Many years ago, while wearing a Navajo jacket, I was accused of cultural appropriation. I told the zealot harassing me the jacket was a gift from a Native American shaman-clown, under whom I had studied. She backed down, humiliated, like Major General Arthur St Clair before the forces of Little Turtle and the Potawatomi, at the Battle of a Thousand Slain, on 4 November 1791.

My accuser and I began a short but tempestuous relationship, based on the thrill of committing ever more offensive ideological thought crimes. One sick night, I imagined a public library with deliberately inadequate disabled access, while she made a scale model of a unisex toilet and then vandalised it. Within weeks, our imaginary atrocities exhausted, our twisted affair ended. But I realised there may have been some truth in my ex-lover’s accusations of cultural insensitivity. Luckily, I still had the receipt for the jacket and so I returned the racist garment to Camden market, where I had bought it while shopping drunk months earlier.

The idea of “cultural appropriation” is a minefield, especially in the “political correctness gone mad” times that we live in now, in today’s “politically correct” world of “so-called” “political correctness” “gone mad”. But I don’t doubt for a moment that Michael Gove’s decision to quote the rap singer Stormzy in a tweet on Tuesday was without malice. If Gove isn’t a Stormzy fan how would the blotchy foundling know that the rapper’s hit Shut Up included the phrase “I set the trends dem man copy”? Daniel Hannanananananananan’s decision to reply to Gove’s tweet with the emphatic urban phrase “Big man ting!” is less easy to justify. As the words do not relate to a specific Stormzy lyric, one can only assume Hannanananananananan thought them appropriate simply because Stormzy is black.

It would be interesting to see if Hannanananananananan felt comfortable saying “Big man ting!” in person to a black person – Sir Trevor McDonald, Lizzo, Anthony Braxton, or Michelle Obama for example – while explaining his views on Brexit. “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our position in the single market. Big man ting!” In short, would a “Big man ting” in the mouth of Daniel Hannanananananananan seem uncomfortable, or would it be a perfect fit, as if it had always belonged there?

In the interests of full disclosure I must confess that I sing some Stormzy in my current show, Snowflake/Tornado. A line from Crown, “heavy is the head that wears the crown”, helps the audience understand the pressures I have faced since the Times declared me the “world’s greatest living standup”. But no one has suggested that I am racist quoting Stormzy, perhaps because I do not work for a man who has called black people “picaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”.

Minds immeasurably superior to mine have suggested that Gove’s controversy-generating tweet was manufactured on his behalf by culturally savvy Conservative content providers, primed to cause plausible online distractions while dog-whistling to the coveted Arsehole Vote, historically a key part of any Tory victory.

But Dominic Tosser Raab explained last week he thinks “people don’t give a … er … toss about social media”, which is why his party doesn’t spend money on re-editing news footage to smear their opponents online. Except that it does. Never mind. Tosser is probably confused, like when he didn’t know the difference between sea and land. And anyway, if the Conservatives wanted to woo arseholes, they could just let Jacob Rees-Mogg open his mouth, instead of hiding him on a remote Somerset fen, like the flesh-eating recluse played by Don Henderson in The Ghoul (Freddie Francis, 1975), who said his hitchhiker victims deserved to be cooked and eaten because they lacked the common sense to not be cooked and eaten.

As usual, the Conservatives' relentless top-down racism remains relatively unexamined

It is likely that Gove, however, feels a genuine connection to Stormzy. Both men, for example, have been accused of using class A drugs, a charge Stormzy denies. But a young black man accused of class A usage would face the full force of the law, whereas an elderly white Conservative politician like Gove can admit to having snuffled as much cocaine as he likes and the offence is soon forgotten. Least said soonest mended, I always say. Gove was further traduced for saying Stormzy, who supported the Grenfell fire victims and funds scholarships to Cambridge University, should leave politics alone because he is “a far, far better rapper than he is a political analyst”. Black people, it seems, need to carry on singing and dancing for their masters and leave the thinking to big brains like Michael Gove.

But is this interpretation of Gove’s words unfair? What if Gove is such a Stormzy fan that he is afraid he will lose his idol from music to politics, and then there will be no more of the rap music that he loves? Is Gove trying to put Stormzy back in the black box simply because he loves him too much?

If the online comment sewer is flowing beneath this piece this week, doubtless readers will ask why this column isn’t questioning the Labour party’s ongoing open-goal antisemitism shambles. This is a legitimate criticism, except that we have the entire rest of the media to ask that question repeatedly while, as usual, the Conservatives’ relentless top-down racism remains relatively unexamined.

It’s a startling fact that 25% of the prison population is from a BAME background, whereas none of it is from parliament, perhaps due to the unequal systems of punishment Gove’s non-conviction proves are in play. Had Gove been imprisoned for his drug offences, as he should have been, his fluency in urban slang would have been a great asset inside. “Ah! Stop it!! It hurts!!! My haggis nozzle!!!! Big man ting!!!!!”

Extra London dates of Stewart Lee’s latest live show, Snowflake/Tornado, have just been announced at the South Bank Centre in June and July, and it tours nationally from January