Bernard Ingham: Political correctness just not cricket as snowflakes set the rules

India's Virat Kohli on scoring a century for England, but was he the player - or man - of the match?

I am convinced of my exceptional sanity roughly five times a day between 8am and 10.30am by reading the newspapers. I don’t blame the Press. They are merely recording the mental fragility of this and other so-called advanced nations.

Take cricket. In the interests of “gender neutrality” we learn that Virat Kohli, the Indian Test captain, has just been judged not “man of the match” but – and to hell with alliteration – “player of the match”.

How long, I ask, will it be before “third man” becomes “third person” and “batsman” a mere number – 1-11? By next season I fully expect “silly mid-off” (or on) to be outlawed as a supposed insult to all those suffering from mental health issues.

As for “fine leg”, there must be serious doubts whether it will survive these gender-sensitive days, though “square leg” will presumably be okay.

Then, blow me, some academic crackpot – and there’s a lot of ‘em about – says chaps should repeat “menopause” three times a day to show “solidarity” with women. Perhaps we shouldn’t grumble. These sorts of hot flushes add to the gaiety of life.

Now we learn that Edinburgh Students’ Union is issuing “he”, “she” or “they” badges to new undergraduates to avoid the “misgendering” of non-binary or transgender youngsters. Ye Gods! In this snowflake era boys and girls can’t be called lads and lasses any more in case they are neither one nor the other.

All this would not be so bad if politicians had not also lost their marbles. I am not thinking of President Donald Trump, but our own crop.

They – and with them judges and police – are presiding over a violent crime wave which, especially in inner London, is killing mostly black lads.

Yet what does Dawn Butler, Labour MP for Brent Central and daughter of Jamaican immigrants, complain about? Why, she pronounces Jamie Oliver, the cook, guilty of “cultural appropriation” for coming up with “punchy jerk rice”. The mind boggles.

But what do you make of politicians and a law and order system when only nine per cent of those committing reported crimes are charged and only four per cent in the case of robberies?

This means that crooks by the thousand are getting away scot-free, even when they commit new offences. No wonder we have a crime wave.

Yet Ministers are against sentences of less than a year, allegedly because they don’t work, and the Magistrates’ Association’s chairman even wants more convicted criminals to be appointed as magistrates because they know the criminal mentality better.

What more is there to know about it?

Our prisons also seem to be an unholy cross between drug-fuelled holiday camps and dens of anarchic iniquity.

It follows – at least for the sane – that, until the forces of law and order, from the police through the courts to prisons, crack down hard, they will embolden criminals ever more.

All we need is Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, to take over the lunatic asylum and the destruction of British life as we have known it will be assured.

He would open the door to ever more immigrants for no better reason than to raise the Labour vote, regardless of the threat extremists among them pose to our values and liberal culture. No doubt he is as pleased as punch to learn that in some cities 75 per cent of kids are born of immigrant mothers.

The mess is completed by parental neglect and the state of our education system from top to bottom. We were told that the Government had toughened up the exam system yet what do we learn? Why, more higher grades through manipulation of the marking system.

To cap it all, the grammar school-educated Corbyn, with a string of ex-public schoolboys in tow, wants the BBC to declare the social status of its employees in the interests of diversity.

Not a single sane and balanced person gives a tinker’s cuss for diversity and this endless virtue-signalling. What we want is for people to be appointed to jobs, especially in politics and the public services, on ability, not the colour of their eyes.

It’s an old-fashioned quality that once made Britain work reasonably well. Or am I, after all, as daft as a brush?