Don’t you love it when virtue-signalling goes wrong? When some progressive ponce gets so tangled in the weeds of woke jargon that they end up spouting pure shite? We’ve had not one but two such delicious moral implosions this past week, and even better they’ve involved two of the most insufferable women to ever draw breath. Buckle in.

First up was Miriam Margolyes, the Harry Potter actor turned chat-show parasite who never shuts the fuck up. She’s on my TV so often that I’ve seriously considered taking out a restraining order. She titillates the Radio 4 classes by saying ‘front bottom’ and recounting how she once wanked off a man in a bush in Edinburgh. Last week, finally, her ceaseless yapping landed her in hot water.

She was on This Morning, oozing smugness from every orifice, displaying her rectitude as usual. Put it away, ma’am! Everyone’s welcome in Britain, she was saying, regardless of their origins, yada yada. Then she turned to the host, poor old Andi Peters, who’s black. ‘What are you?’, she demanded. ‘You’re a mix, aren’t you?’, she said, no doubt causing mass wincing among the jobless hordes who watch this cursed show. Then came her killer question: ‘You’ve got a black daddy and a white mummy?’

Peters looked bamboozled, as well he might: he probably hasn’t been so crassly interrogated about his racial pedigree since the school playground. ‘Both my parents are black’, he awkwardly chuckled. But Margolyes wasn’t done. You’re not ‘deeply black’, she insisted. ‘You’re what I would call high yella.’ Jesus Christ, Miriam. Using a racial term described by the OED as ‘offensive’ and ‘outdated’ on daytime TV? Couldn’t you just have talked about your front bottom again?

My point, she said, is that ‘we welcome everybody’. Even high yellas! One envisions the producers whispering ‘Wrap this shit up’ in Andi’s ear lest Margolyes start prattling about mulattos. It could happen to any of us, I guess. One minute you’re breathlessly broadcasting your anti-racist credentials, the next you’re badgering a black man on live TV about his exact concentrations of melanin. Easy mistake. Margolyes hilariously made matters worse when she addressed the ‘race controversy’. I’m just ‘interested in how black people, fat people and cripples feel about who they are’, she said. Strewth. And what about spastics, Miriam?

Even among damp liberals who are usually tickled pink by Margolyes’ court-jester eccentricities, there’s been discomfort with her racial blather. Funny these folk weren’t likewise perturbed when she said ‘Hitler has won’ and turned Jews from ‘compassionate’ people into ‘vicious, genocidal’ warmongers. Oh sorry, I forgot: they don’t give a shit about Jews. Yet to my mind there’s a perverse logic to Margolyes’ televised racialism. It’s the bloody afterbirth of a cult of identity that instructs us not to ignore race but to see it.

A couple of generations ago, the virtuous thing was to approach individuals as just that – individuals, not proxies for their race. Now the ‘virtuous’ thing is to wang on about ‘white privilege’ and ‘black oppression’ and to treat everyone you meet as a bundle of pigment requiring either reprimand or pity. The end result of such cloying racial grandstanding is a foghorn celeb going on TV and basically saying: ‘You’re half black and half white and I DON’T CARE!’ Character, Miriam, not colour.

Next up was Stella Creasy, the Member of Parliament for Stella Creasy. Roll up, roll up and hear about how a ‘proud feminist’ ended up running cover for a regressive religious festival at which unholy women were segregated from men!

Yesterday, Creasy took to X, where she lives, to say what a hoot she was having at Walthamstow’s Milad Al Nabi march to celebrate Muhammad’s birthday. But eagle-eyed X users noticed something missing from her fawning, slack-jawed video clips. ‘Where are the women, Stella?’, asked Times columnist Jenni Russell.

Then the funniest thing happened. Ms Creasy posted a follow-up video of herself gurning in front of a tiny assembly of black-clad Muslim women. Some had their faces covered in the fashion of Islamic obscurantism. One pictures poor Stella meekly making her way through the mob of Islamo blokes, crying ‘Ladies? Ladies?’ in a desperate effort to locate the fairer sex amid the misogyny of it all. But it was too late to hide the truth: this preening self-styled feminist had whooped for a festival and a religion in which women are treated as second-class citizens, their sinful flesh cloaked, their blabbing mouths gagged.

This is the same Stella Creasy who protested against London’s blokes-only Garrick Club. As the Spectator quipped, at the Garrick ‘male-only membership was misogyny’, while at an Islamo-festival ‘male-only marching is multiculturalism’. Honestly, is there anything more tragic than white liberal women obsequiously rubbing shoulders with Islam, a religion that would happily put them in a black sack? Creasy bows to the religion of transgenderism, too. I hope she’s explained to her Muslim mates that you can have a schlong and be a woman and thus Friday prayers segregation is a transphobic obscenity that denies the fluidity of gender. I’m sure they’ll update their policies accordingly.

In her attempt to prove she’s not racist, Margolyes asked a black man how black he is. In her bid to prove she’s not ‘Islamophobic’ – and to keep winning Muslim votes – Creasy cheered a gathering that she would have damned as sexist in every other circumstance. That’s virtue-signalling for you. One minute you’re yapping about ‘justice’, the next you’re cheering the placing of rapists in women’s jails. One minute you’re saying racism stinks, the next you’re saying ‘high yella’ to a black man on TV. One minute you’re a feminist, the next you’re making excuses for a religious ideology that treats women like shit. If this is virtue, what the hell is vice?