Dani Garavelli: Since when was Mickey Mouse an enemy of British state?

Then, there are the young migrants who will never make it to a reception centre; who drowned in the English Channel or the Mediterranean after boarding make-shift boats, not because they were “at it”, but because they needed to leave their homes and there are so few safe routes into the UK.

Jenrick’s cartoon-covering captured the public imagination because it was in itself cartoon-ish - petty, gratuitous, fairy tale evil; like Captain Hook, Suel…sorry, Cruella De Vil and the Grinch rolled into one.

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While Captain Hook’s badness is rooted in the loss of his hand, De Vil is trying to make herself a fur coat, and the Grinch is teaching the Whos a lesson about the commodification of Christmas, Jenrick’s barbarism served no purpose other than to make miserable people more miserable (and perhaps out-Braverman our Home Secretary).

Excising Winnie the Pooh told the children there were no people “who care too much” about them. Blocking out Baloo made it more difficult to forget their worries and their strife; and reminded them the bare necessities were more than they deserved.

It was an order designed to crush the spirit; to steal every last vestige of happiness an exiled soul might cleave to.

“Seize all the teddies, bury every skipping rope, paint the walls dark brown, abolish hope,” former children’s laureate Michael Rosen wrote in response to Jenrick. And that’s exactly it. “This is a law enforcement environment, not a welcome centre”, Jenrick said. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

Though Jenrick’s order is at the extreme end of the scale - and its consequences far greater - he is not alone in his joy-snatching.

Indeed - as the world becomes progressively darker - attempting to snuff out those remaining pinpricks of light seems to have become something of a trend.

Last week, Edinburgh City Council was being asked to order its own cover-up job in the city’s New Town. After her parents died, Miranda Dickson set about renovating their house which is located on Drummond Place, within the Unesco World Heritage site.

The pink door which upset some people (Image: free)

She first received an enforcement notice when she painted her door bright pink, and then again when she repainted it green. She is now in trouble for painting it a whiter shade of pale - a sort of off-pink Dulux might refer to as “blush”. When she started her renovations the door was white. But council’s guidelines say they should be painted in “dark and muted colours”.

Rules are rules, I suppose. Still, the row brought to mind another song. “I see a red door and I want it painted black,” Mick Jagger spits out in the Rolling Stones’ meditation on mourning. “No colours any more, I want them to turn black.”

Other doors in Edinburgh’s New Town are blue and yellow and red. Dickson is only being targeted because repeated complaints have been made; someone seems determined to flush the vibrancy from her life.

I’m not suggesting the plight of a property owner in one of the capital’s plushest neighbourhoods is akin to that of child migrants at an asylum reception centre though, for all I know, Dickson may have troubles of her own; just that - at a time when almost everyone is struggling - there appears to be a growing impulse to sweep away every last crumb of comfort.

There’s a sort of sourness in the ether. You sense it every time someone on social media tells you the album you said you loved isn’t a patch on the band’s earlier work; every time a columnist takes potshots at a TV show that’s giving people a few hours’ respite from their woes.

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Take columnist Arwa Mahdawi’s churlish piece on Succession. Its final season created a flurry of virtual water cooler moments, more welcome for the fact that most of us no longer have real-life water coolers to gather round, or real-life workmates with whom to discuss the twists and turns of our favourite TV programmes.

Mahdawi pronounced it “over-rated”.

“My problem isn’t the crassness, it’s just that it all feels a little contrived,” she wrote. “It’s as if the writers have mistaken profanity for profundity. The shaky cinematography also feels a little try-hard. I know it’s ‘cinematic’ and supposed to make you feel like a fly on the wall, but it makes me seasick.”

Does it hen, aye? Why don’t you just turn it off, then, and leave the rest of us to enjoy it?

For the columnist, there is a pressure to be contrarian. Editors are desperate for the next hot take. We all have to earn a living. Even so, you wonder what motivates folk to go around bursting other people’s bubbles.

In the Rolling Stones’ song, of course, the door is both literal and a metaphor for the protagonist’s feelings. “I look inside myself and see my heart is black,” he says. His pain twists him until he cannot help but project it onto the world. And what is adult life if not one long struggle against becoming bitter?

It is hard to conceive what could have blackened Jenrick’s heart to the extent that he would want to blacken children’s drawings. But we do know the erasure of Mickey Mouse is just the outward manifestation of the desire to erase asylum-seeking altogether: to Stop the Boats, Stop the Boats, Stop the Boats - the UK Government’s endless cry from Rishi Sunak downwards.

No-one must be made to feel welcome here because no-one is welcome here. The shittier we make these people’s lives, the less likely they are to come, so the logic goes.

Except, of course, that their lives were even shittier where they came from; otherwise, they wouldn’t be putting their children in makeshift boats and crossing the Channel. Their lives are so shitty that stripping Disney characters from walls will make no difference at all, other than to reinforce their sense of their own worthlessness and the unrelenting awfulness of the world.

Most of us will baulk at the immigration minister’s performative cruelty, although a significant proportion support the policy it bolsters; it’s them Jenrick is performing to.

But perhaps there’s a lesson here for all of us about not seeking to project our pain onto the world; about celebrating rather than scorning those little pleasures that keep us sane.

The truth is we never know what shittiness others are enduring. In the wake of the New Town row, someone posted that they too had been irritated by a bright pink door they felt was bringing down the tone of their neighbourhood, only to find out the woman responsible - not Dickson - had just recovered from cancer.

Let people keep their cartoons and their pink doors and their love of mainstream albums and the loathsome characters in Succession.

They may be all that is saving them from the brink.

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