Carry on Kafka: this is our Brave New World

An ex-copper who blogs as Dominic Adler – not his real name – came up with a good phrase this week to describe where Britain is heading under this increasingly authoritarian regime: ‘Like North Korea, but run by David Brent.’ It echoed my own attempts to sum up the atmosphere in Keir Starmer’s Britain in a WhatsApp exchange with Allison Pearson. I described Essex Police, who recently dispatched two hapless officers to the journalist’s door to question her about a year-old tweet, as ‘a cross between the Keystone Cops and the Stasi – Carry On Kafka’.

The fact that our Brave New World is so laughable means people sometimes don’t notice quite how sinister it is

The tale of Allison’s persecution could have been written by Eugène Ionesco, but another good example of this burgeoning absurdism is the recent ‘trial’ of a 17-year-old girl by the Football Association. Her all-women team was about to play another club in a single-sex league when she noticed that one of the opposing players was a bearded man in his twenties.