By Ben Pensant

Dear Graham.

Oh dear, Graham.

What the hell happened?

As Larry Fishburne said in Jacky Brown before shooting Al Pacino in the chest: “You used to be beautiful…”. And I don’t just mean beautiful beautiful, like Norm Chomsky in a tutu kicking a Zionist’s shin. I mean really beautiful, like an ethically sourced whale-spunk omelette washed down with a shot of Jezza’s bum-sweat.

Your sterling work in social media activism long ago surpassed your comedy output, not least because it is completely devoid of that dangerous commodity that is like kryptonite to the modern left: humour. Indeed, you should be proud that despite penning some of the warmest comedy in British history you’re also one of the most joyless people on Twitter.

Because as your 672,000 devoted followers know all too well, there’s nothing funny about Internet Glinner. From applauding the shooting of Republican Steve Scalier by tweeting ‘Chickens. Roost. Etc’ to refusing to condemn antisemitic murderers Hamas on the grounds that it is ‘complex’, your commitment to stony-faced idealism is second to none.

You wowed liberal Twitter with your regular dismissals of Brexit and Trump voters as thick racists. You melted regressive hearts after winning an argument with a student by rummaging around his Facebook page and tweeting a photo of his mother. You made leftists swoon with your support for punching Nazis and belief that anyone who disagreed with you was a Nazi too. And no true progressive will ever forget your principled admiration for the socialist paradise of Venezuela. Well, apart from you that is, as you seem to have developed an acute form of amnesia now that the country’s economy has fell off a cliff and its only growth industry is cannibalism.

But your greatest contribution has been your tireless crusade against people saying whatever the hell they like: a particularly selfless venture considering you earn your living saying whatever the hell you like. Your greatest hits include demanding right-wing accounts are banned from Twitter and applauding Jake Monroe’s libel action against horse-faced racist Katy Hopkins: a cheeky move for someone who has repeatedly accused President Pussy-Grab of raping his wife. Indeed, it’s fortunate your enemies don’t share your enthusiasm for libel bearing in mind the shit you’ve accused them of.

Which brings us to your hysterical celebration of Scottish super villain Cunt Dankula’s conviction for gross offensiveness. As you’ll recall, after initially castigating Dankula for making jokes about Nazis you swiftly realised this didn’t fly as you yourself have written several jokes about Nazis, so instead you adopted the angle favoured by history-loving supply teacher Mike Strawberry and decided Dankula was an actual Nazi. Gotcha!

Mike, of course, is the mega-brained internet sensation who never lets his love of regressive left activism get in the way of his lucrative career as a dinner lady. You’ve gleefully retweeted him on numerous occasions and it’s not hard to see why. Like you, Mike combines a love of libel laws with a penchant for breaking them, regularly slandering people he disagrees with, such as Professor of Lobsters Jordan B. Henderson who Mike has repeatedly called alt-right despite the fact that he isn’t.

When asked, Mike wisely refuses to provide evidence that Peterson is a white supremacist ethno-nationalist, which is understandable as there isn’t any. Besides, he doesn’t have time to placate social media sea-lions: he’s too busy doing dead important history stuff and begging people to employ him so he can get paid to do more dead important history stuff. And as a man of integrity I’m certain that once the culture war is over he’ll report himself to the police for defamation.

But few could fail to be impressed by the way you and Mike pushed the evidence-free narrative that teaching a dog to do a Hitler salute was not merely a tasteless joke but actually part of a sinister plan to infect gullible minds with Nazism via the powerful medium of cute canines.

And you fought your corner with aplomb during a Twitter spat with ‘liberal’ satirist and supposed Corbynite – yeah, right – Jonathan Pile, ending in entirely unpredictable fashion with you calling the free speech faker a Nazi apologist. Pile immediately set his attack dogs on you, though they were curiously silent when you were vindicated by Dankula’s appearance at the Day For Freedom, proving conclusively to you, Mike, and everyone else who really wanted Cunt to be a Nazi that he was indeed a Nazi. In fact your only misstep was not arranging a left-wing Day For Freedom, during which you and Mike could have dazzled the crowds with a sensational live debate: who is the coolest censor – Marie Whitehouse or Topper Gore?

Sadly, it seems that may never come to pass. Because all your years of service were recently destroyed in one fell swoop when you outed yourself as a filthy TERF. Or to give you your proper name – because some of us care about using correct labels – a Trans Exclusionary Right-Wing Fuckstick.

I won’t regurgitate the gory details of your transphobic behaviour, but let’s just say if you insist on spreading hate by dead-naming women with penises then don’t act surprised when one of them tweets personal information about your wife. What the hell did you expect? You think just because you’ve deployed these tactics yourself no-one will use them on you? Please. You might be left-wing but you’re still a white male. You’re practically the definition of fair game, no matter how many Trump supporters you call ‘toilets’.

Worst of all, in getting yourself investigated by the police because of something you said you’ve gained the support of the very alt-right fascists you’ve spent years attacking. I guess the only crumb of comfort we can take is that – like Judy Bindel, Bahar Rastafa, Kate Papasmurthwaite and every other brave progressive nicked, no-platformed, or bitten on the arse by their own ideology – it’s a courtesy you wouldn’t dream of extending to them.

And as for this self-pitiful nonsense: “Once people start censoring views they start thinking they can get away with anything”. Christ. This is no different to the hate speech peddled by the likes of Rod Lidl and Julia Hartley Brexit, the type of brutes who think free speech is under threat and political correctness is a bad thing. Listen up, Graham: political correctness hasn’t ‘gone mad’ – it’s perfectly fine as it is. Stuart Lee said so, and he’s not some thick northern comic: he writes for The Observer and went to Oxbridge and everything.

As former Doctor Who? Paul McCann put it on Twitter: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world that the civic application of human kindness was in fact a vice known as political correctness”. Well said. I for one still marvel at the human kindness displayed by those councils who ignored child abuse because they didn’t want to be accused of racism.

But you were the last famous person off the telly I expected to fall for the alt-right lie that people aren’t free to say what they like. (Despite the fact that they do, everywhere, all the time. Apart from in Saudi Arabia, obvs, but you can blame the West for that). Nobody is being stopped from saying stuff: they’re just being punished afterwards for saying it. Is that so hard to grasp?

So no-one stopped Durham student Angelos Sofocleous writing ‘women don’t have penises‘. They simply sacked him for it.

No-one stopped teenager Chelsea Russell posting the lyrics to a Snoopy Dogg song on Instagram. They simply charged her with a hate crime and gave her a community order.

No-one stopped Professor Ned Lebow making a lame joke about lingerie in an elevator. They simply reported him and ordered him to apologise.

No-one stopped the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Mary Beth Maxwell using the word ‘n****r’ when describing a racist incident that involved someone saying the word ‘nigger’. They simply suspended her and forced her to resign.

No-one stopped student Jonaya English writing that the perpetrators of most terrorist attacks were Muslims. They simply reported her to a local bobby who sent her a friendly email threatening to get her kicked out of University.

No-one stopped a Metropolitian Police detective superintendent from using the phrase ‘whiter than white’ during a briefing. They simply lodged a complaint and launched an internal investigation for gross misconduct.

No-one stopped aforementioned racist Katy Hopkins tweeting that we needed a ‘final solution’ to Jihadism after a terrorist attack. They simply accused her of being antisemitic and successfully campaigned to get her fired.

No-one stopped foul Tory Toby Jones making jokes about tits and writing a snooty article thirty years ago. They simply caused such uproar that he was left with no choice but to resign from a job he hadn’t even started yet.

No-one stopped Kevin Mackenzie comparing Chelsea Rovers striker Russ Barkley to an orangutan. They simply generated enough outrage to get him fired for racism, despite the fact that neither McKenzie nor most football fans had a clue Barkley had Nigerian grandparents.

No-one stopped Roseanne Ba saying Valerie Whatserface looked like a character from Monkey Planet. They simply pretended they knew Valerie was mixed-race and pressured CBS to cancel Ba’s sitcom.

No-one stopped Mike Duplass saying sinister conservative Benny Shapiro was a nice guy. They simply shamed him on social media until he apologised, deleted the tweet and assured everyone he actually thinks Shapiro’s a knob.

No-one stopped James Gun making dumb jokes about paedophiles. They simply dug them up, accused him of being a child abuser, and got him fired from Galaxy Quest 2: a rare instance of the mob getting it completely wrong and a shameless example of the right using our tactics against us, like they did when Cathy Griffiths made a joke about cutting Trump’s knackers off.

And no-one – repeat no-one – stopped you writing transphobic hate on Twitter. They simply tweeted your wife’s address, reported you to the police, and caused you to receive a harassment warning. In case you hadn’t noticed, Graham, this is what the left do. You’ve been on board with these tactics for years so why the sudden change of heart?

Sadly, it’s become increasingly hard to work out what goes on in that huge head of yours. Maybe this whole episode will make you repent and vow to Do Better, like when you publicly agreed with JK Roland that it’s wrong to call female politicians gendered insults on the internet despite having recently called Theresa Mayday a cunt.

Back then your “what the hell was I thinking!” response was welcome, despite the fact it was completely unneccessary as every good leftist knows you can call Tories whatever the hell you like. But your intersectional heart was clearly in the right place, as it was when you overcompensated a few weeks later by attacking someone as a vile sexist for calling a woman ‘shrill’. This time, however, I fear you may not be able to bounce back. As I wrote in my recent review of BlcKKKlnsmn, we’ve already lost African-American auteur Spike Leigh to the far-right – it’s not hard to imagine a known transphobe succumbing to their seductive charms too.

So it appears we’ve reached the end of the line. It’s been a blast but you’ve let us down more than a new series of The Welshes or Count Arthur Mullard ever could. The only possible way of clawing it back would be to issue a full apology, promise never to speak out of turn again, and pledge to cut off your own genitals in solidarity with the zisterhood.

The balls are in your court.

Yours,

The human race.