SOCRATES: I was walking back from the gymnasium when I saw Keir Mather, the new MP for Selby, on his way there. I had been told he was young and good-looking and went to a world-famous Oxford College, so I have been very keen to meet to him.

Hello, O Keir.

MATHER: And you too, Socrates. But what, therefore?

SOCRATES: Now that you are an MP, you must tell me what justice is. For that surely is a lawmaker’s main concern.

MATHER: Enough verbal games. Justice is defined by the laws. My job is to solve problems in the real world.

SOCRATES: Are Tory laws, then, just?

MATHER: Of course they are not!

SOCRATES: But you said…

MATHER: And I will change them and, I quote, by ‘my ability to process information and communicate it to people effectively, and to analyse complex problems and find frameworks through which to implement solutions’.

SOCRATES: Splendid – crystal clear! But come now, here is another problem to solve: what is a woman?

MATHER: Obviously, anyone who asserts that they are.

SOCRATES: So is asserting that you are someone exactly the same as being someone?

MATHER: How not, O Socrates?

SOCRATES: And if I said I was prime minister?

MATHER: Be very careful, Socrates. These days we do not think like that.

SOCRATES: Or at all. Come now, this justice of yours, is it of advantage to the community in the real world?

MATHER: Of course!

SOCRATES: But it is clearly not advantageous to the community, O Keir, for a man, who can fight, to become a woman, who cannot fight, nor have children. Would you not pass a law against it?

MATHER: But that is not a legal matter, Socrates, but one of human rights. Presumably you have never heard of them.

SOCRATES: True. We preferred not to live in a world of make-believe, where anyone could become anyone they liked merely by asserting it.

MATHER: Welcome to 21st-century reality, O Socrates.