Imagination is an artist’s best friend, but when you’re a comic peddling a fashionable but specious hard-left agenda it can create foes where before none had existed. 

How else to explain Trevor Noah’s blistering tirade against what he perceives to be a “backlash” in Britain against the country’s new premier, Rishi Sunak, on account of his race? 

Yes, the 42-year-old Mr. Sunak is young, appealingly rakish (the best-dressed of prime ministers, the London Times reckons), and visibly not white. Born in Southampton, he is of Indian parentage and a practicing Hindu. 

Britons do not care a whit that Mr. Sunak is not white, nor that he is exceedingly wealthy. The attitude is: Just do something about that pesky inflation, will you? As the Spectator noted, Mr. Sunak’s appointment as prime minister this week “was not an Obama moment because Britain is not obsessed about race, which is one of the best things about this country.”

It is indeed. That is why elsewhere the Spectator, the world’s oldest weekly magazine and a pretty conservative one, too, reflected on the “sheer crassness” of Mr. Noah for picking a fight where there was none to be fought.

A former Tory chancellor and health secretary, Sajid Javid, reposted the video of Mr. Noah’s charmless performance on his Comedy Central show along with an assessment: “Simply wrong. A narrative catered to his audience, at a cost of being completely detached from reality. Britain is the most successful multiracial democracy on earth and proud of this historic achievement.”

Has there been racism in Britain’s past? Affirmative. Yet it takes an individual with a real sense of the sweep of politics and world events, not someone with a knee-jerk insistence on sermonizing, to understand when the relevance of dwelling upon it has receded. 

CNN, unsurprisingly, went for the false narrative. “Sunak’s wealth and right-wing politics mean he is far from representative, British Asians say,” the network’s Sana Noor Haq concluded. She reckons that Mr. Sunak’s rise to power “has split opinion among South Asians in the U.K.”

My guess is that is doubtful: Most of the Londoners of South Asian provenance whom Ms. Haq quotes are rightfully proud of Mr. Sunak’s accomplishment. (N.B. apparently  for CNN, standard-issue British Conservative politics is now “right-wing.”)

My empirical evidence suggests that what makes the Trevor Noahs and CNN wokesters a little nervous is the smoothness with which a member of a minority group, “a person of color,” to borrow a phrase of which one sees very little in the Fleet Street papers, made it to the top.

This happened without fanfare or fuss, in part because the British share their new premier’s view that there are “pressing matters” to address: an energy crisis, a wobbling national healthcare service, a war in Europe, Brexit. Creating controversy where none exists, for ratings or for the woke agenta? Not in the national interest. 

If anything, there was a faint whiff of imperialism from our friends the French this week. Le Figaro quipped that Mr. Sunak is the man “who puts a little India into Downing Street.” That might be enough to send Mr. Noah into a fresh tizzy. The British are known to appreciate French wines along with a bit of  dry Gallic humor.  So just keep calm, Comedy Central, and carry on.