Who sounds madder to you: the bloke in the pub who likes golf and whiskey or the twat on the street wearing a keffiyeh like a holy shroud while cackling dementedly as an inflatable Jeffrey Epstein sodomises an inflatable Donald Trump? Come on, it’s an easy one. Give me the normie whiskey-sipper over the bourgeois half-wit who simps for Hamas any day of the week. Luckily for Trump, it was the former who cheered for him during his trip to Ireland, while his haters consisted of the most batshit agitators ever to disgrace the streets of Dublin.

It always amazes me when Trump supporters are painted as loons, given there’s no one in Christendom as nutty and annoying as a Trump hater. His two-day jaunt in Ireland was hard proof that anti-populists are far more mentally unstable than populists. Trump was cheered by everyday men and women thronging the bar of his golf course in County Clare, while 150 miles away, in the fallen city of Dublin, overeducated eejits foamed at the mouth about the ‘Epstein class’ and raised the trans flag alongside the Palestine flag. Imagine calling Trump supporters thick when you don’t even know that the only ‘transition’ a genderfluid Mick would be permitted to undergo in Gaza would be from the top of a tall building to the street below.

Trump’s visit to Ireland was hilariously uncontroversial. The press had panted for scandal. Ireland ‘braces’ for the Trump storm, said Time. We must ‘expect the unexpected’, said the Irish Independent. They couldn’t wait for Trump to say something crazy so that they might wank out yet more thinkpieces on what a menace to decency he is. Yet all he did was swap niceties with Taoiseach Micheál Martin, watch the Irish Open at his Doonbeg golf course, and commit to lifting tariffs on Irish whiskey. Will that apply just in Ireland or across the EU, he was asked? ‘Just Ireland’, he said. Oh snap.

The only thing they could cite as proof that he’s still the great uncouth blunderer of Western politics was his comment on Irish unification. A United Ireland would be a ‘fantastic thing’, he said. But here’s the thing: that’s an entirely mainstream opinion in the Irish republic. It’s the only thing Trump’s cheerers in Doonbeg and his detractors in Dublin are likely to agree on: that Ireland should be united. Even former UK PM Gordon Brown has said it’s ‘inevitable’ Ireland will be united.

Yet that didn’t stop the broken-record loathers of Bad Orange Man from trying to blow up his comments into the scandal of the decade. Trump used his trip to ‘fan the flames’ of war in Northern Ireland, said the Daily Beast. Babe, lie down. The idea that a throwaway remark by a US president could reignite the Troubles is not only fantastically dumb – it’s borderline anti-Irish racism. The Irish Indie used the words ‘geopolitical bombshell’ for its recap on Trump’s visit, yet it could cite not one crazy thing done by Trump. You could smell the disappointment.

No, for true insanity, for a glimpse into the bottomless black hole of dogmatic stupidity, one had to look to the opposition to Trump. Thousands gathered in Dublin to impotently froth about the president. It was a sea of Palestine flags – raw proof that that emblem has been wholly hijacked by pampered Westerners as little more than a vanity metric for their own moral superiority. The irony was too much: Trump gave voice to a genuinely Irish nationalist idea, while his haters wrapped themselves in a foreign flag, clearly preferring the holy relic of performative Palestinianism to anything Ireland-related. The populist cares for nationhood, the anti-populist only for the self.

They burnt the US flag. Down with the Land of Free, up with the Land of Hamas! A blimp version of Benjamin Netanyahu and Jeffrey Epstein took it in turns to bugger a blimp version of Donald Trump. Two Jews fucking an American president in the ass – it’s not exactly subtle, is it? The old fascists saw Jewish tentacles everywhere, the new ones see Jewish todgers. To drive the point home, placards showed Epstein and Netanyahu as the puppetmasters of a marionette Trump. Yeah, that’s anti-Semitic as hell. You almost have to admire the nuclear-grade gall of activists screaming ‘Fascist!’ at a democratically elected president even as they hold up imagery that might have made Der Stürmer wince.

Of course the trans flag was everywhere, too. No lefty demo is complete without the voodoo cry that you can have a cock and be a woman. Quite when ‘left-wing’ became synonymous with being a socially disordered douche who thinks men should be free to show their knobs to women (‘trans rights’) and Islamofascists should be free to kill Jews (‘resistance’) is anyone’s guess. But we can all agree, surely, that the sex-denying, Jew-taunting, anti-American bollocks on display in Dublin was in every way imaginable more unhinged than anything said by anyone in Doonbeg.

We’re told to fear populism but I find anti-populism far scarier. Trump might not be your cup of tea – fine – but an anti-Trump movement that agitates for the right of hulking fellas to play in women’s sports and for Hamas to annihilate the Jewish State all the way ‘from the river to the sea’ should horrify you far more. After his two days in Ireland we’ve learnt that Trump likes golf, whiskey and winding up Brits by yapping about a United Ireland, and that his haters think Jews control the world and a 6ft fella in a dress is literally a woman. Choose your fighter.

When the BBC television programme The Black and White Minstrel Show breathed its last one evening in 1978 after a whopping 20 years, I don’t think many people were that cut up about it. Except, of course, the entertainers involved, who included a young Lenny Henry. When I see Sir Lenworth CBE now talking about reparations, I wonder how much of it is him trying to compensate for appearing in this show. Don’t worry, Len. You were married to Dawn French for 25 years – you’ve served the time.

The Black and White Minstrel Show had been a phenomenon, spawning huge tours and hit albums, with an audience of 20million viewers at its peak – but the 1980s were almost here, and it was obvious to anyone half-sentient how offensive it was. For those of you too young to remember the show, it comprised white male singers wearing ‘blackface’ make-up, singing songs to attractive white women. Even as a child I sensed there was something off about it, so it’s surprising that they kept it going so long. But then the BBC is always rather slow on the uptake, which may be something to do with its lumbering, bloated size.

When it does see the light, however, it will invariably be intent on shining the torch directly into the eyes of the poor paying public and insisting that it’s all their fault before proceeding with a full-on scolding. Thus, in 2023, the BBC broadcast a documentary featuring David Olusoga and David Harewood informing us of the evils of ‘blackface’ and using The Black and White Minstrel Show to illustrate this – as if the decision to broadcast this abomination had been taken by hoi polloi rather than the posh white men who ran the BBC for all those years.

Long before ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ was a song by Taylor Swift, there was a similarly named psychological game, identified by Eric Berne in his brilliant pop-psychology book, Games People Play, in which a person throws the blame for a bad action on to another, even to the point of feeling genuine anger at them. Auntie can run as many cringingly cosy adverts as it likes telling us that it’s ‘our’ BBC, but this has very much been the attitude of the state-sanctioned broadcaster to its tributaries: pay up and shut up – and when it goes wrong, it was all your fault in the first place.

You’d think that, having so conclusively backed a bad idea, for so long and so late, in the shape of blackface, the BBC might have swerved such shenanigans thereafter. But I guess that the taste for mocking a section of the Beeb’s compatriots who hadn’t been to a decent public school was strong in the corporation. So ‘womanface’ replaced blackface as the drag of choice.

It has now emerged that the BBC has cancelled RuPaul’s Drag Race UK after eight series due to ‘significant financial pressures’. According to the BBC website, after starting in 2019, ‘Drag Race UK brought British drag into mainstream entertainment in the UK, and made household names of drag performers such as La Voix, Danny Beard and Tia Kofi.’ (Never heard of ‘em.)

I’m pleasantly surprised that this chop has happened, as the BBC has been unhealthily obsessed with drag queens over the past few years. Every ‘talent’, cookery and panel show must boast a bloke blind with sparkling eyeshadow; they’re all over Celebrity Mastermind, The Weakest Link, The One Show and Comic Relief (which actually sounds like a drag-queen name – once you look at life in their ceaselessly, and oddly joyless, smutty manner, everything seems like a drag-queen name. I can’t go past my local butcher without making a mental note to avoid Crackling & Stuffing.) As Andy Jones (who worked for the BBC himself) noted starkly in the Spectator earlier this year: ‘And, of course, “because of the unique way the BBC is funded”, the BBC News site also features every crumb of drag news from “Wiltshire locals dress in drag for calendar” to “Drag queens impacted by cost-of-living crisis.” The site ran around 20 separate online stories about the death of drag queen “The Vivienne”.’

BBC News even has a dedicated written section for the creatures – which can often run more stories than the boring old women’s section. BBC News’ top story on International Women’s Day one year was Dylan Mulvaney’s autobiography. Drag queens even have their own alleged sitcom Smoggie Queens, which has been commissioned by the BBC for a third series. I’ll stop here, though there’s masses more, because I’m starting to feel a tiny bit queasy. I’ll just say that it’s amazing there hasn’t been a drag queen reading the BBC News yet, hoiking up her false bosom while recounting some terrible atrocity.

This isn’t a bit of a giggle or pushing the boundaries or ‘being kind’. Drag is womanface, and it’s every bit as bad as blackface. That we don’t see it as such – and that women are among those who cheer these misogynist clowns on – speaks volumes about how we still see sexism as the ‘Yes, but…’ of prejudice, not really serious enough to be up there with racism. It’s ironic that a generation of young, liberal women have proudly freed themselves from being compliant to putative male partners of their own age (see that recent New Statesman poll that found that while only 35 per cent of women under 25 hold a favourable view of men, men from the same cohort hold a 72 per cent favourable view of women), but are fine with being adoring audiences and simpering punchlines for men who want only to mock them. They are accessories and doormats, there to make men dressed as women look acceptable – even if they call themselves names like Cheryl Hole and A’Whora and talk about ‘being fishy’ when they compliment one of their kind for ‘passing’ as a woman. There are drag queens who squirt ‘milk’ out of their fake breasts and drag queens who pretend to have ‘periods’ all over the stage. Is that just a bit of fun, too? But for the kind of woman who is deeply dreary and wants to look edgy, and who has usefully internalised her own misogyny, nothing is too low to get a ‘You go, gurrrl!’.

Some women will even involve their own baffled children in ‘Baby Drag Bingo’ or ‘Drag Queen Story Time’. In 2023, the truly vile-sounding ‘CabaBabaRave’ took place, featuring drag queens in thongs and bondage gear gurning at bewildered babies – it was organised by two women. Such thoroughly castrated females exist only as accessories to befrocked men who, the idiots frequently reassure them, make ‘a better woman than I do!’. In a piece calling the cancellation of Drag Race UK ‘sickening’, the Guardian smugged: ‘A contestant in season one even had a girlfriend at the time – and if that’s not inclusion, what is?’ More fool her. Talk about a female eunuch. Talk about a trans- / handmaid.

Even as a little girl, I knew that blackface was wrong. How stupid must grown women be, how complicit in the contempt which the BBC has been so flagrant in displaying towards them, not to recognise the same thing about womanface?

If you want to see how politicians would like to treat the public if they were not constrained by democracy, look at how they treat children. Soon to be banned from using social media and, from 1 January 2027, banned from ever buying tobacco, the under-16s are also about to be subjected to phase two of Jamie Oliver’s assault on school dinners.

It is almost exactly 20 years since a Labour government introduced new food standards in England’s schools after the unbearable celebrity chef made a TV series about it. Budgets were increased and Turkey Twizzlers were banned, but Oliver didn’t stop to catch his breath. He immediately demanded a ban on packed lunches and, in a classic case of projection, described parents who gave their children fizzy drinks as ‘tossers’ and ‘arseholes’.

The new school-dinner rules announced today give Oliver everything he has been lobbying for. Pastries and croissants will no longer be permitted in breakfast clubs. Sausages and bacon are allowed, but only once a week. Fried eggs are banned completely. Only breakfast cereals that are very low in sugar can be served. Teacakes, crumpets and unsweetened pancakes can be served, but only twice a week. Porridge is permitted but only if it is ‘plain’ and ‘unflavoured’ – no sugar, honey, syrups or sweeteners are to be made available.

For lunch, kids can no longer be offered fried chips or any other deep-fried food. Processed meat and ‘foods containing pastry’ can only be served once a week. Meals containing cheese, such as lasagna, are limited to three portions a week. Lentils and chickpeas are to be compulsory at least once a week. No foods containing chocolate are permitted. ‘Sweetened desserts’ can only be served twice a week.

As for the tuck shop, the government has decreed that the ‘only permitted snacks are plain fruits, vegetables, savoury crackers, breadsticks, yoghurt / plant-based versions (as per the dairy food group) and houmous’. Nom, nom!

It is not just that the government is being puritanical. The new food regime also reveals a thirst for micromanagement and regulation for the sake of regulation that is quite mind-boggling. No detail is too small for Labour’s Gastronomic Gestapo. No dinner lady is to be trusted and nothing can be left to common sense. Not only will kids be limited to two sweetened desserts a week, but those desserts ‘must include an 80g portion of fruit or vegetables’. Only jam and marmalade with ‘reduced sugar’ can be served, but they ‘must be limited to sachets or portions of no more than 10g or one teaspoon’.

The rationale for many of the new rules is far from obvious. Schools will be allowed to fry sausages but not eggs. If a school serves a food containing pastry and a food containing processed meat, it cannot serve a food covered in breadcrumbs in the same week. Schools cannot serve more than two portions of ‘meat and fish alternative products’ in the same week, but starchy carbohydrates, such as chips, must be available every day. The vegetarian menu must contain pulses at least three days a week. Where have all these numbers come from? Where is the science for any of this?

The new rules go far beyond ensuring that kids have a balanced diet and consume enough calories to get through the day. They are a grab bag of arbitrary prohibitions on random food products and compulsory targets that seem to have been devised by rolling dice. Their only redeeming feature is that they will save the taxpayer money if children decide to eat their breakfast at home and take a packed lunch with them to school.

This is why Jamie Oliver was so keen to ban packed lunches 20 years ago and it is why nanny statists have been echoing his demand ever since. Only last month, the cake-promoting anti-obesity campaigner Prue Leith said the quiet part out loud when she called for packed lunches to be banned because the government ‘can’t police’ what parents put in them. The constant expansion of breakfast clubs and ‘free’ school meals isn’t about preventing children from going hungry. It is about control. The state doesn’t trust parents to follow the latest food fad and it wants to overrule the preferences of not just the child, but also of the child’s family.

The new school-meals regime reveals in absurd detail what a state-sanctioned diet looks like. The government can enforce it on children because children can’t vote. It can’t enforce it on the rest of us for the time being, but through the use of taxes, bans and reformulation, it will do its best to try.

Christopher Snowdon is director of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs and the co-host of Last Orders, spiked’s nanny-state podcast.