I have never been a contributor to Twitter, partly because my comments would not be subjected to the intensive hygiene and cleanliness vetting which goes on here, for example. Instead it would all spew out untreated and lumpily noisome, like a Thames Water pipe on to your nearest beach, and I would be toast within about 60 minutes. There are other reasons – it seems to me a convocation of obsessive, perpetually furious morons, plus I loathe its modernity in reducing the discussion of complex issues into 75 words of bile, usually ending ‘just like Hitler’ – but self-preservation is the main one.
This kind of flagrant dishonesty ends up demeaning political discourse and restricting what we can say
I am told that it would have been advantageous to be tweeting every hour that God sends during my campaign to be elected in Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland – it would have given me a ‘reach’, apparently. But only a reach into Twitterland: I do not want those people’s votes. I know that one shouldn’t be picky about one’s voters, but I am. I have already banned two constituents from voting for me after they spouted idiocies on my Facebook page. I want those who vote for me to feel they are part of a very select few – and that, luckily, is exactly how it has turned out.
My sympathy for people who get themselves into trouble because of something they have tweeted, then, is a bit thinnish. And all the more so when the person in question is the writer and broadcaster David Aaronovitch. I think it’s fair to say David and I are not close friends. I find him a smug, self-righteous, pompous bore when in the flesh. When on paper, he is somehow a different creature and I always enjoyed his columns even when disagreeing with them. I also think that the programme he hosts on BBC Radio 4, The Briefing Room, is broadcasting of the highest quality and kind of on the side of the angels in its devotion to explanation and understanding.
In short, he is a very talented journalist. So how did he get himself involved in one of those potentially career-ending Twitter howl-rounds?
It seems that he was talking about the US Supreme Court’s ruling that a president or former president was explicitly immune from prosecution for official acts when in office. Aaronovitch tweeted: ‘If I was Biden I’d hurry up and have Trump murdered on the basis that he is a threat to America’s security #SCOTUS.’
Aha. You can see what is about to happen, can’t you? Within about 20 minutes every news outlet in the world was reporting the ‘fact’ that a ‘top BBC presenter’ was suggesting that Joe Biden should order the murder of Donald Trump. The story went everywhere very quickly indeed. To his credit, Aaronovitch left the post up for 90 minutes before deleting it and explained: ‘There’s now a far-right pile on suggesting that my tweet about the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity is an incitement to violence when it’s plainly a satire, so I’m deleting it. If nothing else though it’s given me a map of some of the daftest people on this site.’
There were calls for Aaronovitch to be prosecuted for inciting murder and many remarks concerning his supposed failure to follow the BBC’s unpartisan approach to reporting news, ho ho ho. It’s my guess, and only a guess, that someone at the Beeb probably told him to take down the comment pronto. I wish Aaronovitch had resisted.
There is only one point to make. Nobody with an IQ above 56 could possibly read that tweet and believe that Aaronovitch was inciting murder. It was quite clearly satirising the Supreme Court decision. It therefore follows that those people who made the complaints on Twitter and in the newspapers and on GB News knew very well that Aaronovitch had not remotely ‘suggested’ that Biden should have Trump killed, but pretended that’s what they thought because they disagree politically with the writer and wished to land him in hot water. In other words, they were lying. There is no other word for it. To deliberately misconstrue something is to lie, and that’s what they did, thousands upon thousands of them. And the more news outlets that ran with this non-story, the easier it was to pretend that it had import – when actually it had none, because it was based on a lie. A self-fulfilling lie, if you like.
I feel quite strongly about this for two reasons. First, it has happened to me time and time again: the mentalist left-wing weasels on Twitter take a quote out of context and claim that I think Muslim people should be banned from voting, for example, when a full reading would reveal I was being satirical, or taking the piss.
But also, this kind of flagrant dishonesty ends up demeaning political discourse and restricting what we can and can’t say: it reduces the ways in which we can use our language to express outrage or to underline an absurdity. I thought this sort of thing was solely the preserve of the left, this lying – but it seems that the right is every bit as happy to get in on the act.
There was another case of the right behaving how I thought the left behaved last week in that business with the actor David Tennant and the politician Kemi Badenoch. Tennant said he wished Badenoch didn’t exist and that she should shut up. Many people, including me, wrote articles which said well, au contraire, we would rather you shut up, Tennant. All that is fair enough, I think. But it was also suggested that Tennant should not have made those comments because Badenoch is a black woman. Meaning, I suppose, that black women are never to be held up to ridicule or criticised? Badenoch even suggested this herself. We shouldn’t don the clothes of our opponents in order to score cheap hits – and yet these days we see nothing wrong in so doing.
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