This week, hundreds of well- (and high-) heeled media types gathered at St Martin in the Field in central London to celebrate the launch of Piers Morgan’s book, Woke is Dead: How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness. I was not among them, but it was, by all accounts, a good bash, as Morgan’s parties always are (I gather). What is less certain is the premise of the book. Heralding the end of woke is like heralding the end of cancer. Sane people would love it to happen, and people are working hard on it, but it’s not even remotely the case now or soon. The roots of both diseases are too deeply embedded. The main difference is that cancer is scarily clever, and woke is scarily stupid. Based on the book’s title alone, Morgan’s wishful thinking, welded to his very sizeable ego’s-eye view of the world, actually highlights how very, almost comically, wrong he is. Donald Trump may be president, which is Morgan’s main argument, but woke hasn’t gone anywhere, at least not in Britain. Sure, there are a few victories for the sane scattered about like crumbs – like the curtailment of puberty-blockers following the Cass report and the Supreme Court ruling that sex is a biological fact. But to declare victory in battle and treat woke madness as some past insanity? No way. From high to low, the evidence points elsewhere. In the arts and publishing, pronouns are still regularly specified. There is still talk of “chest-feeding” in the NHS, and of “pregnant people”. Talk of “six million people” being murdered is becoming more common in Holocaust commemoration – a perverse precaution against seeming to “privilege” white Jews over other victims. The more systematic side of woke is eating away at education, where “representativeness”, not opportunity or merit, is still pursued at all costs. Following a Freedom of Information request by The Telegraph, the University of Oxford was revealed to be substantially massaging entry requirements for black applicants. Some 16 per cent of black undergraduates accepted in the past five years did not achieve their required grades, nearly three times more than the 6 per cent of white British candidates who got places despite falling short, and 2 per cent for Chinese-heritage students living in Britain. The powers that be at Oxbridge are drunk on the idea of ending the Bullingdon Club/Saltburn/Brideshead-type of student even though, in politics anyway, that type is barely seen any more. Indeed, the urge to stamp out privilege is now one of the hallmarks of the very places whose glory and splendour were built on beauty, heritage and wealth. Social mobility through access to top drawer education is a magical and virtuous part of a society like ours: the influx of clever grammar school boys given the chance to apply to Oxbridge and other top universities in the mid-20th century was a revolution for the good. But what Oxbridge is doing now is perverse: it is social engineering at precisely the wrong place in the chain. It is killing off the whole concept of elite education through low standards, cheapening the prize for those who have worked the hardest for it, including a good deal of people from poorer backgrounds and ethnic minorities. In lowering its standards for people they assume can’t handle the higher ones, Oxford is indulging in the racism and classism of low expectations. Cambridge, I understand, has the same problem. And it also rewards people who never deserved to take a place from someone more talented or hardworking. A prime example of this is George Abaraonye, the now-ousted Oxford Union president and PPE student who crowed his pleasure at news of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Abaraonye was denied a place at Warwick but was reportedly accepted to Oxford with an ABB grade – well below the normal entry requirements for his course.