RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: J.K. Rowling fiasco proves Britain is now one big April Fool’s joke

Days like this it’s difficult to know where to start. What’s an April Fool’s joke and what isn’t? Search me.

Is J.K. Rowling going to be arrested and charged with ‘hate crime’ for insisting that women don’t have willies?

This time last year, that would have been a nailed-on April Fool. But as of yesterday, ‘misgendering’ someone in Scotland is now a criminal offence, carrying a prison sentence.

In Jolly Jocko Land, you can get banged up for failing to use the right pronouns to describe a man who identifies as a woman, even though they/he/she’s wearing Lycra leggings so tight that you can’t only notice their/his/her biological sex, you can tell their/his/her religion.

Rowling has already gone into ‘You’ll never take me alive, copper’ mode, publishing a series of ‘offensive’ tweets and defying the police to feel her collar.

How long before Jack Docherty’s Chief Commissioner Cameron Miekelson from the BBC’s Scot Squad mounts a dawn raid on Hogwarts and drags Harry Potter’s creator off to Barlinnie jail? J.K. would have been safer marching through central London, waving a swastika and chanting ‘Death to the Jews’.

According to the Met Police, that’s perfectly acceptable behaviour.

An extraordinary video emerged on Sunday of a conversation between a policeman and a Jewish woman objecting to a pro-Palestine/Hamas marcher brandishing a placard featuring a swastika.

The woman wanted to know why the protester waving the swastika had not been arrested for committing an anti-Semitic public order offence. She complains that the police have told her that a swastika is not, in itself, anti-Semitic.

PC Plod tells her ‘everything needs to be taken in context’ and said the person involved had already been arrested for a public order offence in relation to a placard.

The woman replies: ‘Why does a swastika need context? In what context is a swastika not anti-Semitic and disruptive to public order?’ The copper explains: ‘I don’t have an in-depth knowledge of signs and symbols. I know the swastika was used by the Nazi party during their inception and the period of them being in power in Germany in 1934. I’m aware of that.’

She says: ‘I can’t believe this conversation is actually happening.’

Actually, I can, absurd as it may seem. From the moment the anti-Israel marches kicked off in the wake of the savage October 7 massacre, the Met has been bending over backwards, forwards and sideways to appease the pro-Palestine/Hamas mob. Two weeks after Hamas had murdered 1,400 Jews and taken 200 hostages, supporters paraded through London chanting ‘from the river to the sea’, and calling for ‘jihad’ and the eradication of Israel — sorry, the ‘Zionist entity’.

The fact that elements of the crowd were agitating for Israel to be wiped off the face of the Earth didn’t appear to unduly bother the Boys In Blue.

The Met explained that while ‘jihad’ is usually taken to mean ‘holy war’, it could also be interpreted in several different ways — for instance, ‘a personal struggle to be a good Muslim’. So that’s all right, then.

J.K. would have been safer marching through central London , waving a swastika and chanting ‘Death to the Jews’. According to the Met Police, that’s perfectly acceptable behaviour

An extraordinary video emerged on Sunday of a conversation between a policeman and a Jewish woman objecting to a pro-Palestine/Hamas marcher brandishing a placard featuring a swastika

And specialist officers had examined photographs of what appeared to be an Islamic State flag and concluded that the white squiggles on a black background weren’t an exact match for the ISIS version. Therefore, no case to answer.

All a matter of ‘context’, you understand.

So you can now go to jail in Scotland for getting someone’s genitalia in a twist. But call for genocide on the streets of London and you’ll get a free pass and a police escort.

I don’t know whether to file all this under You Couldn’t Make It Up, or Mind How You Go.

Elsewhere yesterday, it was reported that the Lord’s Prayer had been read in Urdu and Swahili during the Easter Service at Canterbury Cathedral to ‘celebrate diversity’.

The Dean, The Very Rev Dr David Monteith, invited a congregant from Pakistan to make the first reading, with English subtitles projected on to a big screen.

This had to be an April Fool’s gag, surely. Apparently not. The reading was shown live on the BBC, which admittedly is no guarantee it was genuine. It might just have been a joke which backfired. In Liverpool, ‘Urdu’ is Scouse for a shampoo and set.

Then you recall last month, the Pakistani flag was flown from the roof of Westminster Abbey and London’s Regent Street was decked out in ‘Happy Ramadan’ bunting, with no room for Easter, and it all starts to make sense.

After the reading of the Lord’s Prayer, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby is reported to have used his Easter Sermon to condemn ‘the evil of people smugglers’.

That has to be a joke. This is the same Archbishop of Canterbury who recently led the opposition in the Lords to the Government’s ‘stop the boats’ Rwanda scheme.

To be honest, I don’t know why anybody bothers with April Fools any more.

The joke’s always on us.

• One of my laydees, Kathy, writes in response to last week’s item about female pheasants turning ‘queer’ and changing sex once they’ve stopped producing eggs.  ‘As a no-longer egg-laying female, being past the menopause, I must also be turning queer. I find I am growing a moustache and a bit of a beard, have a sagging belly and creeping malepattern baldness. ‘I am a biological female but nature is indicating otherwise. My question is: which box should I tick on Government forms in future?’ How about ‘pheasant’, Kathy?

Rumpole’s golden thread

There are calls for Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, who has resigned as leader of the DUP, to be stripped of his knighthood after being arrested for ‘non-recent’ sexual offences. I have no idea whether there is any substance to the allegations and make no comment. 

But what bothers me is that he appears to have been found guilty in some quarters before having his day in court. Did we learn nothing from the disgraceful Operation Midland ‘Nonces In High Places’ investigation into ‘historic’ sex crimes, which dragged the names and reputations of blameless men through the mud in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal? 

As Horace Rumpole always maintained, the presumption of innocence is the Golden Thread of British justice. It applies as much to politicians and celebrities as to common-orgarden criminals like Rumpole’s bread-and-butter clients the Timson family. We must never lose sight of that fact.

• Transport Secretary Mark Harper has lifted a ban on fat fishermen going to sea. Elf’n’safety rules had meant that some mariners over 17st would have to stay on dry land in future. If the ban hadn’t been rescinded there wouldn’t be a fish’n’chip shop left in Skegness, famous for the Jolly Fisherman poster. It’s so bracing! 

Taxing questions 

Keir Starmer never misses an opportunity to remind us that he’s a distinguished lawyer. Why, then, hasn’t he bothered to read the legal advice his deputy Ange Rayner claims to have received regarding her failure to pay capital gains tax on one of her two homes and alleged breach of electoral rules? Isn’t he in the tiniest bit curious? 

• Experts say that men hoping to father a child should stop drinking for at least three months. If women stopped drinking the birth rate would plummet overnight