I think we need a new source of ultimate evil for people taking part in political discussions, because Godwin’s Law has been outreached of late. Mike Godwin, a US attorney, correctly identified that every political debate online will, eventually, end up with someone being likened to Adolf Hitler. ‘Eventually’ was the key word — but that was in 1990. Nowadays the arguably controversial Austrian politician is invoked at the outset of discussions, and after that there’s nowhere left for people to go to display their contempt for whoever it is they’re speaking to, or about. Both Brexiteers and Remainers are like Hitler. Leftists and Tories. We’re all like Hitler, immediately, these days. The chairman of the Conservative Muslim Forum, Mohammed Amin, compared Boris Johnson with Hitler for saying that Muslim women wearing the full veil looked like pillar boxes. Come on, Mo — old Adolf was a bit naughtier than that, wasn’t he? It’s only my opinion, but I reckon that if Hitler had confined himself to commenting humorously on the way some Jewish people dressed he wouldn’t have quite the same amount of bad press he gets today. Incidentally, I wonder who people used as the source of ultimate political evil in discussions and debates before about 1930? Robespierre? Genghis Khan? Or were people just much, much less stupid then? Less apt to dive straight to the bottom?

Mr Amin’s intervention made me warm a little to Boris’s leadership campaign, as did some of the comments compiled by a newspaper to demonstrate that the albino blunderbuss was indeed Hitler, or perhaps worse than Hitler. Such as his patently correct assertion that colonisation is not remotely responsible for the parlous state of Africa today. When lefties start banging on about imperialism being responsible for African poverty, despotic governments and chronic underachievement, ask them to explain the anomalies of Ethiopia (never colonised, yet as wretched, if not more wretched, than the former colonies which surround it) and Singapore (colonised 200 years ago and now the most successful country on the planet). Or ask them about Liberia and contrast with Malaysia, or South Korea, or even Vietnam and India. But these sorts of facts are of course racist and must not be mentioned, even though they are true.

Meanwhile I’ve been trying to interest people in the chicanery and vote-fixing which may have occurred during the Peterborough by-election — but for similar reasons to those quoted above, am finding it heavy-going. People don’t want to know. In short, the scandal is being Rotherhamed. That is my word, a nonce word, for turning a blind eye to serious criminal activity because the people involved are Muslim and we don’t want to upset them. The police opened investigations into five allegations of voter fraud (there are many more) and it may be that the election must be run again. Much of the stuff that transpired has been revealed by the journalist Jay Beecher and the Politicalite website, to which I would direct you for a more comprehensive exposition. What is unquestionably true is that Labour has been lying through its teeth about the involvement in its campaign of Tariq Mahmood, who was jailed for 15 months in 2008 for voter fraud. He’s nothing to do with us guv, never met him, Labour argued, even as photos emerged of this felon escorting Magic Grandpa Corbyn around Peterborough, wearing a red rosette and sitting outside a polling station and present, too, at the count.

But that is not the half of it. Peterborough’s postal vote was far above the normal percentage (and almost 10,000 strong) and heavily utilised in the city’s most Muslim area. There are stories of imams filling in voter slips for worshippers and local non-Labour Muslims have complained of intimidation. Labour is also accused of buying votes at ten quid a go. If this were not a problem associated with Muslim community leaders and activists then I suspect it would be front-page news. And yet to make such an assertion is to run the risk of being called a racist by the usual troupe of woke idiots who are purblind to the facts.

It’s not as if this was an isolated incident — far from it. In 2016 the Electoral Commission identified a bunch of areas in the UK which were vulnerable to voter fraud: Blackburn, Darwen, Bradford, Bristol, Burnley, Calderdale, Coventry, Derby, Hyndburn, Kirklees, Luton, Oldham, Pendle, Peterborough, Slough, Tower Hamlets, Walsall and Woking. Notice anything about those towns and cities? What is it that they have in common, do you reckon? The Electoral Commission, at the time, had no doubts, even if it worded its warnings very carefully, suggesting only the ‘vulnerability of some South Asian communities, specifically those with roots in parts of Pakistan or Bangladesh, to electoral fraud’.

Sir Eric Pickles, a former government minister, suggested that ‘political correctness’ had facilitated electoral fraud and that the authorities were in a ‘state of denial’. No kidding. Six Muslim councillors were kicked off Birmingham City Council as a consequence of voter fraud and the Muslim mayor of Tower Hamlets was also removed from office. And then there’s Peterborough and Tariq Mahmood: convicted and jailed, but still busy rounding up Labour’s Muslim vote.

Maybe we should do what the liberals want us to do and rejoice. Simply take delight in the fact that immigrants to this country bring with them not only exciting new cuisines but also the vibrant and uplifting political culture of Karachi and Sylhet, which can only improve ours. And meanwhile the people of Peterborough can be happy that their former criminal Labour MP has been replaced by a new Labour MP whose manifest anti-Semitism may not have entirely deterred a certain section of the city from voting for her.