Freedom of speech

Have you heard? Do you know? Are you, as they say, ‘in the loop’? When the Mail on Sunday said a ‘sensational affair’ between ‘high profile figures’ close to Cameron had ‘rocked’ No. 10, did you have the faintest idea what it was talking about? I did, but then I’m a journalist. Friends in the lobby filled me in on a story which had been doing the rounds for months. I even know which law stopped the Mail on Sunday  following the basics of journalism and giving its readers the ‘whos’, ‘whats’, ‘whens’, ‘whys’ and ‘hows’. (Although with most affairs the ‘whys’ are self-evident. It is the ‘whos’ and, for

They’re running Julie Bailey out of town. The poison pen letters, foul-mouthed phone calls, slashed tyres, shit through the letterbox, boycott of her cafe and attacks on her mother’s grave have become too much. Stafford’s upstanding citizens, or a good number of them, want her gone. So she is leaving her home and business, and looking for a better place. ‘People come up to me in the street and just start bawling,’ she told me. ‘I can’t go out by myself. I always need someone with me’” Bailey had been the public face of the campaign to highlight the conditions inside Stafford Hospital. She showed that nurses left food and

Nigel Farage has just met one of the most fascinating aspects of modern politics. He was surrounded in Edinburgh by left-wing ‘anti-fascists’ shouting ‘Racist scum. Go back to England’. The same mob also screamed ‘scum’ repeatedly at the top of their voice until they made him leave. This is probably the best demonstration so far of something which has gone un-remarked upon for too long. Among the closest thing we have to fascists in modern Britain are people who call themselves ‘anti-fascists’. Not all people who call themselves ‘anti-fascist’, thank goodness. But a sizable portion.  If you ever see these people in action you will notice that they behave in

If anybody doubts that free speech would be in danger after Leveson it is worth remembering what it is already like in this country. A couple of months back Julie Burchill wrote a column in the Observer about transsexuals. It was a response to complaints by transsexuals about a piece by a friend of Burchill’s, Suzanne Moore. In a glorious broadside of a column Burchill referred to the complainants as, among much else, ‘dicks in chicks’ clothing’ and ‘a bunch of bed-wetters in bad wigs’. The results were endless further complaints and a junior government minister – Lynne Featherstone – calling publicly for Burchill and the editor of the Observer

I thought that readers might be interested in this new piece from me on Islam, the Koran and Richard Dawkins’s survival instinct.

A couple of days ago I managed to interview Lars Hedegaard – the Danish journalist currently at an undisclosed location under police protection after an assassination attempt at his home in Copenhagen. The results are in this week’s magazine. Lars was his usual calm, eloquent and forthright self. If anybody thought they could silence him, they’ve got another thing coming.

What freedoms we have in Britain have not come as a rule from revolutions and thunderous declarations of the rights of man. More often than not, our liberties have come because bloody-minded and obstinate men and women have squared their shoulders and decided to fight an arbitrary decision, when others would have surrendered. Paul Chambers has the right to claim a good deal of credit for compelling the Director of Public Prosecutions to stop treating offensive but harmless remarks as crimes. I won’t go through his case in detail because I have told his story elsewhere. But in brief Paul was planning to fly to Belfast to visit a woman

I have worried about Hugh Grant’s understanding of power ever since he started bringing up baby. I first saw him reach for the innocent child at one of the party conferences, where he was on stage arguing for statutory control of the press. He had his stock reply ready when someone asked whether he wasn’t being naïve about the likelihood of politicians or politicised bureaucrats seizing the opportunity to censor. ‘The phrase that is always used is ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bath water’. I have always said I don’t think it is that difficult to tell what is bath water and what is a baby. To most