When the time to write the history of the 21st Century finally arrives, the initial 23 years will pose two questions which historians yet to be born will find unanswerable. First, why did the people of our era allow all social, political, and intellectual discourse in the Western world to become shackled and perverted by the phenomenon, initially known as ‘political correctness’, and latterly given the more catchy soubriquet of ‘wokeness’? And secondly, how was this scourge eventually extinguished – how was ‘cancel culture’ cancelled?

To the first question, no simple answer is apparent.