Accused of killing a man I’ve never met

ON MONDAY I once again had followers mysteriously cancelled on my Twitter account. On Tuesday I was censored. On Wednesday I was denounced in The Guardian. On Thursday I was accused of helping to kill a man I had never even met (I’ll come back to this). And on Friday I was attacked and abused in the Left-wing New Statesman.

I was also denounced on a website associated with the vice-chairman of the Conservative Party, so effectively an arm of government. Paradoxically, the website – which claimed my words endangered public health – is partly run by a man who spends much of his time defending cigarette companies.

This is normal life now for any dissenter from the official view of the lockdown – abuse, accusations and smears.

The censorship was a mysterious cut in the recorded version of a weekly conversation I have each Monday on Talk Radio with presenter Mike Graham. Mr Graham had nothing to do with it. But Talk Radio recently ran into trouble with the pro- lockdown internet monster YouTube, which provides a platform for its recorded material.

My guess is that someone at Talk Radio, worried that YouTube might attack again, cut out some rude words I said about government propaganda (the whole episode is described on the Peter Hitchens blog). This is what censorship does. It makes people cut their own stuff, so the censors don’t have to.

But the worst was the suggestion that I should be counted as responsible for a poor man who had died, in Shrewsbury, after testing positive for Covid-19. The claim was that he had liked some of my tweets, and as a result, had ignored precautions against the virus and so died. I’ll leave it to you to judge the strength of that. Furious screeching internet warriors, who remind me strongly of the Red Guards who denounced and attacked Mao’s enemies in 1960s China, demanded I should confess my guilt and express public shame. Normally, this sort of thing would be easily dismissed. But in the current atmosphere, I am not so sure.

With every day that passes, this country grows darker and narrower, and more like the places I used to visit in my foreign correspondent days, secure in the knowledge I could fly home to freedom, law and calm. Believe me. I have seen a lot of tyrannies and we are turning, bit by bit, into such a place.