Toby Young, General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, has now managed to get Wikipedia to drop its description of the FSU, which over the 12 days of Christmas offered Anglican clergy in the UK a discount membership offer, as a ‘far-right’ organisation.

The FSU’s pitch to clergy was: ‘Under Justin Welby, clergy were cancelled for believing in the Bible and using their common sense, but his successor is bound to be even more “progressive”. If you’re an Anglican minister who’s worried you might be targeted under the new Archbishop for saying something controversial, e.g. expressing orthodox Christian beliefs, now is the time to join the FSU.

‘The FSU stands for religious freedom. We believe every Anglican vicar has the right to express Christian views in their church without losing their livelihood. Preach from the Bible, and if the C of E Stasi come for you, we’ll have your back.’

After Young objected to Wikipedia’s ‘far-right’ designation last week, the online encyclopaedia now describes the FSU as ‘a non-partisan British organisation which advocates for freedom of speech’.

But the FSU-Wikipedia row raises the question of what might happen to the entry about the celebrated opera singer Maria Callas (1923-1977) after the various documentaries about her that have been appearing on BBC i-Player in the wake of the release of the 2024 biopic starring Angelina Jolie as Maria.

Unlike the redoubtable Toby Young who, thank the good Lord, is still alive and campaigning, Callas would not be able to take on Wikipedia if left-wing editors were to change her entry.

It is apparent from her utterances that Callas was not merely not a feminist but an anti-feminist in certain respects. She also believed in God and sought to practise Christian forgiveness.

Maria by Callas, a documentary film the BBC first showed in 2020, has extracts from an interview she gave to the late Sir David Frost in 1970, two years after her paramour, Aristotle Onassis, caused her immense trauma by marrying Jacqueline Kennedy.

Callas said: ‘There is one prayer I do. It’s my own. I hope you won’t laugh at me.’

Frost, a Methodist minister’s son who in 2001 presented a television series about Christianity which commended the Alpha Course, would not have dreamed of doing such a thing. ‘No. What is it?’ he asked respectfully.

She replied: ‘God help me, give me what you want. I have no choice, good or bad, but give me the strength also to be able to overcome it.”

She made even more infuriating statements than that to provoke the contemporary woke left into smearing her memory. She also told Frost: ‘I would have preferred to have a happy family and have children. I think that is the main vocation of a woman. But destiny brought me into this career, I couldn’t get out, and I was forced into it quite frequently, first by my mother, then by my husband. I would have given it up with pleasure, but destiny is destiny, and there’s no way out.’

She said in another interview later in the 1970s: ‘I think the most important thing in a woman is to have a man of her own and to make him happy.’

What if Maria Callas were to become a role model for Millennial and Generation Z females? That really would send Wikipedia into a spin.

As well as branding her ‘far-right’, would they then call her a racist for being a patriotic Greek with an Orthodox Christian faith?

Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in the UK.