Rod Liddle: Is Hugh Grant a pawn of the mad metropolitan left?

It is a peculiar alliance, when you think of it, which wishes to bring to an end 300 years of press freedom in this country. The handsome actor Hugh Grant would rather the press didn’t find out about him being ‘noshed’, as I believe the term has it, by a prostitute on some Los Angeles freeway. I can understand that, even if I do not think he has the right to make that call, given the image he adopts to sell himself to the public. The absolutist metro liberal left, meanwhile, would have no doubt -whatsoever who was the victim in that particular scenario: the nosher, not the noshee. Grant should be prosecuted and outed; the, uh, sex–worker, meanwhile, is a victim, oppressed by very real economic and gender (and in the case of Hugh’s illicit young lady) racial imbalances intrinsic to the capitalist system.

This hysterical and intolerant arm of the modern left does not have much time for celebrity, or for wealth, or indeed for privacy as a general concept, although it believes very strongly in its own privacy, as we saw with the case of one of its most cherished scions, Julian Assange. If we’re honest, it doesn’t really have much time for sex, per se; that is simply another means by which powerful men suppress and exploit vulnerable women, and all forms of contact between the two sexes should therefore be rigorously policed, with strict regulations as to how and when and where one might make an advance to a woman, with transgressors punished — in the press, for example (in the case of Lord Rennard), and better still in the courts.