In the old days, vandals and hooligans simply knocked things over, be they flowerpots, bus stops, old ladies or standards of common English decency. But these days anything that is knocked over, as long as it is knocked over with a sense of clear moral purpose, isn’t merely knocked over, it seems, but “toppled”. Indeed, a court judgment in Bristol last week opened the floodgates for a summer of 2022 epidemic of righteous toppling. Let the games begin!

On Wednesday, the four committed young people, opportunistically identified as part of a much larger group that toppled the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston into the Bristol docks in 2020, were found not guilty of criminal damage. They clearly broke the letter of the law of the land and Colston’s sculpted, slavery-funded cane and fancy frock-coat coat-tails specifically were definitely criminally damaged during the toppling, but the jury acquitted the four by referring to a higher moral standard – the new religion of wokery, as Dominic Paddleboard Raab would have it! Or admirable sensitivity to local public feeling in a city once riven by racial tension that is now proudly multicultural, as it is also known. Tribal war! Signs and wonders!! Move on!!!

Last February, Conservative MP Robert Jenrick, whose 2020 luxury housing development approval is now officially more illegal than toppling a Bristol slave trader, said: “Our view will be set out in law, that such monuments are almost always best explained and contextualised.” “We cannot now try to censor or edit our past,” said the prime minister, Boris Johnson, whose 2013 extramarital affair was concealed by an injunction and who lied in an investigation into the recent past of his own interior decorating irregularity. It’s as if there’s one law for statues of slave traders and one for proved liar prime minister adulterers.

Only last summer, the then culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, declared: “The government believes that it is always legitimate to examine and debate Britain’s history, but that removing statues, artwork and other historical objects is not right”, arguing for a “retain and explain” approach to “defend our culture and history from the noisy minority of activists constantly trying to do Britain down”, before adding: “The first time I saw Phantom of the Opera I thought a real chandelier was actually falling down from the roof and I cried out like a monkey. But then I went to see it loads more times and realised it was a theatre trick because it happened the same every night, which would be too much of a coincidence. It was still exciting though, like when you hold your wee in for ages and then finally go to the toilet and your winky goes off like a firework.”

Where are Dowden’s and Johnson’s and Jenrick’s dogmatic proclamations left by the Independent People’s Republic of Bristol’s decision to give free rein to this woke, righteous effigy-toppling and to support its disrespectful sons and daughters?

The historian David Olusoga told the court about the “rape rooms” of the slaver fortresses on the African coast and explained how Colston’s company branded slaves as young as nine. Sticking a plaque on the bottom of a statue to acknowledge this would seem insane, an Elastoplast on a brain haemorrhage, a sick joke. Anyone with a heart reading it would surely wonder why the statue was still standing. At the site of Hitler’s bunker, next to a car park somewhere south of the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin, there is no official commemoration, for obvious reasons. Presumably Johnson would favour a blue plaque that retained and explained.

New measures in the government’s forthcoming police, crime sentencing and courts bill would see the Colston Four face up to 10 years in prison because “there has been widespread upset about the damage and desecration of memorials with a recent spate over the summer of 2020”. But even though the justice secretary, Dominic Calais Raab, doesn’t think the police investigate crimes more than a year old, the enforcement of the new bill’s rules must surely see all statue vandalisers from the recent past prosecuted.

In 2012, cowardly, woke council officials removed from the Scotstoun leisure centre in Glasgow a wooden effigy of Jimmy Savile, the predatory paedophile sex offender. New government policy surely means the Savile statue must be subject to the same “retain and explain” policy that Johnson has endorsed. The Savile sculpture must be retained and returned to its original position in the foyer of the leisure centre, with a small plaque appended to its foot, detailing Savile’s horrendous sex crimes. And if, as is thought, it transpires that the council destroyed the Savile effigy, then those responsible must be tried for criminal damage. And if they aren’t, then it appears there is one law for those who destroy effigies of predatory paedophiles and quite another for those who topple slavers into a dock.

On a lighter note, the Colston Hall in Bristol has now been renamed the Bristol Beacon. It is a superb venue, run for the benefit of the people of Bristol and not for faceless shareholders, with a genuinely diverse programme and staffed by the most accommodating and professional and friendly people. I am delighted to see it reopen and glad it has weathered with sensitivity the storms its historical name meant it was caught up in, to continue to serve the people of the mighty musical city. That said, there is also a tiny part of me that is sad that, next time I do standup there, I won’t be able to violently condemn my woke, Guardian-reader audience for patronising a venue that celebrates slavery. Nonetheless, it’s a small price to pay for a city’s efforts to do the right thing. God speed the (former) Colston Hall and the current Colston Four.