What did the Romans ever do for us?

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is planning to install a statue of John Chilembwe in Trafalgar Square. Mr Chilembwe was a Malawian Baptist famous for, among other things, leading an uprising where the head of a Scottish farmer was chopped off and put on a pole. He is much revered in his home country for all this and his face has appeared on banknotes. In truth, Mr Chilembwe didn’t incite the murder of many people, in the great scheme of things. If the mayor is searching for a murderer who did punch his weight, he could do worse than hoist up a statue of Francisco Macías Nguema, the former dictator of Equatorial Guinea. I do not have the exact figures of how many people he murdered, but it is impossible not to be impressed by his ambition to have everybody who wore spectacles killed. I think Francisco would look splendid standing next to Horatio Nelson.

This plague of self-flagellating obeisances, which has ripped through many of our institutions since the Black Lives Matter business last year, has now afflicted the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). Like a lot of other colleges, it has decided that it is time to ‘decolonise’ its curriculum and indeed its staff and students. The subjects taught will be re-worked so as to avoid racism. Staff have been told that if they are white, cis and heterosexual, they must accept that they are privileged and there’s an end to it. Making people feel bad about the race they were born into seems to me the very essence of racism, but there we are. Eight posts have been created for people who will be enjoined to discover racism in the nooks and crannies of the LSHTM and stamp on it with a vengeance. Eight posts! If you ever wonder what the great growth industry in Britain might be right now, look no further.