I expected more from Caitlin Moran

I first met Caitlin Moran at Julie Burchill’s flat in Bloomsbury. This was in the early 1990s and she was a precocious teenager who’d written a play and published a few pieces. Julie had asked her to write for the Modern Review, a magazine I co-owned with Julie and her then husband Cosmo Landesman, and Caitlin’s stuff was really good. After that, she became a kind of junior member of our gang and I remember liking her a great deal – she was warm and funny and didn’t seem remotely intimidated by older, more experienced journalists. It was obvious that she was going to have a brilliant career.

I tried to think of something I’d said or done that could have prompted such a visceral hatred – and came up blank

Fast forward about 15 years, by which time we’d lost touch, and I was somewhat taken aback by her reaction to my appearance on a BBC2 discussion programme with Germaine Greer. As the two of us duelled away, Caitlin shared her feelings about me on Twitter. My ability to irritate, she said, was so reliable it ‘could be used to power an atomic clock’. She continued: ‘Oh, Germaine Greer. You’re still MAGNIFICENT. Please end this brilliant monologue by running a sword through Toby Young’s face.’

I joked about this at the time, particularly when Caitlin raised the alarm in a hand-wringing, deeply concerned way about how often women are threatened with violence on Twitter. She campaigned for a ‘report abuse’ button on the platform and launched a ‘boycott Twitter’ day in 2013 because of its failure to deal with offensive comments directed at journalists and politicians. Talk about hypocrisy! If she thought users should be banned from social media for encouraging people to assault those with whom they disagreed, shouldn’t she start with herself?

But the truth is, I was quite upset.