LIBBY PURVES: Whisper it, the finger wagging woke warriors are lastly on the retreat. So possibly we will now concentrate on the world’s REAL issues

Is ‘WOKE‘ on the wane? Can we bring down the curtain on the grand opera of outrage, stop worrying about clumsily saying a wrong word, and enjoy old books written by people who knew no better?

Is the wave of hyper-correctness ebbing quietly away? Some have started rejoicing about the death of woke, especially since the definitely criminal Donald Trump beat the sugary-nice (but rather wet) Kamala Harris.

Others are alarmed and fear the return to a narrow-hearted world of bigots. Either way, it pays to pause and look around at the actual evidence.

The idea of ‘wokeness’ – a term annoyingly borrowed from US civil rights campaigns of the 1960s – now covers many things, which adds to the confusion. It started with the excellent idea of being ‘awake’ to the reality of racial and religious inequality, not smugly blind to it. It meant pulling back from the idea that straight white males are naturally superior, and celebrating same-sex partnerships.

But like many religious enthusiasms down the ages, it became an inquisition, letting those who felt holy take unholy swipes at others. The oddest manifestation is in gender politics.

There was always a minute quantity of people with a strong need to live as the opposite sex: maybe a new wave of it was due to an exaggerated media culture of superhero masculinity and primped, sexualised femininity. But it’s always been there, and often reasonably accepted.

Angela Morley (formerly Wally Stott who wrote the Hancock theme) transitioned and carried on in music; Jan Morris had a long literary career and general respect. Some had hard battles, such as April Ashley who got the MBE for her campaign for full legal rights, achieved here in 2004.

Yet, a few years ago, activists started demanding immediate, unmonitored self-identification as a right. Some were reasonably driven by trans people’s stories of abuse, mockery and exclusion from work – though existing laws already covered that and should have been better enforced.

Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in the US election to become the 47th President of the United States of America

But other campaigners were downright bullies and fetishists, jumping on the woke bandwagon to claim persecution on a par with the most wicked of racisms. Gender became a prime weapon of woke: so if you’re looking for change, start there.

Advertising is the flickering candle in the coal-mine, detecting change. Take the beer company Budweiser: last year the male-born trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney appeared in a sponsored video for Bud Light, with the usual preening and pouting imitation of little-girl cuteness.

The company wanted a new market but infuriated existing customers and the brand lost 13 per cent of its value.

Poor daft Mulvaney got a torrent of personal hatred and made a weepy video about how Budweiser did not ‘reach out’. Indeed, it didn’t: panicking, it banged out macho ads featuring a Clydesdale horse, men hauling up flags, and American football star Travis Kelce, in which big grunting men sprawled in garden chairs with beer cans. 

Mind you, a lot of women saddled with monosyllabic beer-bellied blokes may dislike that even more than the Mulvaney parody of girlishness. But it does feel like a sign of retreat.

That’s one ad, but elsewhere the mood music is changing. Stonewall, once an honourable campaign against the persecution of homosexuals, suddenly flocked to the trans banner, perhaps fearing irrelevance after winning gay marriage, as well as employment and adoption rights.

They piously demanded everyone fall in behind their new cause, and dozens of organisations signed up to be ‘Diversity Champions’, as a sort of holy hygiene rule. Even the head of MI6 felt he had to put his pronouns, ‘he-him’, on Twitter (though why a bloke in a suit not doing it insults trans people, is hard to see).

The new Jaguar ad was clearly an effort to distance the brand from Alan Partridges in golfing sweaters but brought only ridicule, writes Libby Purves

But now what’s happened? Within months, the BBC, Arts Council England, Scottish Parliament, Sport England, the Crown Prosecution Service, and the Equality and Human Rights

Commission broke links with Stonewall: so did Ofsted, Anglian Water, University College London and more. Some say it was poor value, others resented wasting time tracking ‘microaggressions’ between staff.

The medical evidence of the Cass report on chemical puberty blockers alarmed some; so did the absurdity of men demanding the right to be ‘fluid’, switching between genders as the singer Sam Smith and comedian Eddie Izzard do.

More sinister were cases of male rapists who, on the verge of a prison sentence, declared themselves women, or the predicament of Darlington nurses having to share an open changing room with a fellow worker who was biologically male and ‘intact’ to the point of talking about trying to get his girlfriend pregnant. The nurses are suing their employer.

The roll-back is happening, and not just in the dumping of Stonewall. JK Rowling, savagely attacked for her rather mild attitude to decent trans rights and disowned by ungrateful young actors she made famous, is preparing for a new series. And – hold your breath at the daring new bravery of TV executives – HBO now says she ‘has the right to express her personal views’.

Elsewhere, some have quietly stopped publicly announcing their pronouns or forcing their staff to.

From the publishing world – lately held to ransom by the enthusiasm of its younger employees to spot anything possibly transphobic or sexist or colonialist – there are faint but definite indications of resisting imaginary offence.

In sport, some bodies are still struggling with the issue of mediocre chaps who self-declare as women, and either win unfairly or injure real ones. But there, too, is definite movement towards sanity.

The woke-wave wasn’t all bad. Some of the present ebbing has probably been because people wanting to be modern and ‘kind’ went along with it until they suddenly noticed real harm – not just the censoring of classics and skewing of history to condemn the past, but in the gender wars’ real damage to women’s privacy and safety.

Among the smug-centrists rolling in the podcast shallows, Alastair Campbell sheepishly shuffled back from his surprise at people turning to Trump because of his campaign’s message on the trans issue, or as the former Labour spin doctor put it: ‘the dressing room stuff’.

Cue female howls of ‘We told you!’. Meanwhile, the Women’s Equality Party had a vote to abolish itself after divisions on the trans issue got nasty. On balance, I suspect the truth is that society can stomach only so much tutting from the supposedly virtuous, whether it’s about ex-colonialism, tolerance, creeds, gender or just language. Now is the time to draw some lines and dare to laugh.

The new Jaguar ad, beautifully described by Giles Coren as ‘a load of angry half-starved non-binaries on their way to a Pride rally dressed as Boney M’, was clearly an effort to distance the brand from Alan Partridges in golfing sweaters but brought only ridicule. 

A year ago, maybe, anyone mocking it would feel uneasy, thinking ‘they’re racially diverse, bit non-binary, better not giggle, maybe it’s cool’. But something’s shifted: enough’s enough.

Laugh, not unkindly, and return to thinking about housing, poverty, worklessness, global conflict, climate change. And real kindness, not the forced variety.