I am often accused of fabricating false taxi drivers, to create straw-man mouthpieces to embody easily satirised counter-arguments that I want to kick to death in my standup comedy, from the lofty position of a patronising north London liberal elitist with his own column in the Observer. But there’s no need to invent them.

My classic “You can prove anything with facts” line, now much beloved by liberal talk radio hosts, was in fact uttered by a driver near the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout on a summer Sunday morning in 1999, while the interminable “If you say you’re English these days you get arrested and thrown in jail” riff was gifted to me by a cross cabman somewhere between Balls Pond Road and Newington Green in the winter of 2013. The routines were already out there, like Messiaen’s birdsong. All I had to do was listen.

But the past few years have seen slimmer pickings for monetisable reactionary remarks. The average angry person has become more guarded, but the lack of censure of commonsense avatars such as Lee Anderson may, hopefully, embolden unfettered foolishness again. Last month, as we passed the concealed site of the Finsbury town hall nuclear bunker on Rosebery Avenue, a very nice, white, elderly black-cab driver took care not to assume I was heterosexual, asking me if I had a partner of either sex, and then laughing about how you have to do that these days because everything’s gone woke.

It was easy to sympathise with his perception that he wasn’t free to say anything any more,........

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