You can’t help but feel sorry for Ed Sheeran. Lesser musicians would have buckled far sooner.

He remained defiant as his supporting acts and even his backing musicians abandoned him, taking to the stage solo. But eventually, he cracked. What is he? JK Rowling?

Last night, in a tearful mea culpa, he read a prepared statement to his audience in which he acknowledged “making mistakes”, though to be fair to him, he didn’t stoop to the indignity of listing them.

Instead, he came clean about his feelings on the conflict between Israel and jihadism. “What happened in Israel at a music festival on October 7 was horrific and compounded centuries of Jewish pain,” he said. “What is happening in Gaza is catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate.”

So that cleared that up, then. The man is against the killing of innocents, whatever side they are on. Is that really such a radical position? Did it really justify the outrage? Evidently, it did.

For the great hordes of Palestine fanatics that occupy the music industry, media and the arts, and our university and education system, any sympathy for Israel is too much.

By that measure, Sheeran is a supporter of the Jewish state – sorry, a Zio baby killer – just because he disapproved of the jihadi murder, rape, mutilation, kidnap and necrophilia that was unleashed upon hundreds of innocent festival-goers three years ago.

Sheeran’s speech had all the characteristics of a Soviet show trial, only with no uniforms and better lighting. One worries for him more than ever now. Giving the mob a bit of blood only makes it ravenous for more.

Will this apology absolve him? Will it win him quiet? Of course it won’t. These people are not interested in contrition, only submission, and even then, they will not let up until you are destroyed. Get used to it, Ed. You’re now in a world of pain.

His “crime”, such as it was, comprised of failing to join the “free Palestine” bandwagon, along with all the other cretins who do not realise how their energy is supporting the collapse of our societies.

It wasn’t that Sheeran opposed it; he simply kept quiet. Like Cordelia, he protested that he could not heave his heart into his mouth, only to be told “nothing comes from nothing: speak again.” And so he spoke.

These are disturbing times for our democracies. I don’t recall such fascist ideological uniformity across the arts in decades past. Do you?

When Bob Dylan supported the civil rights movement with The Times They Are A-Changin’, or John Lennon opposed the Vietnam war with Give Peace a Chance, or Madonna campaigned with Elton John and George Michael on Aids, they were raising their voices out of conviction.

These days, however, artists – aside from Boy George, perhaps – only raise their voices out of narcissism. Supporting Palestine these days has become a surefire way to win plaudits on the Left, a cost-free exercise in self-fashioning that flattens all moral arguments into a single, immoral one, then basks in applause while crushing dissent.

In the meantime, all our enemies, from Russia and China to Qatar and Iran, nod their heads with approval and quietly increase their propaganda budgets.

If we are going to curb this madness, stars with consciences are going to have to start taking a stand. After all, what has Sheeran got to lose? The fallout of this row has caused his Instagram followers to decline to a mere 47.2 million. That’s it?

He already holds wealth that is beyond anybody’s wildest dreams. Surely, if anybody can afford to be courageous, he can. Just think of what your average young Israeli has to face. It may be no exaggeration to say that the fate of up-and-coming generations depend upon people such as Sheeran.

In a parallel universe, he comes out on stage with a guitar and an Israel flag. He opposes jihadism, authoritarianism and tyranny, he says, and supports Western civilisation and the only meaningful democracy in the Middle East.

He follows this with a basic statement of reality: nobody likes war, but the depravity of Oct 7 entirely justified Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, especially as Hamas used civilians as human shields. It isn’t the flawed and beleaguered democracy that’s the problem, kids, it is the jihadis who wish to murder us all and the states that support them.

That’s what we need. A bit of true courage from people who matter. Then the tide would begin to turn.