Cheer up, Lord Sugar – I can’t be trusted on Twitter either

People who don’t know me personally are often surprised I don’t tweet. Shouldn’t I be up there in the icloud, mingling with the twitterati, dispensing my wisdom and witterati?

People who do know me are relieved I don’t tweet and grudgingly impressed I have both the insight and restraint to leave social media well alone. Even before wine o’clock.

Why? Because I can’t trust myself not to say something awful. Not Katie Hopkins awful, more Lord Sugar awful.

I used to do comedy a long time ago, and that impulse to not just amuse but shock still courses through my veins. Humour is a powerful weapon and paying audiences are happy to be slain by a knife-edge punchline that exposes their own prejudices.

Social media? Not so much. Here, said powerful weapon tends to be trained back on the person who had the temerity to tell a joke.

Context is all. Had Lord Sugar’s photomontage of the Senegalese World Cup team as migrant market traders featured on a show such as Mock the Week, knowingly couched in post-modern irony, it would have raised the requisite giggle of discomfort.

On Twitter, it caused offence, outrage and brought forth calls for him to be sacked from the BBC on the grounds of racism, which is nonsensical. The Apprentice boss strikes me as a man who cares about the colour of a man’s money, rather than that of his skin.

A-ha! But it could still mean he is guilty of casual racism, the selfappointed Twitter gestapo may scold.

Maybe – but I think the backlash has put him straight on that one. Isn’t self-policing the best way to deal with such social-media lapses?

He’s deleted it and apologised for it, that’s chastisement enough. If everyone was hung out to dry for making a dubious wisecrack in search of a cheap laugh, half the population would be strung up.

And me. Definitely me.