The British Council would like to cancel the word ‘Brits’. And it’s tempting to stop the column there. Make this my shortest piece of the year, and like the Pink Panther’s Chief Inspector Dreyfus, who is slowly driven insane by Clouseau’s madcap behaviour, just sit here twitching and cackling at my desk until the men in white coats take me away.

But the Council’s newly issued “non-discriminatory” guide also prohibits the use of terms like “had a fit” or, indeed, words like “insane” – the example provided in the document being “that colour scheme is insane” – meaning that very reference would be deemed inappropriate.

So let’s get back to “Brits” – which, as the taxpayer-funded body may or may not be aware, is a shortening of the word “British” – and the Council that has therefore decided to cancel itself. In the guide recently issued by the body (which will receive £189 million from the Foreign Office this year), employees are warned that “careless, uninformed or ill-considered use of language can categorise, marginalise, exclude or stereotype.” Got it.

The document also advises against the use of terms such as “British English” and “the Queen’s English”, both of which are deemed “problematic, as it implies that these varieties of English are more correct or of greater importance than others”.

That they are indeed “more correct” would make little sense to the topsy-turvy logicians, who are, according to a spokeswoman yesterday, “proud of our work promoting the UK to the rest of the world”. Just as long as that United Kingdom has had any toxic “Britishness” surgically removed beforehand, you understand. And that any promotion of our national culture and identity comes with an inbuilt apologia five pages long – and a free hair shirt.

The defiantly Non-British Council isn’t the first establishment to cancel itself. Don’t forget that we’re now living in a world where St Paul’s Girls’ School deems the world “girl” offensive, and earlier this year axed the role of head girl because it is too “binary”. A world where Terry Gilliam’s production of the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods was abruptly removed from the Old Vic’s schedule last month after staff objected to controversial comments made by the Monty Python star about the #MeToo movement, race and trans rights, and theatregoers will henceforth have their viewing pleasures restricted to what are essentially ideological/political broadcasts on stage. A world in which we have a drama industry striving, above all, to avoid drama.

Then there are universities: the “institutions of higher learning” that now specialise in closing down minds and infantilising their students, as college heads at Durham have proved all too clearly in their pathetic response to a walk-out on December 3, when a speech made by journalist Rod Liddle made this fragile bunch feel “unsafe”. Institutions that, according to one shrewd reader who wrote to me on Sunday, should give up the pretence, “be closed forthwith, and repurposed as training academies for key workers our society actually needs: electricians, plumbers, lorry drivers, pharmacists and care workers”.

If we follow the self-cancellation craze through to its logical, kamikaze conclusion, 2022 could see The Telegraph rebranding itself as a newspaper that will cease to provide news, what with most of it being “hurtful” and “triggering” and words being the sharp-edged flying objects that they are. Gyms will stop encouraging any form of physical improvement, since reducing us all to a mere collection of body parts “marginalises and trivialises” those who may want to sit at home ploughing their way through the Sharer Dozen tray of Krispy Kremes they happen to identify with on a deeper, cis-glazed level.

Menswear brands will veto the selling of “misogynistic” items such as trousers, boxers and ties, and butchers will finally take a stand on the barbaric practice of meat-eating, and force every client who passes through their door to sit through a Voices for Animal Liberation documentary in which a cow is shown being slaughtered in slow-mo. How do you fancy that steak now?

All this self-cancellation is fine, by the way. It’s a free world and a free market: fill your virtue-signalling boots. Only it’s worth bearing this one thing in mind: if you’re a company that has deliberately chosen to alienate your consumers then you deserve everything coming to you in those marketing reports, mass redundancy packages and insolvency forms.

And if you’re a publicly funded institution doing, as screenwriter and novelist Julian Fellowes says of the new Non-British Council, “the exact opposite” of what you were set up to do, then you should expect that funding to be withdrawn. Because you are redundant, pointless, needless and unwanted. And, as an opinion writer, I hope those words do what they’re supposed to – and cause offence.