SARAH VINE: It’s totally surprising for Starmer to silence free speech

The adjectives ‘Kafkaesque’ and ‘Orwellian’ have been doing some very heavy lifting this week, after the journalist Allison Pearson received an unexpected knock on the door from members of the Essex constabulary in connection with something she has called a ‘non-crime hate incident’.

Her alleged ‘non-crime’? A Tweet she posted more than a year ago then deleted, though the police refused to tell her which one.

It has since transpired that it may be in connection with a photo of two men holding a flag of a Pakistani political party standing alongside some policemen. It seems Pearson mistook the men for anti-Israel protesters, and was criticising the police for posing next to them.

The previous week, she and a group of Friends Of Israel supporters had been at the Cenotaph. They had invited some police officers to pose for a photo with them, but they declined.

So when she saw what she thought was a picture of police laughing and joking alongside anti-Israel protesters, she was incensed by the double standard. However, as soon as her misunderstanding was pointed out, she deleted the post.

OK, maybe she got it wrong. Perhaps she should have been more careful. Maybe she should have checked the source or counted to ten before pressing the button. But let’s not forget that at the time, tensions were running very high over the October 7 atrocities.

Hamas supporters were protesting on the streets, with numerous incidents when the police seemed to be turning a blind eye. People brandished pictures of ‘heroic’ paragliders, chanting ‘From the River to the Sea’; posters of Israeli hostages were being defaced and torn down; Jewish pupils were being targeted outside schools.

It was an emotional time, and many – including myself – felt deeply uncomfortable with the open expression of support for the rape, murder and torture of innocent Israeli citizens.

Rivkah Brown, of Novara Media, proclaimed on Twitter/X that the actions of Hamas were ‘a celebration for supporters of democracy and human rights worldwide’. Dr Mennah Elwan, an NHS neurology registrar, mocked Israeli victims online and accused them of cowardice for fleeing the gunmen.

BBC journalist Sally Nabil liked more than a dozen tweets that appeared to legitimise the targeting of Jewish civilians; ITV gave a platform to a woman reporter for Iran’s state-run TV channel who called the attacks ‘a moment of triumph’; Maggie Chapman, the Scottish Greens MSP, said Hamas’s actions were a ‘consequence of apartheid, of illegal occupation, of imperial aggression by the Israel state’.

The principle of free speech was being pushed to its very limits. In particular, it was deeply distressing to see the total lack of compassion felt in certain quarters for the victims, many of whose gruesome ordeals had been gleefully recorded by their killers.

There had been a video of a 22-year-old woman whose broken, half-naked body was paraded by Hamas on the streets of Gaza in a pick-up truck. The sight of Palestinians jeering and spitting on her lifeless corpse was soul-crushing.

Another Israeli woman, the seat of her tracksuit bottoms stained with blood, was dragged into the back of a Jeep by armed militants. Her fate is still unknown. She is the same age as my daughter. The burning sense of rage and injustice I felt as a mother seeing such vicious and misogynistic treatment of an unarmed and defenceless young woman at the hands of sneering, leering men clearly salivating at the prospect of what they were going to do to her knocked me off my feet in its intensity.

I couldn’t understand how anyone could witness footage like that and not be horrified, let alone take to the streets in defence of it.

Perhaps Allison Pearson felt the same. She, too, is a mother.

Assuming her ‘non-crime hate’ Tweet is the one referenced, it was, at worst, a misunderstanding, a momentary lapse of judgment borne out of heightened emotions – hardly a justification for what I can only imagine has been a very frightening and distressing ordeal at the hands of the police.

Part of the problem for someone such as Pearson – and, indeed, for any high-profile commentator – is that her success makes her a target for those who dislike her, or what she represents.

In her case, an eloquent and successful Right-wing columnist and a fearless advocate for the Jewish community in Britain. It is in the interests of those on the opposing side to bring her down.

Indeed, it is perhaps worth noting that the person who filed the complaint against her in the first place is a retired, Guardian-reading civil servant.

But that is not the real problem here. Whether in politics or journalism or business, that kind of thing comes with the territory. In fact, the more people try to cancel you, the better you are at your job.

What is profoundly worrying is that the institutions that have always been trusted to exercise restraint and common sense in response to such attacks no longer seem to believe in the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’. They’re so infiltrated by certain ideologies that their impartiality can no longer be trusted.

For someone such as Pearson to find herself on the wrong side of the law is absurd. The idea that the police would waste time investigating something as spurious as a misguided Tweet, when they could be protecting, say, victims of domestic abuse or other real-world crimes, is simply madness.

This is a frightening moment for us all. What makes it more sinister is that our Prime Minister seems to think it’s OK, possibly because it would be in the interests of this socialist Government for critics like Pearson to be silenced.

To coin the phrase about witch trials: ‘I saw Goody Pearson dancing with the Devil.’ And so it begins.

Just a few days after an inquest found that an Oxford undergraduate took his own life after being ostracised by his social circle, another student at the university has been found hanged. Along with the child of a friend of a friend, now in a persistent vegetative state after an attempt to take their own life, that’s three promising young lives cut short. The sad legacy of a generation whose mental health was destroyed by lockdown. 

Bon appetit, girls!

They say revenge is a dish best eaten cold – or, in the case of Rebekah Vardy, a sheep’s anus. With her arch-rival Coleen Rooney in the Jungle, Vardy has signed up as The Sun’s I’m A Celeb columnist. These two women really are the feud that keep on feuding. 

• Amanda Abbington has posted online a picture of me alongside my Mail colleagues Katie Hind and Amanda Platell, accusing us of being ‘the lowest of the low, dreadful, scheming, lying, bitchy bullies’. Does she imagine us in stripey stockings and pointy hats, crouched over cauldrons, stirring the pot with malicious intent: eye of newt and tongue of frog and all that? That’s about as true as some of her allegations against her Strictly dance partner Giovanni Pernice… 
• The draft list of new emojis for 2025 (yes, this is actually someone’s job) includes a gorilla and a dolphin. Why not a Remembrance Day poppy? 

 Is my dog Muffin offensive? 

In its anti-racism drive, the Welsh Government is considering introducing dog-free areas. Is the implication that dogs are racist, or is the act of owning one offensive? Does it matter what breed?

My dog Muffin, right, is a Lhasa Apso, originally watchdogs in Buddhist monasteries. Does this mean she offends Chinese people? Am I inadvertently upsetting non-Buddhists on our thrice-daily walks?