All the more shocking, then, to hear the allegations of sexual misconduct levelled against him in recent months. And how strange the silence that they were met with. Until now, that is. 

In a six-part podcast series by Tortoise Media, hosted by Rachel Johnson and Paul Caruana Galizia, a succession of women air allegations of sexual impropriety or abuse against Gaiman, author of Good Omens and The Sandman series. They raise serious questions about consent within relationships that were, at best, highly asymmetrical. Writer and broadcaster Julia Hobsbawm, for example, says Gaiman “jumped on her… out of the blue” in an “aggressive, unwanted” pass in London in 1986, when she was 22. Another, “K”, claims she and Gaiman began a romantic relationship in 2003, when she was 20 and he was in his mid-40s. She alleges she was subjected to rough and painful sex “she neither wanted nor enjoyed.” In 2007, she claims he performed non-consensual penetrative intercourse on her after she had repeatedly asked him not to. 

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Scarlett, another accuser, claims Gaiman assaulted her in a bath at his New Zealand home, hours after they had first met. He was 61, she a 22-year-old nanny. Gaiman said that they “cuddled” and “made out” in the bath — and that the encounter was consensual. But Scarlett claims that Gaiman also assaulted her with “rough and degrading penetrative sexual acts” she hadn’t agreed to. When Scarlett attempted suicide, Gaiman’s response was to say that he was also suicidal. In May 2022, after her employment with the author had ceased, Scarlett signed an NDA with Gaiman which was backdated to her first day of work.

When I spoke to Scarlett last week, she told me how it felt impossible to not be impressed by Gaiman’s fame and status, while at the same time not feeling at all sexually attracted or drawn to him. “I’ve never read any of his books,” Scarlett tells me. “He just talked about himself all the time.”

For Scarlett, “Gaiman’s superfans somehow seem to think that they have personally been betrayed by the allegations because they see him as sharing their own tick-box ‘progressive’ values,” she told me. “It’s beyond belief for me that people just aren’t acknowledging that a man in his Sixties has admitted that he got into the bath with his 23-year-old employee within the first few hours that they met.”

Scarlett, as with the other women who have come forward, was vulnerable at the time she met Gaiman, and, as she describes it, “desperate for love”. “Pretending to myself I had fallen for him was a way to kind of trick myself to think that I had not been sexually exploited,” she said. 

Given the seriousness of the allegations made against such a famous author, you might have expected the Tortoise podcast to have been met with righteous anger. And it was. But not the sort that you might think. Despite the careful reporting — which includes regular reminders that Gaiman denies any wrongdoing whatsoever — many of his fans have expressed their outrage at the podcast, claiming that Johnson is a “Right-wing Terf” with an axe to grind. The podcast, they say, is an attempt by anti-trans activists to smear him. As Rachel Johnson tells me, “The trans activist lefties discrediting the podcast as ‘terf’ made by the sister of Boris is purest misogyny. It’s meticulously researched and it’s fair to a fault.”

Perhaps his impeccable Left liberal feminist credentials have confused people. A whole book has been written about how women-friendly Gaiman’s work is: Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the Comics, Poetry and Prose. The podcast also found two female advocates. One says she’s known Gaiman for 12 years, and that while she’s alive to his faults, doesn’t believe him capable of sexual misconduct. She says she would “go to the wall for him on this” and be “stunned if the allegations were true”. Yet the same friend also said that Gaiman has autism, suggesting that perhaps “some of his mistakes” may be explained by its contribution to what she called his “naivety”. 

That she talks about “mistakes” nods, perhaps, to the fact that these women were all in consensual relationships with Gaiman. But to claim that he was “naive” is to disregard the fact that the vast amount of sexual abuse takes place within consensual relationships. I have heard women who should know better describe the allegations against Gaiman as “not really abuse” because there was no force involved, and the women did engage in certain activity willingly. But each of the women who has come forward about Gaiman described instances of coercive control.

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At least one of the women that have made allegations against Gaiman has approached the police — but with limited success. In October 2022, Scarlett filed a complaint with New Zealand police. In response, Gaiman has claimed the police have not taken him up on his offer to assist the investigation, claiming this showed the complaint’s lack of substance. But officers said they had made a “number of attempts to speak to key people as part of this investigation and those efforts remain ongoing”.

How did the big corporations who profit from Gaiman’s work respond? While Disney and Netflix quietly paused their Gaiman adaptations, it took Amazon until last week to announce that filming of the final series of Good Omens had been halted due to the allegations. “I may be cynical,” Scarlett told me, “but I don’t imagine that Amazon or Disney have paused production because they altruistically care about allegations of abuse. Amazon and Disney have likely suspended production because they are a business, and the only thing that drives a business is cost. This is about cash and not care.”

As ever with allegations of a sexual nature, we have a “he said, she said” situation, complicated by highly asymmetric nature of the relationships, the vulnerability of the women and his claims of their “false memory syndrome”. And unless — or until — there is a criminal trial, there will be no resolution. 

As for Gaiman, he has said very little, only issuing a statement denying the allegations. The storyteller has fallen unusually silent. 

Polly Barton’s Porn: An Oral History — a transcript of 19 meandering conversations with anonymous interlocutors on the subject of sexuality, kinks, feminism and pornography — introduces narcotic doses of nuance into a “conversation” one might have considered already unwieldy enough to begin with. The book is “a compilation of messy, ugly conversations brimming with contradiction and ambiguity”. Indeed, by the end of her 19 conversations, Barton has been exposed to so much nuance she appears to have achieved full cognitive disengagement. “I am increasingly unsure what a position or even an opinion on porn could look like for me,” she concludes with satisfaction.

This is a common enough phenomenon when it comes to thinking reflectively about sex: bully your basic reactions with nuance to the point where you can disengage from the underlying phenomenon and believe almost anything. Barton’s conversations — especially those with women — are full of reports of sincere, sound, and persuasive first-order judgments about porn that are then swiftly crushed by second-order deference to a sexual morality of nuance. Her interviewees spontaneously notice that some sexual or pornographic convention strikes them as wrong, or degrading, or disgusting, then will immediately check themselves by noting that things are of course subtler and more “complex” than that suggests.

Contemplating the diverse horrors of porn — its violence, its tendency to warp and infiltrate sexual taste, its exploitative business model and association with criminality — Barton’s interviewees are near unanimous. They feel “extremely uncomfortable”; something “between anger and disgust”; “a kind of nebulous, all-pervasive worry and discomfort”. Porn is “unhinged”; “doesn’t sit right with me”; is “super off-putting”; “terrifying in a quite non-specific way”; “I just think about how the porn actress is in pain.” Barton notes the “flashes of discomfort in [their] eyes” as they answer. “I’m scrolling down,” reports one man, “and then I get to something that will suddenly be a turn-off. Women with their mascara running, or they start being tied-up, or they’re being abused and humiliated… It’s awful… It makes you feel dirty…[but] in a way I want to say, each to their own.”

Each to their own? This familiar corrective is more than an expression of the admirable liberal view that depraved practices ought not to be outlawed simply because they are wrong; it is the view that it is a mistake to register them as depraved or wrong in the first place. One interlocutor reports being made “queasy” by porn, but then to being “troubled… because I don’t what to be a prude and I want to be sex positive”. Another person is disquieted by styles of porn in which “the woman is treated quite violently”, but smothers this thought with the “understanding of that diversity and wanting to celebrate it”. “Why am I strangling you?” one man recalls thinking with horror, while discussing the sexual choking he was invited by a partner to imitate from porn. He then urgently corrects the record: “It’s not that I’m against it. I’m not against any of it.”

He’s not against any of it? Another woman, having discovered her husband’s penchant for “eight person gang-rape” videos, feels conflicted: “I understand that is some people’s fantasy… and I’m hesitant to kink-shame.” Several of the women are understandably scared by the idea that their boyfriends may be secretly aroused by the spectacle of misogynist sexual violence: “I struggle with it… sometimes I get myself in such tangles,” one says apologetically. Of course, some people might see this mental tangle as symptomatic of enlightened political thinking. Perhaps these people are in the process of refining their baser aversions to being slapped, degraded, and ejaculated on. They are overriding their untutored judgements, tuning them politically to the sex-positive framework, making them more sophisticated. More nuanced.

One diagnosis is that these people are attempting systematically to loosen their grip on fairly reliable patterns of response that we unproblematically accept when applied to the rest of human life. They have imbibed a doctrine of sexual morality that tells them to uncritically embrace every sexual impulse, on their part and that of others, apart from the ones sending them warning signals of fear and aversion. Of course, as Barton’s interviews remind us, it is very difficult to restructure one’s basic reactions as to what is bad, dreadful, threatening, or gross. They continually reassert themselves, despite attempts on the part of the subject to crush them in vindication of some putatively more elevated sexual ethic. The upshot is a feeling of helpless conflictedness.

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A striking feature of Barton’s interviewees is that they take it to be obvious that the broad-minded, sex-positive attitude that explicitly shuns “judgement” of others is the most empathetic view, and therefore the right one to hold. It is not at all clear, however, what is involved in the exercise of empathy free from judgement. Examined under a different light, such supposedly broad-minded assessments look more like failures to fully exercise empathy, rather than the opposite. “I’m not into people getting slapped in the face, or pinned down by the neck, or kicked,” says one interviewee. “I get that maybe some people are, but to me that doesn’t seem enjoyable.” Under ordinary circumstances, the judgment that another person might like to get slapped in the face does not strike us as a successful exercise of empathy. It seems about as successful an extension of empathy as the short-tempered schoolmaster’s judgement that, contrary to everything else he knows, what his student really wants is a good beating.

It is not obvious why we should accept the wholly exceptionalist picture of sex as immune to the relatively robust norms that we happily apply to the rest of life (for example, the norm that it is wrong to slap someone in the face merely for your own gratification). The sex-positive outlook of unconstrained nuance is not of much satisfaction to those who embrace it, as becomes all too clear to anyone who reads Barton wallowing in it for over 300 pages. As she comes close to admitting: she knows that porn is largely horrific, but wants to believe that it isn’t.

Barton attempts various unsuccessful means of easing this instability. One is to venture that while porn may be an ethical free-for-all, the general dislike she has of it might be to do with its “problematic aesthetic elements”. But the attempt to wholly divorce the aesthetic and ethical deficiencies of porn is almost certainly ill-fated. The two modes of appraisal are too closely entwined. The judgment that what one has just watched is nasty, or dreadful, or simply gross, invariably draws on both dimensions of value.

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A more disconcerting reflection for the anti-exceptionalist view of sex might be that one risks denying an important truth: that the erotic has, to a certain extent, a life of its own. More, the erotic stands in some interesting relation to transgression itself. The attempt to tame sexual impulse with ethical norms immediately raises the prospect of their being flouted. It is the perennial pornographic leitmotif: the sideways glance, the final trembling protest of one’s better nature, and all the rest gives way to extravagant gratification. Erotic life takes us by surprise; takes us out of ourselves. It is ruled by murky and poorly understood impulses. Of course, even if we accept this picture wholesale, it wouldn’t follow that our account of the erotic should be similarly murky and poorly understood, as Barton seems determined to make it. More tellingly still, to attach any great significance to transgression, one must first acknowledge that there are some norms in play to be transgressed.

The fantasy of a sexual realm that can float untethered from the rest of ethical life and human judgment is just that, a fantasy: just like the view that ever more nuance is a necessary good, and conversation always remedial. As Barton’s book makes all too clear, in fact, “conversation” can serve to conceal, rather than reveal, the truth. The complaint — which she occasionally makes — that we do not yet “have a language” that is sufficiently nuanced to reconcile us to pornography and the degrading sexual practices it depicts can, under this light, take on a cynical quality. Actually, the language with which to describe violence, coercion, and the lack of self-knowledge and false consciousness required for people to uncritically approve it, is all too readily available; what we do not always have is a language of critical reinterpretation that is sufficiently opaque to disguise uncomfortable truths from us.

Something similar applies to a story unfolding here in Hong Kong. It too involves dozens of senior officials ignoring the advice of their own government by going to a party — although many of the details reveal the differences between the two approaches to Covid.

The basic facts are straightforward. With Hong Kong on the brink of its fifth Covid wave, the Government this month advised people to avoid large gatherings. Yet last week, dozens of government officials and politicians instead went to a birthday party in a tapas restaurant, hosted by Witman Hung, Hong Kong’s delegate to the National People’s Congress. Estimates of the number of people present vary — and indeed, keep climbing as more information seeps out — but more than 200 seem to have been involved at various points in the evening.

A few days later, one of the women at the party then tested positive for Covid.

If you are a close contact of a known Covid case in Hong Kong, you don’t get pinged and asked to stay at home for a bit. Instead, you are taken off to a room in a quarantine centre for up to three weeks. It is common to see these rooms described as spartan or like being in prison, albeit by people who have never been to prison and wouldn’t have lasted long in Sparta — but they are not the Mandarin Oriental and three weeks stuck in a single room is far from pleasant.

This policy is stern and unbending. Currently sitting in quarantine, for example, are a class of kindergarten kids, aged three and four. Even contacts of close contacts have found themselves locked up, albeit it for shorter periods, while they are tested.

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The result is that multiple members of the Government, including the home affairs secretary, the head of immigration chief, and the secretary for financial services, now find themselves in quarantine. Others escaped by being able to prove they left the party before the Covid case turned up — although at one point, when a second case was identified, it looked as everyone might get locked up, only for the second case to turn out to be a false positive.

A key difference between the stories in the UK and Hong Kong is that the Chief Executive Carrie Lam wasn’t at this party and moved swiftly to distance herself from those present, in an event one Hong Kong observer referred to as the Night of the Long Ibérico Ham Knives. To paraphrase Jeremy Thorpe, when Harold Macmillan defenestrated multiple colleagues in an attempt to save his own political skin: greater love hath no woman than this, that she lay down her friends for her life.

It is not that those attending Witman’s party had necessarily broken any laws, although things are a bit murky as to whether everyone had been entirely on it when it came to using the tracing app required to enter restaurants. But they had all gone against their own government’s clear advice.

And then there’s the public reaction. The overwhelming response of the public to the various Downing Street beanos has been anger at the hypocrisy of politicians who appear to have been behaving in a way that they were preventing others from doing. All those people who couldn’t visit a dying parent — and, as one of this group, here I declare an interest — look askance at politicians going on the razz.

In Hong Kong, there is anger at the behaviour of their politicians, but it is mixed with massive dollops of schadenfreude. By European standards, Hong Kong’s fifth ‘wave’ is less of a wave and more of a millpond. It has involved fewer than 50 cases thus far. In a territory of more than seven million people, one of them just happened to attend a party containing many of its most senior political figures; of all the tapas restaurants in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

Depending on your point of view this is either a sign of how unlucky the politicos were or, and this seems to be the view taken by many of the people I speak to, it proves that that there is indeed a God. Because it is, bluntly, hugely enjoyable to see people who have inflicted such heavy-handed measures on the population hoist by their own petard like this, especially when not all of them have handled their incarceration with grace and dignity.

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As an example of how heavy handed it is, consider this. At the same time as the Witman story unfolded, a four-year old girl tested positive for Covid — and was put on her own in an isolation room in hospital, with a bell to ring should she need anything. Somehow, and because she was bored or terrified or lonely, she managed to escape. When she was spotted, maskless, outside of her room, she was sent back in, for what could be weeks of isolation, while the two staff who found her were themselves carted off to quarantine. In almost any other place in the world, isolating children like this would be a huge story; in Hong Kong it has somehow become accepted as normal. It, and the many other restrictions in place here, are not normal.

The flipside of how easily we understand some scandals is that sometimes we fail to comprehend the more complicated, duller, but maybe more serious issues. And however enjoyable the Witman scandal is, there is a danger that it all distracts from the broader points about Hong Kong’s record of dealing with Covid.

The cautious approach that initially served it well is now crippling it. The death rate remains staggeringly low relative to the rest of the world; per capita, the UK’s death rate is 78 times higher. But this policy is becoming increasingly unsustainable, the measures required increasingly harsh. What once advertised itself as ‘Asia’s global city’ is becoming ever more isolated. Multiple travels bans are in place; even of those who can fly in, most have to spend three weeks in quarantine. Hong Kong’s airport is now a ghost town, save for the families leaving. The goal of reopening the border with the mainland — which Lam and others see as their priority — appears no closer to fruition either.

The vaccination programme has been a disaster. Despite ample resourcing and availability, fewer than a fifth of the over-80s are vaccinated. The Government’s approach to driving up the vaccination rate has been woefully hands-off, wasting months when the city was effectively Covid-free which could have been used for a vaccination drive.

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The result has been that the handful of cases seen since January have led to a widespread reintroduction of restrictions, including, as I write this, the suspension of face-to-face teaching in primary schools. This will be the third time since Covid began that primary teaching will have been suspended. (All local schools, including secondaries, were anyway still not back to full face-to-face teaching anyway, even two years into the pandemic.) Announcing the closure of schools, Lam said that she didn’t want to see young children sent into quarantine; that there may be other ways of dealing with this appears not to have occurred to anyone.

The inter-generational tensions caused by Covid are evident all around the globe, with the young, mostly safe, forced to undergo restrictions to protect the more elderly. But nowhere is this issue starker than in Hong Kong, where the youngest are again being punished to protect an elderly population that has done next to nothing to protect themselves — and by a government that has also done next to nothing to make them protect themselves. This, rather than a piss-up in a tapas restaurant, is the real scandal.

The complex relationship between leaders and satirists is as old as politics itself. Aristophanes attacks Socrates in his comedies, Plato accuses Aristophanes of misrepresentation and whipping up the mob. Nearly two and a half thousand years before the invention of the internet, the same issues surface again and again: hypocritical public figures, comedic put-downs, public anger, the manipulation of public anger. But have satirists ever had this much of the upper hand? Those who would expose political deceit have so many more means of detecting hypocrisy — cameras in Government offices, for heaven’s sake — and increasing access to audiences to expose it to.

The jester used to sit in the corner of the royal court, occasionally telling the truth about the king in the apparently innocuous form of comedic banter. Now the jester has a court of his own. Sometimes he is better paid than his targets. He may have a larger public profile, perhaps even more political clout that those he mocks. As the satirist Steve Punt joked on Private Passions, there are some young people who watch Have I Got News For You but won’t watch the news itself. Comedians have real power in holding politicians to account; but how do we hold them to account?

Part of the trouble is to be found in the complex eddies of truth that swirl around the notion of hypocrisy. The exposure of hypocrisy is the satirist’s stock in trade. The danger however is that the satirist can all too easily presume that he or she is above it. As R. Jay Magill writes in his fascinating little book on Sincerity, “satirists mean sincere things by saying them insincerely, hypocrites say sincere things but actually mean them insincerely.” In other words, despite their superficially self-deprecating irony, the purpose of the satirist is one of deep sincerity and moral seriousness. They possess the true heart, so beloved of religious Puritans since the sixteenth century.

And this may be part of the problem: the mocker becomes the moral hero. Those who would cast our political life as a parade of stupidity and hypocrisy understand themselves to be above the very things they point to in others. Often, we don’t even know who they are. Who produced all those Hancock memes? I have no idea. And no idea whether their own lives match up to the moral seriousness they see lacking in their target.

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One explanation for our increasing concern with sincerity — with whether people are who they say they are — is that it came about following the Industrial Revolution, as people moved from a settled rural life to an increasingly transitory urban one. In the rural village setting, if you are born and die in the same place, people can eventually work out who you are. If you say one thing and do another, others notice. Your true nature emerges over time. But when people move about more frequently, the question of whether someone is as they profess to be becomes much trickier to establish.

Something similar is also produced by the way our relationships are now so mediated by technology. Where there is a screen between you and me, I no longer feel I have access to the social cues that can reassure me of your sincerity. In such a context, we often insist upon our own sincerity by signalling it to others in increasingly deliberate ways. Ironically, there then becomes something increasingly artificial about the profession of sincerity – which only intensifies the cycle of distrust and the need for a more genuine expression of sincerity. With so much work, and even socialising, done on Zoom, the whole of our lives seem to resemble a kind of demonic Turing Test, an attempt to work out the truth of the other at some impossibly digital distance.

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There are many echoes of the past here. The Puritans of the 16th and 17th centuries were gripped by the fear that others did not sincerely hold to the faith that they professed. Was the conversion of others genuine? Or was it mere outward performance? How could you tell? It is no coincidence that with this Puritan anxiety came a new proliferation of testimonies and autobiographies, all attempts to show the inner self to the outside world, proving sincerity.

Much has been made of the idea that we are now in an age of New Puritanism, a new era of moral intensity. Some call it woke, but I wonder if the more interesting comparison is with the anxiety about sincerity. As our lives are more mediated by technology, and as the wearing of masks has become standard practice, the question of the truthfulness of the other is once again intensified. The very word hypocrisy derives etymologically from the Greek for play acting, referencing actors who wore masks on stage. Now we all wear masks. And so now the question of hypocrisy has intensified, generating renewed social anxiety.

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This is where the satirists come in, and why they are the crack troops of the New Puritanism. Imbued with a sense of moral righteousness, they set about trying to unmask the deceivers. And politicians make for a ready and easy target. Don’t get me wrong, they often deserve it. And satire is a vital component of a society saturated with bullshit, political and otherwise. But the rise in the importance of, and our need for, satire is also a consequence of the weakening of the social bonds that used to form the basis for our mutual understanding. Increasingly, is is also a consequence of the kind of mediated and distanced lives we are being forced to live through technology.

Like the Puritans of old, we are obsessed with the fact that others might not be as they seem, with hypocrisy, with transparency. And like the Puritans, we are obsessed with parading our inner righteousness in moral testimonies for all to see, making public demonstrations of sincerity. We now call this virtue signalling — which is not about younger people being more self-righteous, but more about the need to demonstrate moral sincerity in a context where so many of the traditional mechanisms for establishing it have collapsed.

In the end, however, the old-style Puritans had God to settle the matter. He alone would know the secrets of your heart, He alone would unmask the truth. The new-style Puritans give this role to The Now Show and Mock the Week.

There are multiple examples of Francis using ‘Pharisee’ as a term of abuse. Let one more example stand for many. Last October, at Mass in Casa Santa Marta (St Martha’s guesthouse) where he lives, he said: “Three months ago, in a country, in a city, a mother wanted to baptise her newly born son, but she was married civilly to a divorced man. The priest said, ‘Yes, yes. Baptise the baby. But your husband is divorced, so he cannot be present at the ceremony.’ This is happening today. The Pharisees, or Doctors of the Law, are not people of the past, even today there are many of them.”

Now, I don’t dissent from the general sentiment of these pronouncements. Francis is a good man, wanting to shift the Roman Church in the right direction. And nor do I think Francis is unique in laying so much emphasis on his condemnation of Pharisees and their hypocrisy – Christians have been attacking the Pharisees since the earliest days of the Christian proclamation. Hence ‘Pharisee’ long ago became a code work for religious hypocrisy in general.

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But there has always been something basically racist about this association: Pharisees are Jews, and Jews are shifty, untrustworthy, hypocrites. Given the long and violent Christian persecution of Jews, today’s Christians should be far more circumspect in referencing the Pharisees as Francis regularly does.

So who were the Pharisees, and what did they stand for? At the heart of the philosophy of the Pharisees was a belief that priesthood was not a special category of people who went about their business in the Temple, but that the priestly task was a responsibility for all Jews. As God said to Moses up the top of Mount Sinai: “Now, therefore, if you will attend to My voice and guard My covenant, you shall be to Me a treasured people, above all the nations. For all the earth belongs to Me, but you shall be to Me a royal priesthood and a holy nation.”[1 Exodus 19:5] In other words, all Jews are called to be priests. So what is required of priests is required of all Jews.

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The Pharisees took this seriously. Religion was not simply a matter of what one did at the Temple, and it was not something for a special cast of people. It was required of all – at least, all Jews. The Protestant reformers later called this ‘the priesthood of all believers’. On the one hand, then, this required an intensification of domestic holiness, and an extension of the rules that applied to Temple priests to everyone in the Jewish world. So yes, the Pharisees required a far greater strictness in the way that faith was lived out, day-to-day. But it was also an attack on the sort of thing we would now regard as a supreme religious hypocrisy – i.e. the idea that religion is confined to church/synagogue/temple and not for everyday life.

St Paul was himself a Pharisee. As the book of Acts makes clear, many of the early Christians were also Pharisees. But most important, when the Temple was destroyed in AD70, it was the theology of the Pharisees – by placing the religious emphasis as much outside the Temple as with it – that was able to survive this greatest of religious calamities. It was the theology of the Pharisees that formed the basis of what came to be known as Rabbinic Judaism.

Consider, for instance, the important midrash, or exposition, in Avot d’Rabbi Nathan:

“The Temple is destroyed. We never witnessed its glory. But Rabbi Joshua did. And when he looked at the Temple ruins one day, he burst into tears. ‘Alas for us! The place which atoned for the sins of all the people Israel lies in ruins!’ Then Rabbi Yohannan ben Zakkai spoke to him these words of comfort: ‘Be not grieved, my son. There is another way of gaining ritual atonement, even though the Temple is destroyed. We must now gain ritual atonement through deeds of loving-kindness.’”

I want to stand and applaud Rabbi ben Zakkai. Loving-kindness and the study of the Law – these came to replace the Temple as the glue binding Judaism together. The Pharisees made this transition possible, and good for them. They kept the faith alive. Christians should start to re-assess their historic antipathy towards Pharisees, and Francis should take be taking the lead on this rather than constantly repeating this classic antisemitic trope.

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But one more thing, a postscript to the above. What, I want to ask, is so very wrong with hypocrisy? There are two sorts of people in life: hypocrites and cynics. Hypocrites aim high morally and often fail. Cynics think the whole aiming high thing is a waste of time. They assume there is no point to moral aspiration. So “why bother?” they say – at least, then, no one will be able to draw attention to the gap between our aspiration and its reality. Well, of the two, give me an honest hypocrite any day of the week. At least they try.

In reality, all of us are hypocrites, more or less. It’s just that some of us admit it and some of us don’t. And if this is so, then the only people who really deserve to be disparaged as hypocrites are the people who deny that they are.