The Stasi paid for the thought police, but trolls do it for free

IHAD thought it was only women who were subject to abuse by internet trolls. But Jeremy Clarkson has revealed, writing in Top Gear magazine, that he was sent abusive tweets after he announced his ancient labrador, Whoopi, had died. He received a ‘non-stop tirade’ of abuse along the lines of, ‘How does she smell?’

When my ancient cat, Squeaky, died at the age of 24, I shared this loss with my readers.

Many of them had, over the years, grown to love my cantankerous black cat, who was once so wide of girth she wore the cat flap as a skirt, having got stuck on her way in from the garden.

In the past, I have received a lot of sympathy whenever one of my animals was unwell.

When my feral cat, Susan, went missing from our home in Hackney for two weeks, I received 6,000 emails offering help.

But times have changed. I am no longer on Twitter, having joined for about two hours and been so shocked at the vitriol, I swiftly deleted the app from my iPhone.

But people can still reach me: they just scrawl, Liz Jones, Exmoor, and John the Postman duly delivers.

A few days after I wrote about Squeaky’s death, I received in the post from a reader a copy of the book 101 Uses For A Dead Cat. It was not a good moment. At about the same time as I was mourning a cat I saw more as a daughter – and whom I loved above all other beings in the world – and after I’d been styled to look like Kate Middleton for the Daily Mail, someone sent me the pages torn from the newspaper, with various things drawn on top of my face and body. A dog’s head had been applied, like an obscene collage, over mine.

Once, someone just turned up, in my hallway, with an abusive letter.

Another time, a man came to my front door and refused to leave, saying he had driven all the way to see me from Suffolk. A couple, who happened to be staying with me that weekend, had to physically eject him.

When I was on the SomaliKenyan border, working on a story on the famine, the photographer assigned to my story told me someone was pretending to be me, and was tweeting about how awful it was that my Gucci luggage was getting dusty.

I’ve had my house shot at, and eggs splattered on my car.

When I wrote about my depression, a man wrote to say: ‘Please go ahead and commit suicide, do us all a favour.’

I’ve been instructed to ‘f*** off and die, twice’ by a Muslim man who took umbrage at a woman, and someone who ‘only writes about fashion’, travelling to Somalia.

When I wrote about a boy in Africa who was beating a donkey with an iron bar, and how I had reprimanded him (even my editor at the time, wanting me to leave this paragraph out, had to be convinced that if poor people do not even have donkeys, their chances of survival diminish drastically), I received a small metal rod in the post, smeared with blood.

I wonder, often, at how nasty people can be. I wonder, mostly, that they have the time to do this.

It irks me that animal rights activists are always portrayed as violent nutters, when I think the reverse is true.

I’ve had more abuse from farmers, threats from those who like to hunt, wielding guns, than from any other sector of society. (I guess fashion designers, second on my hit list after animal abusers, are less likely to resort to violence, given their only weapons are pinking shears.)

There is much talk of the democracy of allowing everyone their head, as it were (not something even gold-medal-winning dressage horses are allowed, but that’s another story).

THAT is clearly nonsense because, as Clarkson has pointed out, we not only don’t know their names, we don’t know where they live. I’m selling up, mainly because being frightened of who will turn up next has become so exhausting.

I wonder what these internet trolls are trying to achieve? They are self-appointed thought police, wanting everyone to be humble — and uncritical — and unchallenging of the status quo.

Isn’t it interesting that the Russians and the East German Stasi had to employ people to do this for them.

Now, the general public are doing the job for free.