You can say that

‘There. I said it.’ That phrase, and the attitude it strikes, says something pretty specific. It doesn’t just say: here’s what I think. It says: ‘Here’s what I think, and, you know what? It’s what nobody except me dares to say in public.’ It says: I’m brave. It says: I speak truth to power. It says: here I am on the battlements. It also says: I’m a grade-A chocolate-coated plonker.

And though most people are too fly these days, too aware of the lurking threat of Craig Brown, to use that form of words, there’s a good deal of there-I-said-it-ism about these days. In particular, when it comes to the issue of ‘free speech’. To read many serious commentators on the right, and some less serious ones, not to mention very many egg-avatared Twitter-users — this foundational human right is suffering an existential threat. From, um, undergraduates, apparently.

Big, serious books about all this are catnip to major publishing houses. This autumn Allen Lane publishes Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff on The Coddling of the American Mind. There’s Claire Fox’s ‘I Find That Offensive!’ and Mick Hume’s Trigger Warning. There are contributions from Timothy Garton Ash, Nigel Warburton and Erwin Chemerinsky. Niall Ferguson has been making apocalyptic noises about the suppression of conservative voices on university campuses. My esteemed colleague Brendan O’Neill, bless him, doesn’t seem able to find an issue in public life, these days, where the real problem isn’t that old chestnut, illiberal liberals.

The problem here is that all this is, essentially, horseshit. That lone voice in the wilderness, Jordan Peterson, has sold hundreds of thousands of books. The online ‘platform for free thought’ Quillette gets millions of page views a month. And the self-styled renegades of the so-called ‘intellectual dark web’ were profiled at length in that noted samizdat journal the New York Times.