Politician, lobbying
If you don't live online, you may have missed the controversy over Hogwarts Legacy, the latest computer game to have been spun out of the multi-billion Harry Potter franchise.

A small but amazingly vocal band of activists launched a vicious campaign against the game because of its connection to 'transphobe' J.K. Rowling. Then the game came out and was instantly a phenomenal success - the most popular game ever on the streaming platform Twitch, physical sales of 12 million in its first two weeks of release, earning its makers $850 million (£709 million) in revenue. These cold, hard, commercial facts are like a glass of cold water in the face. The balance sheet shows that we have a very skewed understanding of the popularity and reach of 'woke'.

Elsewhere, we see the smash West End success of Steven Moffat's play The Unfriend, despite its star turn by notorious 'Terf' ('trans-exclusionary radical feminist') Frances Barber. A friend showed me a hilarious social media post from a true swivel-eyed woke believer who apologised to his followers for attending, and said that, though he'd loved the show, he'd made a point not to applaud Barber at her curtain call. Outside the worlds of showbiz and entertainment, we have recently witnessed the spectacle of Nicola Sturgeon self-destructing after her gender reform bill smashed into reality.

One dares to hope: is woke dead? We keep waiting for a tipping point that never tips. There have been so many false dawns, hefty straws that you think will surely break the camel's back then don't.

A global pandemic, it was believed, would make people appreciate that gender pronouns are not humanity's most pressing concern. But Covid-19 quickly established its own culture wars, as keyboard warriors began arguing about which marginalised groups were suffering most. A major land war in Europe should have been serious enough to bind the progressivist fist for a month or two. But the conflict in Ukraine has barely touched the sides. Even the recent possibility of an alien invasion doesn't seem to be having much effect on concentrating the crazed human hive mind.

But hang on. Maybe it's a case not of sudden death, but of a gradual recalibration, a slow unwinding of the sense that 'woke' matters that much.

According to a recent YouGov survey, only a small majority of British people say they know what woke means while 30 per cent say they have 'never heard the term being used'. The same poll showed that, as public awareness of the word has slowly risen, the number of people who consider themselves not to be woke has increased. Of the quarter of respondents who admitted to using the term, around three-quarters said they employed it in a pejorative way. So, for all the undeniable media Sturm und Drang, most Britons don't think much of 'wokery' if they think about it at all.

Recent research from Policy Exchange shows very clearly that woke corporates are viewed with cynicism. Only 10 per cent felt that such entities made political statements because 'they genuinely believe in them'.

And there was extreme distaste for the practice of firing employees for expressing legal political beliefs on social media out of work hours, with only 12 per cent in support. Again, we see the chasm between the executive class, which takes woke concerns seriously, and the punters, who do not.

Lots of us would like to reclaim our culture from the insane progressivists who have hijacked it over the past two decades. But there remain big obstacles. The biggest is that almost every western institution, public or private, big or small, has a cell of woke activists in it, enabled by their elders.

Our increasingly ageing population is, bizarrely, characterised by this deference to youth. Older people seek out the political validation of teenagers and young adults, even children, when it really ought to be the other way around. Think of middle-aged people wearing 'ally' badges, burly policemen shying away from upper-middle class Extinction Rebellion protestors, or the publishing execs who tell authors: 'We couldn't get it past our junior members of staff.'

Pandering to the young is always a pitiful, undignified spectacle. The formulation 'the wrong side of history' is a factor here too. Netflix has shown the way ahead, letting staff go who noisily objected to the money- spinning output of Ricky Gervais and Dave Chappelle. As Douglas Murray and others have argued, giving in to these people only encourages them.

Things seem to be changing at the macro-level; the micro-level, not so much. In the past couple of weeks we have seen the cancellation from an arts festival of a show by comedian Samantha Pressdee because two 'queer' comedians said they find her 'very scary'. The suspicious stifling of the new album from Morrissey, which features an angry song about the Manchester Arena bombing; Waterstones shortlisting for its Children's Book Prize a graphic novel (Welcome To St Hell by Lewis Hancox) in which a teenage girl's naked breasts are labelled 'fatty lumps that need to be gone' and her vagina 'my imaginary willy'. Chunks of Roald Dahl's books being rewritten by idiots. If woke is receding, it is a slow and painful process.

But the reason these things continue to happen is that we can't deal with the reality of the actually tiny numbers of aggrieved activists - in the low hundreds of thousands at most, and existing almost exclusively in the highly developed world. The power of the internet is that it amplifies small but noisy groups and makes them sound like public opinion. We are allowing ourselves to be dictated by a handful of hooligans, a gang that even the other kids don't like.

Perhaps the best cause for hope is simply time. New things will be needed to stimulate the new young. Firebrand wokeists who came of age in the 2010s are now in their forties. Those junior publishing staff will be senior staff soon, and maybe they'll have to deal with young upstarts who think (often correctly) that they are barmy and bigoted.

In the UK, an incoming Labour government might be a factor in the dying of woke. You may think this unlikely, given the party's love of taking the knee and diversity 'training', but let me explain. The defenestration of Margaret Thatcher and the coming of Tony Blair led to our pop culture, populated as it is by middle-class bien pensants, unclenching its socially concerned muscles and expressing itself. Look at the joy of daft Reeves and Mortimer after the grim Ben Eltony political shoutiness of 1980s comedy. And not for nothing were the scabrously incorrect League of Gentlemen and Catherine Tate Show the products of a time when the Tories had been 'seen off'. That's a silly way of looking at the world, yes, but it's how TV commissioners think.

Right now we stand at a crossroads. Let's consider two futures. In Future A, people look back on the 2010s and early 2020s with bemusement. 'How mad that time was!' celebrity talking heads will tell the nostalgia shows of 2043. 'What were we thinking!'

Or we might get future B: the gradual degradation and collapse of western civilisation as this cultural awfulness snowballs through it, as personal liberties taken for granted for centuries evaporate, as crazier and crazier grievances are indulged, as the pillars of the institutions rot, as the state becomes nothing but a gigantic simultaneously totalitarian and crumbling HR department.

I'm very much hoping for A. The numbers are very definitely pointing to A, after all. If it's B, what a sad society it will turn out that we were, to have been brought down by such a negligible bunch of ninnies.