Where will vaccine passports take us?

Desperate to find someone to commemorate with a statue for having done great things, but who isn’t a white male, some people in Devon want to honour a couple of lesbian pirates. A statue of Anne Bonny and Mary Read has been proposed for the beauty spot of Burgh Island, to salute their important work in ‘breaking gender boundaries’ in the 18th century. Their long careers of psychotic violence and theft are easily eclipsed by the suggestion that they liked a spot of how’s your mother from time to time.

A problem here is that there is no proof that they were actually lesbians. A few revisionist historians, of the kind who trawl back through the years in the hope they will find someone who might possibly have batted for the other side, have suggested as much, but that’s about it.

I’ve seen drawings of the two chicks and they do look a bit butch, it has to be said — but then so did an awful lot of women in the 1700s. Catherine I of Russia, for example, looked a bit like David Walliams impersonating a woman, and even our own Queen Anne had a certain heft to her. Women only started poncing themselves up during the Regency period, really.

But being a bit beefy is not sufficient evidence, in my book, for the two of them being lesbians and thus instrumental in ‘breaking gender boundaries’. If they weren’t lesbians then nobody would have thought for a single nanosecond of erecting a statue to them. Your skin colour, your gender or sexual preference are now far more important to the woke authorities than what you have actually done with your life.

But wokeism may have come to our rescue, surreptitiously, on the vexed issue of whether or not we should have ‘vaccine passports’ which allow us to do things in this strange era.