Armando Iannucci is a bit of a mystery to me. With shows like The Day Today and The Thick of It, he created some of the most astute political satire of the 1990s and 2000s. And yet put him in front of a microphone now and the man will display all the political insight of a draught excluder.

Iannucci regularly pops up in the media to promote his new projects and dispense milquetoast Guardianista opinions. Trump? He’s so mad he’s beyond satire! Brexit? What a mess, eh? Now, inevitably, he’s weighed in on wokeness – and spectacularly misunderstood what it actually is.

On Newsnight last night, Iannucci was asked about wokeness and whether it led comedy writers like him to self-censor. Naturally, he pretended that this wasn’t really a thing. ‘People aren’t self-censoring themselves because they’re afraid of offending people’, he said, before burbling something about everyone ‘retreating into our positions’.

Then he performed the half-cocked judo move beloved of centrist dads when asked about left-wing identity politics. ‘I think the people who most use that phrase “woke” are the ones who are themselves most censorious’, he said, pointing to the government’s legislative clampdown on protest. (A clampdown, it bears mentioning, that anti-Semitic Hamas supporters have proven remarkably immune to.)

‘I think the people who most use the phrase ‘woke’ are the ones that are the most censorious’

Armando Iannucci discusses writing satire and the need to challenge audiences with @vicderbyshire#Newsnight pic.twitter.com/RZekHywpvR

— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) January 4, 2024

Look, I don’t like those Tory protest laws, either. The arrest of republicans purely for showing up to the coronation with anti-monarchy banners was an outrage. But to suggest that the Tories’ illiberal approach to ‘disruptive’ demos eclipses or cancels out the rampant woke authoritarianism of recent years is a lame deflection – a desperate attempt to change the subject and go back to bashing the ‘evil’ Conservatives.

Comedy writers aren’t self-censoring because of the speech codes of the identitarian left? It’s impossible to judge from the outside, I guess. Few creatives would openly admit to muzzling themselves. But what about the comedy writers who have been shut down, cancelled, for daring to defy those speech codes? Because there is no shortage of them.

What about the comedy writers who have been shut down, cancelled, for daring to defy those speech codes?

What about Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan, who has lost his career in the comedy industry, and even been visited by the police, after opposing misogynistic gender ideology – one of the sacred pillars of woke identity politics? As Linehan told me recently in a new documentary about his cancellation he lost one job after another as a result of his activism. It culminated in the plug being pulled on the Father Ted musical he had been working on – and which he had hoped would be his pension.

He has recently taken up stand-up, given the door to sitcom-making has been slammed so firmly in his face. But when Linehan tried to perform as part of a free-speech comedy line-up at the Edinburgh Fringe last summer, two venues cancelled on him, forcing the promoters to stage the show on the street outside the Scottish parliament.

The year before that, Fringe legend Jerry Sadowitz – who hails from Armando Iannucci’s native Glasgow – had his show at the Pleasance pulled. Why? Did some dastardly minister intervene? Of course not. The venue folded after a handful of audience and staff members took offence to Sadowitz’s alleged ‘racism, sexism, homophobia and misogyny’ – even though being wilfully, obscenely offensive has been his stock in trade for decades.

I could go on. Another Scottish comic, Leo Kearse, had a show in Australia cancelled a few years back over his supposedly ‘transphobic’ material, even though he wrote said material with a trans woman he was dating at the time. In 2021, veteran working-class comic Chris McGlade had his critically acclaimed but thoroughly un-PC show Forgiveness pulled by the Soho Theatre, because some took offence to his language.

And that’s just comedy. What about all the books pulped, or the academics hounded off campus, because they refused to genuflect to woke orthodoxy? Was that all the Tories too, Armando? Yes, there are some censorious right-wingers who can, on their day, give the woke a run for the money. But their occasional tantrums are as nothing when compared to the stranglehold a new breed of identitarian leftism has over art, culture, academia and the media.

You’d think such a keen-eyed satirist would recognise that. But apparently not.