SARAH VINE: Look out, Sloanes – the Wokesters are coming for you! 

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One of my least favourite questions to be asked — usually at dull political fundraisers where the conversation is as dry as the beef — is: if I could go back in time and eliminate one person from history, who would it be?

It’s a pointless question, not least because everyone always chooses Hitler or Genghis Khan, but also because it is an idiotic simplification. There is no one person whose death could eliminate all the evil in the world, just as there is no one person whose presence can cure it.

Luckily the whole exercise is just a stupid parlour game. Or it was. Because lately some people — rather a lot in fact — are playing it for real.

The latest bete noire is 17th century Irish physician, naturalist and collector Sir Hans Sloane. Born in 1660, he lived through an age of great scientific, intellectual and artistic expansion.

He has been denounced, Cultural Revolution style, by the British Museum (which he founded), and his bewigged effigy removed from its plinth. His crime? Like virtually every other nobleman of his age, he owned slaves. Henceforth he is to be housed along with other common-or-garden artefacts in a display that explains his legacy in the ‘exploitative context of the British Empire’.

Without Sloane we would not have the British Museum, nor the British Library, the Natural History Museum, Chelsea Physic Garden, hot chocolate — or even one of the more entertaining features of the 20th century, the Sloane Ranger.

Indeed, if we’re really going to cancel everything Sloane then presumably Alice bands, red trousers, Barbour jackets and point to points must henceforth all be consigned to the Orwellian black hole, together with pearl earrings and, of course, blue mascara.

The director of the Museum, Hartwig Fischer, explained that the move is part of wider measures to ensure its treasures are seen in the context of colonialism.

The aim, he asserts, is to ‘rewrite our shared, complicated and, at times, very painful history’.

No one is denying the history of the British Empire is inextricably linked to the slave trade. It is an unpleasant and indelible stain on our nation, and it is one that we must all reflect upon. But it is nevertheless just a stain. It is not the whole tapestry.

It is this broader picture, as people have been toppling the statues of similar historical figures in towns and universities across Britain over recent months, that we seem to be ignoring. And people like Mr Fischer — who seem more interested in furthering their personal goals than making the case for the rich and nuanced history of the institutions they represent — are guilty of the worst kind of intellectual cowardice.

The cancel culture sweeping the nation is not about materially improving the lives of the oppressed.

It’s about an intellectual fearfulness now sadly embedded across almost all our institutions — from the Civil Service to the Scouts — that has neither the courage nor the sophistication to resist the zombified armies of the woke whose righteous indignation and evangelical fervour makes them blind to the ambiguities of humanity and human history.

So to depose Sloane — or for that matter George Washington or any slave-owning figures of the past — serves no purpose, no real, practical purpose, other than to play to the gallery.

When you attempt to simplify the past, to paint it in convenient, monochromatic shades of black and white, you achieve nothing. Slavery is not what defines Britain, just as it is not what defined Hans Sloane.

Yes, it is part of our past — but it is only one aspect of that past.

There are countless others — not least the fact that our Parliament abolished the slave trade long before many other nations — that, at least to my mind, tips the balance in our favour.

Show we’re flocking to watch

Proof you don’t need to spend a fortune to make great television: Our Yorkshire Farm, Channel 5’s series about sheep farmers Amanda and Clive Owen and their nine ‘free-range’ children, has overtaken the BBC’s Line Of Duty in ratings, with one episode attracting 2.26 million viewers.

I can see why: the Owens’ humour and no-nonsense attitude to life makes for the kind of uplifting escapism we crave at the moment. Clive and Amanda are chalk and cheese — he’s 20 years older than her for a start. And yet they make the most brilliant team, she with her mini-skirts worn with gumboots, he slightly in awe of his glamorous wife (left).

It’s the perfect antidote to lockdown blues, not to mention the ultimate cure for townies with fantasies of moving from suburbia to the wilds of Yorkshire.

Incidentally, Amanda Owen’s love of farming came from reading James Herriot novels — which are returning to our screens also courtesy of Channel 5 in a remake of All Creatures Great And Small. The original starred Christopher Timothy as vet Herriot, up close and, shall we say, very personal with the business end of a cow. New legislation relating to the rights of animals in entertainment has put a stop to such behaviour, so the show has replaced the real thing with a prosthetic, ensuring dignity for actor and ruminant.

I’ll miss doorbells. Full stop

Peak snowflakery: the full stop is now considered a form of micro-aggression by the younger generation.

What to most of us is merely an effective way of ending a sentence is apparently an ‘unfriendly emotion marker’ to anyone under 30. I find the notion quite funny — what agonies might one inflict by the correct use of a semi-colon? — but it does highlight the ever-growing abyss between generations created by technology.

Take doorbells. I’ve noticed over the summer that teenagers don’t use them. They text each other when they’re outside before magically appearing by the drinks cupboard.

Actually using a doorbell to signal your presence is as alien to them as watching live television (another sign of impending decrepitude) or leaving a voicemail message (unforgivable).

In fact, what with Covid and ‘contactless delivery’, I reckon the doorbell will soon go the way of that other relic of tech-gone-by, the landline.

No more will naughty schoolchildren lay waste to suburban streets with games of knockdown ginger. Sad, really.

Scotland’s decision to make masks mandatory in schools sparked a tedious debate about whether pupils in England and Wales should follow suit. I don’t care either way — just so long as they go back. Not least because as soon as they do, all those women who have found themselves trapped in a 1950s hell of domestic drudgery will be free again — and the country will light up like a firecracker. Or to put it another way, there will be a few corks popping next week.

Prince Harry has spoken of his admiration for self-help authors, Brene Brown and Tristan Harris. ‘They are two people we absolutely adore, and we know,’ he gushed, adding: ‘We love them!’ We? Is that the Royal We, Harry — or the Meghan We? 

Universities minister Michelle Donelan has urged vice-chancellors to ‘where possible try to prioritise those from disadvantaged backgrounds for admission this year’. I understand disadvantaged children need help but why should their wellbeing be at the cost of middle-class pupils? It’s this kind of reverse snobbery that infuriates parents who work hard to offer their children the best start — then find themselves penalised. 

Are we sure all this stuff about the BBC considering cutting Land Of Hope And Glory and Rule, Britannia! from the Last Night Of the Proms is not a real-time episode of writer John Morton’s hilarious BBC spoof, W1A? This Proms stunt is exactly the kind of thing ‘brand consultant’ Siobhan Sharpe (played by Jessica Hynes) would have dreamed up. In fact, it reminds me of that time she came up with the idea of modernising the BBC by getting rid of the ‘B’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ to make it ‘more like an app’. Clearly the same logic has been applied to the Proms: get rid of the audience and singing to make it more like . . . well, pretty much anything you want, apart from the actual Proms.Is it me or is Covid becoming an excuse for councils and local authorities to commit acts of civic sabotage with the impunity of your average medieval Pope?

Take the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan: he is presiding over a new network of cycle lanes across the capital which will, when the city eventually returns to normal, create gridlock, make it harder for ailing shops and businesses to recover — and increase pollution.

I’m all for encouraging cycling (I cycle myself), but doesn’t he understand that if you go too far and clog up the capital’s arterial roads you will, eventually, choke the life out of it?