Here’s the strange thing about the Boris/burqa controversy: the very people who constantly kick up a fuss about repressive male behaviour are now up in arms at Boris for talking about repressive male behaviour. The same tweeters and liberals and feminists who have spent the past year of #MeToo cheering the new public conversation about how awful men are now want to shut down a public conversation about the possibility that some Muslim men might be awful too and might be inflicting a repressive culture on women. The same people who think a bloke ever so slightly spreading his legs on the Tube on the way to work is committing the crime of ‘manspreading’ and is proof of the continued existence of the patriarchy refuse to accept that a man putting pressure on his wife to cover herself head to toe in a black cloak might just be a tad patriarchal.

The double standards are staggering. A chattering class that sees patriarchal bullying in everything – from the man who sends a tweet suggesting that a female politician has made a factual error (mansplaining) to the fact that young boys think girls aren’t very good at football (ingrained male entitlement) – refuse to see it in the culture of the burqa. Or at least they refuse to allow an open, frank discussion of the possibility that there is a culture of repression in some Muslim communities. The demonisation of Boris, and the authoritarian efforts to extract a public apology from him for his blasphemy against the burqa, is not driven merely by a distaste for his description of niqab- and burqa-wearers as looking like ‘letterboxes’. It is an effort to chill all strong commentary on this garment and on the question of whether it is a good thing that in 21st-century Britain there are some women – not many, but some – who wear such archaic, anti-social clothing.

Media outlets play their role in shushing any conversation about the repressive culture that exists in some Muslim communities. The BBC and others always wheel on university-educated niqab-wearers who gaily explain that they love their face-blocking veils and in fact view them as feminist garments since they prevent men from ogling the women underneath. So it’s all fine, then. These garments are great. Even empowering. Anyone who believes this is the whole story is kidding themselves, and they know they are. They know that the majority of women who wear these garments didn’t go to Oxford and will never appear on the BBC and instead live in communities, or at least households, in which women are considered second-class citizens and so intensely the property of their husbands that only he may see their face and hair. If another community was treating women like this, there would be uproar. But when it is the Muslim community our feministic elites turn away. ‘The burqa’s great. It is part of their culture. Shut up.’