Freedom starts with plain speaking

The Jeremy Vine show (BBC Radio 2) rang the other day to ask whether I’d come on and talk about the newly ennobled Tory peer Howard Flight’s remarks about ‘breeding’ and the underclass.

The Jeremy Vine show (BBC Radio 2) rang the other day to ask whether I’d come on and talk about the newly ennobled Tory peer Howard Flight’s remarks about ‘breeding’ and the underclass. As usual, my immediate answer was, ‘No. You just want me to come on and be your token hate figure.’ ‘Oh pleeeeze,’ they said. ‘We’ll send a car. A really nice one.’ ‘Oh, all right then. But not because of the car. You’d have sent the car anyway. I’m doing it because I’m a whore, that’s all.’

So on the way to the show I got talking to the driver. I asked what he thought of the Howard Flight business and he said: ‘Ooh, I think it was wrong of him to say what he did.’ ‘What? Eh? Why was it wrong?’ I said, quite testily. ‘Everything Howard Flight said was entirely true. You think, what, people should be banned from telling the truth?’

I read out the quote from the newspaper to remind him exactly what Howard Flight had said: ‘We’re going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it’s jolly expensive. But for those on benefits, there is every incentive. Well, that’s not very sensible.’

‘It’s that word “breeding” that’s the problem. It was insensitive. It might upset some people,’ the driver explained.

‘But look at the context. If anyone’s going to be offended it’s the middle classes, because they’re the ones it refers to, but they won’t because Howard Flight is clearly on their side and understands their predicament entirely.