When I first read that Islamophobia had "passed the dinner party test", I assumed that Come Dine With Me was going in a worrying new direction. Either that, or Islamophobia was a new pudding from Heston Blumenthal at Waitrose.
But no: it was Baroness Warsi, advising that anti-Muslim sentiment is now common practice at dinner parties.
There are so many headlines about what does and doesn't happen at dinner parties, I'm sure many people's first thought was a panic: "Oh blimey, new etiquette again?"
First we heard that the dinner party was dead, an embarrassing Seventies throwback. Then, staying in was the new going out: dinner parties were back in! A rush of TV cooking shows subsequently demanded that top cuisine be served. Come Dine With Me told us we should also provide entertainment.
And now we have to be Islamophobic? Is that as well as hot starters? If you're Muslim yourself, that's a near impossible demand, like baking a chocolate nemesis.
Reading on, with some relief, we discovered that Baroness Warsi was not offering lifestyle tips but expressing social concern. I am a great admirer of this deft, clever woman, but I think she might be on the wrong horse here. You can't start worrying about what the British say at dinner parties. We just aren't very good at conversation. Lame jokes, dull anecdotes, pompous opinion… but enough about what follows in the rest of this column, my point is that our dinner party habits are way beyond help.
We will say anything, rather than be silent and risk appearing a bad guest. All over Britain, this morning, people will be waking up with hangovers and going: "Oh no… I told everyone I'm having an affair with a married man when I'm not… I said the food was disgusting, I meant it as a joke… Ohhhh I called my Turkish neighbour 'Abu Hamza'…", pulling the pillows back over their heads and moaning quietly.
When Baroness Warsi warns that "anti-Muslim hatred and bigotry" have become widespread at dinner parties, I assume she is guessing. That doesn't happen when she's actually there? If it does, she really needs to go to different dinner parties.
Assuming not, my own guess would be that anti-Muslim hatred is not widely expressed over the social tables of Britain. I've certainly never heard any – and I've been to dinner parties from liberal northwest London to right over the other side of liberal northwest London.
But I'm not worried about the general character of the Brit. We are OK. We are basically nice, clumsy, polite and well-meaning people. It's the fringe loonies you have to worry about.
I have to remind myself of that quite often, because it can be easy to forget. I was briefly disturbed, last week, to get an email from a magazine asking me to write a piece (using the hook of an upcoming Channel 4 sitcom) about my memories of "Friday-night dinners" as a child. "What did they mean to you, growing up?" asked the email. "Have you carried on the tradition in adulthood?"
My anecdotes were being sought, it explained, as one of "the nation's best loved and familiar Jewish personalities".
For a moment, I felt like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, suddenly wearing a full Hassidic hat, beard and ringlets.
I'll tell you the traditions I had growing up: Sunday lunch, Christmas dinner and the Lord's Prayer at school. Somebody at the magazine must have read somewhere that I have Jewish blood, or remembered a Jewish joke of my father's, and assumed it was all candle-lighting and wine-drinking on Shabbas.
"What else do you assume?" I silently seethed. "Hebrew classes? No bacon? Ruthless pro-Zionism? Perhaps you think I drink the blood of children on special occasions?"
Only for a moment, only for a moment. But it rushes in: the folk memory and fear, for anyone of European-Jewish extraction, of what it means to be identified as "other". The shock of realising that people see you as different in a way that you do not see yourself as different. That the word "Jewish", attached somewhere in the ether to your name – decades after your parents abandoned it, deep into a life of pride in your heritage yet vaguely Christian beliefs and no formal religious practice of any kind – defines you, in the minds of strangers, as something that you aren't.
I can quite sympathise with British Muslims who are tired of people's failure to understand that the word "Muslim" doesn't automatically translate into everything from dietary restrictions to violent holy war. If you tell me you're from a Christian family, I don't assume you spend your life writing fan letters to Cliff Richard and playing Kum Bay Ya on the flute.
Of course, the magazine people were terribly nice and well-meaning, simply extrapolating from something they'd read or half-remembered and kindly offering me a job. These things just touch a nerve, for a moment, because the principle of racial assumptions has a nasty history which is not the fault of the person making an innocent one. Racial prejudice and violence are still real, still exist, and they come from ignorance, so ignorance can feel threatening even in its kindliest and most harmless form.
Most people really do mean well. I imagine there are people at dinner parties all over Britain saying stupid things about Muslims (or Jews), revealing their unfamiliarity. But hatred? No. I don't think there's a lot of hatred. It's there, of course, but it's not in the average person's character or expressed at the average person's dinner table.
The place to seek and fight against hatred is in fringe groups, on political platforms, in dangerous local activism, in voters for the BNP. Dinner parties? Meh, that's just a lot of people saying anything they can think of, and feeling embarrassed in the morning.
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