In a recent staging of Jack and the Beanstalk, the giant was revealed to be ‘Mother Earth’, enraged by humanity’s littering and environmental destruction. This dreary and outdated message was delivered to a blameless audience of children and elderly relatives in a tidy, entirely litter-free West Country market town only last week. It was humourless, heavy-handed and left the audience distinctly unmoved. Letters of complaint have been submitted by the grandfather who generously purchased tickets for 14 members of his family. The pantomime nonetheless served as a neat illustration of what might be termed ‘the lag’ – the woke hangover in the arts – which we should expect to persist into 2026. While the EDI/DEI and Net Zero supertankers are indeed beginning, slowly, to change course, a substantial volume of pantomimes, television series, radio plays, advertising campaigns and even £100 million Church of England ‘reparations’ funds were commissioned during the high-water mark of the woke era and have yet to emerge. They will continue to trickle out over the coming months and years, and are unlikely to dry up entirely until late 2027.

The question of whether culture is upstream of politics is a tough one. Andrew Breitbart famously argued that “politics is downstream of culture”, and the recent case of Alaa Abd el-Fattah appears to support the claim. Politicians responded eagerly to public appeals from actors including Olivia Colman and Emma Thompson to secure the release of a supposedly gentle poet, only to discover that they had taken up the cause of an individual who has posted openly antisemitic and anti-white material online.

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