Sitting in the GB News greenroom on Sunday evening, I watched the two guests on air before me – one from Reform, one from the Greens – debate whether Nigel Farage should have reported Zack Polanski to the police for potentially inciting violence against him. Was it a challenge to free speech?

The timing was almost too neat. Only last week, I learned the outcome of the Green Party’s own attempt to silence me, after police were sent to my home and I was threatened with arrest for opposing the party’s antisemitism.

As a writer and broadcaster in 2020s Britain, one almost expects the police eventually to arrive

As a writer and broadcaster in 2020s Britain, one almost expects the police eventually to arrive

Everything was set for my first interview of the day – lights on, cameras ready, my guest a professor of architecture – when the doorbell rang. A petite blonde woman said, with theatrical concern, that she was a police officer, and perhaps should come inside in case the neighbours saw. She wasn’t in uniform. She had come alone. She wore no body camera. Yet I knew immediately what was happening.

As a writer and broadcaster in 2020s Britain, one almost expects the police eventually to arrive and allege some sort of thought crime, particularly if one writes about anti-Jewish racism and violence, free speech, the Middle East, Islam or trans issues. I write about all of them.

I recognised the moment for what it was. A rite of passage, and an attempt to place a boundary around my speech. Informing her as I did so, I reached for my phone and began recording, as much for posterity as for evidence.

The police rarely visit my house – not when someone smashed my car window (“It’s not life or death,” a bored operator told me), not when shoplifters threatened to strike a local shop worker with a stolen bottle of wine. But one balmy day in June, they found time for me.

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