I went to Pedro’s Tex Mex Cantina to claim my racist sombrero

Pedro’s Tex-Mex Cantina is a fantastical shack near a ring road in Norwich. It was recently asked to stop handing out sombreros at the University of East Anglia Freshers’ Fair, because anti-racist activists (henceforth known as ‘morons’) at the UEA Freshers’ Fair reckon the sombrero is racist, and gave the staff of Pedro’s Tex-Mex Cantina a lecture about ‘cultural appropriation’, which they took well; that is, they did not set fire to the UEA Freshers’ Fair, which is what I would have done.

This is where we are with progressive politics, Spectator reader, although I think you knew that anyway. Anyone who thinks wearing a sombrero is racist — rather than suave, because the usual student headgear is still the traffic cone — needs an education in the true nature of racism, and should visit Ferguson or Tower Hamlets, instead of wondering if Yad Vashem should do millinery, and calling, however obliquely, for ‘white culture for white people’, because they are morons. I was overcome by a dark longing to wear a sombrero and vomit all over Twitter. Perhaps I can persuade the editor of this magazine to offer every subscriber a sombrero and a stick-on Zapata moustache? Perhaps we could rename the UK ‘El Sombrero’? It is obvious that racism will not be eradicated by banning the sombrero. Polemically speaking, it is a straw hat, and we all know it.

Anyway I was so angry I went to Norwich in solidarity with the sombrero, a hat too often maligned because, on the right face, it can be terrifying. Norwich is, as you know, a city famous, at least in Jewish circles, for a medieval pogrom — was anyone wearing a sombrero? It has a re-pointed Norman castle on a boob-shaped hill; many Georgian houses; and a market selling principally baskets.