How many armed cops does it take to arrest a comedy writer?

Five, if that reprobate dared tweet that only men have penises. That’s what happened to the award-winning TV writer Graham Linehan.

For the benefit of my foreign readers, British policemen don’t carry guns on normal duty. When a suspect to be arrested is likely to offer armed resistance, special units, similar to American SWAT, are called into action.

Not having had the pleasure of meeting Mr Linehan, I don’t know how pugnacious he is. I do know he is Irish, which, at the risk of ethnic stereotyping, suggests that he might have been in a scrap or two.

However, five SMG-toting cops arrested him at Heathrow, as he got off his flight from America. Hence there was no way Mr Linehan could have brandished a weapon – airlines are strict about that sort of thing nowadays.

Still, better safe than sorry. Officers arresting a known terrorist would certainly carry arms, and Mr Linehan’s crime was worse than any terrorist offence. A terrorist has life and property in his sights, but he doesn’t endanger the very essence of the state. Graham Linehan does.

He has been a relentless campaigner against transgender lunacy for years. Specifically, he has been arguing that biological males must be kept out of women-only spaces. And if they aren’t, the women who happen to be inside are suffering abuse.

As a result, Mr Linehan found himself on the receiving end of a witch-hunting hysteria in all media. I can appreciate his ordeal, having myself suffered something like that, if on a comparatively minuscule scale.

A dozen years ago I wrote in The Mail that, if homosexual groups are allowed to advertise on buses, then Christian groups ought to be given equal time for their rebuttal. Within hours, the LGBT rag PinkNews published my photograph and contact details, telling its readers to express their indignation.

This they did, in hundreds of obscene e-mails, many threatening my life and limb. One chap wrote he’d happily kill me but, looking at my photograph, he diagnosed that I’d soon croak of my own accord, so he didn’t need to bother.

But I wasn’t a ‘celebrity’. Mr Linehan is, which means he and his family had to suffer constant abuse a thousand times worse, and for years.

Soon the award-winning writer couldn’t find any work in the UK. His wife, unable to take the pressure, walked out. And his show-business friends either stopped taking his calls or regretted not being able to ‘do lunch’.

Finally, the writer was hounded out of Britain and emigrated to the US, hoping to rebuild his life there. But he continued his campaign, tweeting a week ago this incendiary message: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

I’m disappointed in Mr Linehan. The joke would have been funnier had he written “punch her in the balls”. He missed a trick there, a mistake he then exacerbated by flying to Blighty for a short visit. Waiting for him at Heathrow was a welcoming committee with automatic weapons.

His arrest has caused an outcry in conservative papers, but I don’t feel any anger. Would you be enraged reading that torrential rains caused a flood? Of course not. It’s what torrential rains do.

So why be incensed reading about a man being arrested for writing something that even twenty years ago would have been considered bleeding obvious? It’s what Marxist governments do.

Marxist (or any other) ideology isn’t about changing the nature of government. It’s about changing human nature, moulding it to conform to the ideology. Since that’s impossible to do by any regular means, the government has to rely on irregular means.

To begin with, it has to achieve, or at least approach, total control over individuals. Looming large at the end of that process are things like concentration camps and mass executions. However, it’s impossible to arrive at that glittering goal at once. Some incremental steps have to be taken along the way.

In a country like Britain, where traditions of civil liberties go back many centuries, such steps must be taken cautiously, with the speed of progress picking up gradually and slowly. First, the Marxist government has to accelerate class war, making sure that gaining economic independence from the state would become hard, eventually impossible.

As I’ve argued quite a few times, this – and only this – explains the economic catastrophe our Marxist government is visiting on the country. A catastrophe, that is, only for you and me.

For the Starmer gang, it’s a huge success. Rich people are fleeing the country in droves, and the middle classes are losing their usual trappings: reasonable disposable income, private (meaning the only decent) education for their children, financial security – why, that’s the next best thing to shooting them en masse.

But it’s not just about the economy. Depriving people of economic freedom is only part of the Marxist job. A more important part is depriving people of freedom, full stop.

And there Marxists, fascists and other totalitarians have discovered a trick that’s as diabolical as it’s effective. They boil their ideology down to patently ludicrous statements going against common sense, history, logic, morality – everything that goes into the make-up of human nature. And then they force the people to accept those statements as real and regurgitate them when told to do so.

The government knows the statements are ludicrous, so do the people, and the government knows the people know. Yet it’s the ultimate exercise of power to force the people into mouthing idiotic drivel or at least pretending they go along with it.

Naturally, those few who refuse to do so or, worse still, have the gall to sneer at that twaddle become criminals in the eyes of the state – worse than thieves, worse than burglars, worse even than terrorists.

Someone who posts tweets like Mr Linehan’s strikes at the very essence of the Marxist state. He is an apostate, heretic, even a traitor. He tries to slip the tethers of state control, and that’s a graver crime than slitting someone’s throat.

So it stands to reason that cops threw him into a cell, took away his trouser belt and only released him hours later, when bail was posted. In North Korea, he could have been shot, but Britain isn’t North Korea yet. Not really, at any rate. Only aspirationally.

The same aspiration informs the proposed policy of introducing mandatory ID cards to be carried by His Majesty’s subjects at all times. Been there, done that, didn’t buy a T-shirt (there was a shortage of clothes in the Soviet Union).

Whatever our Marxist rulers say to justify this totalitarian measure is a lie – take it from someone who had to carry an ID card from age 16 to 25, when I shook the Soviet dust off my feet.

The only purpose of forcing people to carry ID cards on pain of punishment is to enable any state official to put his foot down. Any cop will be able to stop anyone in the street and demand proof of identity.

And if the mark is absentminded enough to have left his card at home, the cop will arrest him or not – whatever it takes to make a point, to remind all and sundry that they are all servants at the state’s pleasure.

Meanwhile, poor Mr Linehan was charged with an offence against ‘trans people’. When he asked the cops to define the concept, he was told: “People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth.”

Don’t you just love the language? To any normal person unsullied with totalitarian dung, sex, not ‘gender’, isn’t assigned. It’s determined, and not at birth but at conception, when two DNAs come together in a fertilised ovum. It’s good to know that even the police have been house-trained to speak the cant of Marxist tyranny.

Having said all that, I wish Nigel Farage expressed his legitimate indignation in Parliament, not in Congress. It’s perfectly fine to wash dirty laundry, but, for a British MP, the proper laundromat ought to be located in Westminster, not on Capitol Hill.

Trump and Vance don’t need any encouragement to poke their noses into internal British affairs, and they certainly don’t need any more ammunition to fire at European countries. Whatever abuses against free speech they espy in Europe – and God knows those abuses are numerous and egregious enough – they are Europe’s business, not America’s.

I don’t often – almost never, truth to tell – agree with Democratic congressmen, but I do agree with Congressman Jamie Raskin, who called Mr Farage a “Putin-loving Trump sycophant” who “should go and advance the positions he’s taking here in Congress today, in Parliament, which is meeting today, if he’s serious about it.”

Hear, hear, although the language needs work. If Britain wishes to go to Marxist hell, she ought to do so in her own fashion. There is nothing Trump can do about it, other than running off at the mouth in his usual bossy, offensive and illiterate manner.

Nigel Farage, on the other hand, can do something about pushing Britain away from the brink, but he should do it by standing up in the Commons, not by bending down to pay gluteal tribute to Trump. Even if what Farage says is true, which it is.