they could later regret.

Similarly, when it comes to footballers taking the knee, I get that they want to make a statement about eradicating racism, and I’m all in favour of that, too.

But I also find the way that anyone who doesn’t want to take part – perhaps because they are uncomfortable with the association with Black Lives Matter, which in America is a radical organisation with some highly dubious methods – gets branded as racist deeply unfair.

So often, it seems, wokeness is just replacing one form of obnoxiousness with another, all – ironically – in the name of tolerance.

This just doesn’t make sense. Tolerance is about understanding and respecting the ideas of people you don’t agree with, not threatening to ruin their lives if they don’t agree with you.

TO ME, that is in essence what wokeness signifies – and why I find so much of it exasperating. And why I think that, where appropriate and reasonable, it’s important to push back. So I was a little concerned when, in his address at the G7, Boris Johnson kicked off with the kind of statement that made me wonder whether he’d hired Greta Thunberg as a speechwriter.

Appealing to his fellow leaders, he urged them to ‘level up’ by avoiding the mistakes made following the credit crunch of 2008, and expressed his passion for ‘building back greener and building back fairer and building back more equal and in a more gender-neutral and, perhaps a more feminine way’.

As my daughter would say, ‘Sorry love?’ For a start, it doesn’t make sense. You can’t be both more feminine and more gender-neutral. It’s kind of an either/or situation.

But also, et tu Boris? I would have thought that you, of all people, would be the last person to succumb to this kind of frothyheaded nonsense.

Because make no mistake, this is textbook woke-speak. It expresses a variety of positive, empowering-sounding intentions, but it doesn’t actually say anything useful or concrete. That is not the Boris we know and love and elected with a stonking majority. That Boris does not mince his words and, perhaps more importantly, that Boris gets stuff done. Hard stuff, such as Brexit and a vaccine rollout programme. He’s a man of intergalactic ambition and appetites, and that’s why people like him. If the country wanted some lily-livered appeaser, they’d elect Keir Starmer.

Of course it would be lovely if everything could be sunshine and rainbows. But that’s all a bit of a way off because we are by no means out of this crisis. Britain needs a strong leader capable of making tough decisions.

But perhaps more importantly, it needs a leader who stands up for common sense, who doesn’t buy into this narrative that Britain is a horrible hellhole, who doesn’t make the vast majority of good, ordinary people feel bad for not flagellating themselves day and night in pursuit of cultural purification.

Of all the Prime Ministers this nation has ever had, Boris probably more than any other represents the right to individual freedom, both in action, thought and expression.

He has always been someone who has pushed the boundaries of an argument, who has never been afraid to stand up to a mob.

The fact that even he now feels he has to dance attendance on the woke brigade is, to my mind at least, concerning. Let’s hope it’s just a passing fancy.

THE economy is bouncing back, according to figures which show GDP only 3.7 per cent below its prepandemic peak. I’m not surprised: A friend recently tried to book a weekend away in a perfectly nice but not thrilling hotel in Cornwall: £900 a night, he was told. Is that why the Government seems determined to make it impossible to ever go abroad again? ●CHILD marriage is despicable, so well done to Sajid Javid for his Bill calling for the minimum legal age for weddings to rise to 18. I’d go one step further, and do something concrete to discourage unions between first cousins. A study into child deaths in Bradford showed twice the risk of death from genetic and congenital abnormalities. ●MY LABOUR council (Hammersmith & Fulham) has decided to stop cutting the grass in my local park on the grounds that ‘it encourages bees and insects’. It also encourages hidden dog mess and other horrors. Why do I get the impression this is less about wildlife and more about skimping on basic public services?