Dr Golz and her peers are in effect saying to students, “You should want to be the guy who bitches about the rather unobvious racist subtext of party snacks. And if you do choose to behave that way, we’ll reward you, flatter you, and make you feel important, while making other people jump through clown hoops to appease the feelings you pretend to have.” And the more implausible and contrived the claim of victimhood is, the more status points accrue, on account of the complainant’s heightened sensitivity and supposed mental prowess. One has fathomed an injustice mere mortals cannot see. And bewildered onlookers are expected to pretend that this is a high and noble function of an academic institution.

“Polly Toynbee’s influence is perceived to be huge in British public life,” wrote Julia Hobsbawm of the media analysts Editorial Intelligence. “Her columns resonate in Whitehall and beyond.” From high atop those resonating columns, Ms Toynbee delivers her various pronouncements, including a conviction that “left-wing people are more intelligent and just generally better people,” i.e., better than thee and me, and her belief that “disruptive 16-year-old boys” should be taken out of class to spend a term being taught the finer points of dance, thereby resulting in a “transformation in the whole year group.”

When not curing inner-city classroom delinquency with the thrill of modern tap, Polly tells her readers that obesity isn’t chiefly a matter of inactivity and overeating, but instead has a more pernicious cause, i.e., a lack of socialism: “It is inequality and disrespect that makes people fat.” To bolster this radical insight Ms Toynbee made a number of further claims regarding economic inequality and expanded waistlines, each of which proved to be either misleading or untrue. And chunkier readers should note that waiting for a socialist revolution probably isn’t the best way to lose those extra pounds.