How a tweet got me sacked

I always advise younger journalists never to use irony or make jokes on social media, so when I was effectively sacked for alluding to an edible fruit of the palm family, I should have known better. And of course I did know better. I deleted my three-word tweet within minutes. But screenshots live for ever. There are no second thoughts on Twitter, no clarifications allowed. No second chances either. It is judge and jury and will take away your career, reputation and livelihood at the click of a mouse, if pusillanimous employers allow it to.

I’d been in countless Twitter storms in the past over Scottish nationalism, hate crime, gender. It’s what Twitter does. So when the editor of the Scottish Herald, for which I had been a columnist for more than 20 years, rang to tell me I was suspended, I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. The order had come from ‘upstairs’. I was out.

What for? Had I libelled someone? Nope. Broken the law? Nah. Had I been accused of groping? Of course not. I hadn’t even offended Twitter’s notoriously woke algorithms. I had used a word that is ‘not acceptable’ and the Daily Mail (shock horror) had asked for a comment. I pointed out that publications including the Guardian and Newsweek had recently published articles about how black Tories had been abused as ‘coconuts’ (brown on the outside, white on the inside) by the left. My tweet – ‘a coconut cabinet?’ – was an allusion to this, an ironic response to another tweet by someone who had said the presence of black ministers in the Conservative cabinet does not make it truly ‘diverse’.

When the Labour MP Rupa Huq said Kwasi Kwarteng was ‘superficially black’, she meant it. I quite clearly did not. The people who denounced me on Twitter knew this perfectly well. But it was possible to frame my three words in a way to suggest otherwise, inviting obloquy.

Trying to explain irony is hard, because it is a figure of speech in which words used mean the opposite of what they say. But it’s not that hard. I had also tweeted that the Liz Truss cabinet made Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish government look ‘hideously white’ – which was a reference to Greg Dyke’s famous remark about the BBC when he was director-general. Again, this was a turn of phrase, a use of exaggeration to make a point. It was not a literal assertion.

Do newspapers no longer know the meaning of irony, of hyperbole? Of course they do. But we now live under the tyranny of the literal. Anything you say will be turned into a statement of intent.

Attention-seekers on social media deliberately misconstrue what people say to generate contrived outrage. When Gordon Beattie, the chairman of Beattie Communications, wrote online ‘We don’t hire blacks, gays or Catholics. We sign talented people and we don’t care about the colour of their skin, sexual orientation or religion’, everyone knew what he meant. But he had to ‘stand down’ from his own PR company because he’d used the words ‘we don’t hire blacks’.

When politicians talk about a ‘decapitation strategy’, they don’t mean that they intend to execute the rival party leader. If someone says ‘I’ll bloody kill you if you do that again’, it’s not a reason to call the police. Though come to think of it, under the Scottish government’s Hate Crime Act it could be.

Irony isn’t the only thing that suffers if everything is taken literally. Debate becomes impossible. It was futile to point this out in my case. There was ‘reputational’ damage to Newsquest, the parent company of the Herald group. They are committed to ‘Diversity Inclusion Equality’ (DIE).

I was suspended for a week before my fate was eventually decided. The Herald stated (on Twitter, naturally) that there had been no ‘racist intent’ on my part. That I have written ‘sensitively on racial matters’ for more than 20 years. They knew I’d been stitched up. But the gods of social media had to be appeased.

I’ve been ‘let go’ before in my long career. I was a BBC TV and radio presenter for 25 years. I’ve been a columnist for every-one from the Observer to the Big Issue. It’s part of the game. But this was something else. It was an assault on my integrity.

The Herald in Glasgow is one of the oldest newspapers in the world, published daily since 1783. It has had fearless editors such as Arnold Kemp, who revelled in the ancient Scottish tradition of hyperbolic abuse and offence-giving called ‘flyting’. How sad that it is now subject to a higher editorial authority composed of censorious figures who don’t even read the paper. These guardians of moral and political probity have been elected by no one. They aren’t accountable – they aren’t even identifiable in many cases. Only a small minority of the population have a Twitter account and only a tiny minority of those accounts, 10 per cent, actively tweet.

The Herald isn’t the only publication that lives in fear of social media. The journalists who are addicted to Twitter are part of the problem. Free speech and independent journalism are finished if we submit to the caprice of doctrinaire online zealots. Newspapers are, to use another no doubt unacceptable metaphor, cutting their own throats.