My week from hell shows that the Britain we love and trust is gone

This must once again be a fair and free country with a police force that solves actual crimes instead of imaginary ones

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The eye of the storm is a really scary place to be; dark thoughts crowd in. You wince when you see your own name in headlines with terrible, wounding words like “hate” and “racist”. (At the best of times, I shrink from fame, let alone Fame’s brazen sister, Notoriety.) You rack your frantic brain in the small hours wondering, “Did I do something wrong?” I know I didn’t do anything wrong.
I cling to that knowledge like a shipwrecked person clings to a raft, your fingers getting colder and colder and gradually losing their grip. Why not stop struggling and let yourself go under? I understand why people under this kind of pressure take their own life. Make it go away, please just make it go away.
That’s how this Kafkaesque process works. Someone who probably hates my guts because I’m a Conservative or a woman with a platform or a blonde woman Conservative who sticks up for farmers or small business people or Jews, complains to the police about a tweet I posted.
And the police don’t ask, “Sir, are you by any chance a lifelong Labour voter and possible Catweazle lookalike who can’t stand gobby Tory women, or have you been on any of the pro-Palestine marches and do you think Israel shouldn’t exist?”
They don’t have to ask my accuser anything because he is immediately sanctified as “the victim”. A single complaint – weighed against 35 years of journalism with which millions agree – is enough to send the police to your door.
The leader of His Majesty’s Opposition may say it is “absolutely wrong” for the police to visit any journalist’s home simply because they have expressed an opinion (Kemi could well have added it is wrong for police to visit anybody’s home because they have expressed an opinion), and we instinctively know that’s right, don’t we?
In a free society, cops at your door at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday telling you you’re in trouble over a social media post made over 12 months ago (while refusing to tell you what it said or whom it offended) should be unconscionable. It’s stark staring bonkers actually.
Alas, we are not in the realms of common sense, dear reader, nor are we any longer in that Britain whose character was once summed up so perfectly in four words by Jeremy Clarkson: “Oh, for God’s sake!”
That Britain, fundamentally decent, tolerant yet impatient of cant, still exists in the hearts and minds of millions of ordinary people, I know that it does and I know they are bewildered and angry because all this Lefty nonsense has gone too far.
To a remarkable extent, though, that Britain we love and trust has disappeared from the higher echelons of the police and other agencies of the state. A pernicious woke ideology has insinuated itself into those exclusive eyries like Japanese knotweed.
Neil Gregory, a councillor in my district and member of the Essex Police, Fire and Crime Panel kindly dropped a note round to my house after the police visit. Neil, who has observed Essex senior officers at close quarters, says that they are hellbent in their “pursuit of a progressive Nirvana”.
Contemptuous of Essex residents who would really quite like an officer to come round and deal with a burglary or a car theft (count yourself lucky if they send you a crime number), they prefer to focus on trans rights or investigating spurious Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHI) or racially or religiously-motivated cases like the one I seem to be caught up in.
The “social justice” which the chief constable appears to care about – equity, diversity and inclusion – is a far cry from the justice the society he is meant to serve cares about: you know, catching the bad guys and making the world a safe place for our children.
Such a virtue-signalling police philosophy does not readily promote virtue, I think: on the contrary, it emboldens criminals to fill their boots (because they know they won’t get caught) and interferes with the freedom of expression of innocent people (because they think they might). In addition, there is the troubling question of what “hate” the police care about.
A Jewish reader emailed to tell me she complained to the police about a tweet she found horrifying (by one David Miller) which talked about “genocidal Jewish supremacists”. An Essex police officer wrote back saying that, although they were sorry she was offended, they would not pursue the author of the tweet… “feelings were running high” at the time he posted it.
A former Essex police officer told The Telegraph there was a problem with anti-Semitism and that, on one occasion, when they insisted that a certain tweet merited further investigation, their senior officer had asked, “Are you Israeli?”
The Essex service can hardly claim to police “without fear or favour” if, as Cllr Gregory alleges, it’s mainly favoured ethnic communities that get their attention. White people – still the majority in our wonderful county – and Jews do not appear to be among them, sadly.
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A lot of people have asked me about my offending tweet. According to The Guardian, which my accuser happily spoke to while unwilling to identify themselves to me, the tweet was posted, as I had suspected, in the period after the Hamas massacres of October 7.
American friends had shared a gut-wrenching video of mass slaughter in kibbutzim, and I became increasingly upset by what I saw as the swift downplaying of Israel’s anguish while the Metropolitan Police seemed to display extraordinary leniency to Pro-Palestine marchers who waved anti-Semitic placards and chanted furiously for the obliteration of the Jewish homeland.
That sense of two-tier policing only grew when, on Armistice Day, I gathered with the British Friends of Israel, a group I co-founded, near the Cenotaph. We invited a couple of police officers to appear in a selfie, but they declined.
Shortly after, someone on Twitter shared a photo of officers posing alongside what appeared to be Gaza marchers with the caption: “The police certainly have picked a side. Disgraceful.” I added my own caption: “How dare they. Invited to pose with lovely peaceful British Friends of Israel police refused. Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters.”
I pressed Post and thought no more of it until, not long after, I was alerted to the fact that the photo actually dated from before the present crisis. I deleted my tweet immediately, of course. (Although the men with the police in the photo were not pro-Palestine marchers, they belong to a Pakistani group which is, indeed, anti-Israel and its leader Imran Khan once called Osama bin Laden a “martyr”.)
I can’t be certain, because I haven’t been told, but that tweet appears to be the basis of an alleged criminal offence of inciting racial hatred (not a Non-Crime Hate Incident, as I first thought; although the officer at my door certainly used the word “incident”). Needless to say, I had no intention whatsoever of provoking racial hatred; I have, after all, spent the past 13 months campaigning against that very thing, putting my neck on the line to stop anti-Semitism.
My criticism was, quite clearly, of the police who seemed to hold one group to infuriatingly relaxed standards, causing immense fear among British Jews. To borrow from the email which Essex Police sent to the Jewish lady rejecting her complaint, “Feelings were running high” at the time my tweet was posted.
Believe me, you can drive yourself mad trying to point out that, every minute of the day, there are online communications which make mine read like Winnie the Pooh. This week’s Jewish Chronicle reports that the Met have dropped an investigation into an imam who called on Allah to ”destroy Jewish homes” in London.
Made himself pretty clear, didn’t he? And what about Labour MP Dawn Butler sharing a tweet which accused Kemi Badenoch of representing “white supremacy in blackface”. Now, that is disgustingly racist to my mind. And not even a rap over the knuckles from Prime Minister Starmer for such a vile slur.
There are ministers in the current Government who have tweeted inflammatory things about Right-wing voters and journalists which, if one were petty or mean-spirited enough, one might report to the police. Most of us wouldn’t dream of it. We know in the plaited fibres of our DNA that the billboard on a Merseyside Police lorry warning “Offensiveness is An Offence” is not what being British means. We are not a nation of snitches.
At least, we didn’t used to be. According to the Free Speech Union (a godsend for me in my present distress – do join, you may need them), an average of 65 NCHIs are recorded every day. I have been amazed to hear from many people – midwives, shopworkers, teachers, businessmen – that they got an NCHI for something shockingly trivial, something which would be considered perfectly acceptable by the majority of their fellow citizens.
One Tory MP got in touch to say a Labour opponent reported him a couple of years ago and the police questioned him at the station for two hours. He has never spoken of it before, not even to his wife, such was his acute distress.
Honestly, you don’t know whether to laugh or scream. A nine-year-old got an NCHI for calling another child a “retard”; so did two teenagers who said a classmate smelled of fish. Oh, for God’s sake!
Just imagine the reparations I am owed from being called “Speccy Four-Eyes” in a playground in South Wales in 1971! What future violence are those draconian sanctions on youngsters supposed to nip in the bud? Is a kid who bandies about piscatorial insults destined to grow up to be a terrorist? How about me – what threat do I pose to my community? Such actions by the police smack of totalitarianism; they are repellent to any sane person.
I suppose that has been one of the few rays of light in this dark week. Overwhelming support for me from thousands and thousands of people, truly I have never known anything like it.
A woman came up to me in the street and silently handed me a beautiful pot plant. Bottles of wine and flowers left on our doorstep. The cab driver in London who looked at me in the rearview mirror and growled “You that Allison Pearson?” (I feared the worst.) “Yes, I am.”
“No charge, love,” he said softly.
I have often been in tears, moved by the kindness of strangers; just as quickly, gusts of defiance billow up and blow the sorrow and dread away. I was afraid that all the headlines, and the woman they described, would mean friends from ethnic minorities would think less of me. I needn’t have worried. (Lord) Shaun Bailey picked me as his Greatest Briton on GB News.
The citation read “Courageous, bold and willing to tell the truth.. The ridiculousness of the police knocking on Allison’s door over a hate incident is beyond comprehension…The police apparently don’t have time to follow up burglaries, but have found time for this nonsense. Allison, we stand with you.” (Boris struck a similar note in a sweet, thoughtful text: “Don’t worry. We are with you all the way.”)
On Thursday, I was walking past the shop at our station, when the brilliant owners, Jai and Ruchi, came out and spontaneously hugged me. “Do you two think I’ve been stirring up racial hatred?” I asked, my voice cracking. Jai, who is from Wolverhampton, shot me a twinkling, complicit glance and said drolly: “That’s bollocks, that is.”
Correct, Jai, it is bollocks. And I am so deeply grateful you can see that. Unlike Roger Hirst, policing and crime commissioner for Essex, who told LBC that police had to consider how what I had tweeted would be heard “in our black and Asian communities”.
‘We can’t go around ignoring crimes just because they’re politically sensitive.’ The Crime Commissioner for Essex, Roger Hirst, defends the police investigation into journalist Allison Pearson. @Lewis_Goodall pic.twitter.com/Av34QWgQ6o
They’re not in ethnic silos, Mr Hirst, no matter how much the wokesters want to put them there; they live in Essex, they’re proud to be British and, just like everyone else, they want crimes to be policed, not thoughts.
I have been invited to do interviews by media around the world. All stunned and disbelieving that “Mad Britain” – the place people always wanted to come to because it was a gloriously free country – had fallen into Soviet-style repression and punishment. “This must stop,” as Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the owner of X (Twitter) posted in support of me. When I thanked him, he replied, “You’re most welcome.”
A Florida multi-millionaire (no, not that one) offered me “political asylum” in his guesthouse. (I may yet take him up on it; the guesthouse is at least five times the size of Pearson Towers.)
We are perilously close to being an international laughing stock. You know, almost the worst thing is that, as a law-abiding citizen, I have always respected the police, not envying their difficult, occasionally dangerous job. Being on the opposite side feels horribly uncomfortable, but what are they playing at?
With many national figures speaking out about how absurd the whole thing was – even Sir Keir, when he was asked about my case, said police should investigate crimes not tweets – Essex Police announced they were setting up a major-crimes “Gold Group” to look into a 5ft 4in Welshwoman who put something not entirely considered on social media. I’ll be honest, it felt like bullying and intimidation.
A former Cabinet minister texted me: “It’s incredible really that people like us have come to look on the police in this way.” Yes, it is. Very sad.
Not all police live in la-la Woke World. Two very senior officers from another part of the UK got in touch to say they could not believe how I’d been treated; not when they didn’t think there was a case to answer. “There is so much negativity about police officers right now,” wrote Sarah (not her real name), “and I can understand you must be feeling it, Allison. But most are like me and [X] – we are here to protect, support and comfort people in their fear, threat or danger and deal with those who would cause harm to others. Please don’t give up on us yet.”
I found Sarah’s words deeply moving and consoling, a slender handrail to hang onto as my lawyers and I plan the next steps.
I won’t lie; this has been one of the worst weeks of my life. I found myself thinking if there were any upsides. “Look at it this way, you got to read your obituaries before you died – all those lovely things people have been writing and saying,” joked a friend doing her best to comfort me.
You know, I hope it’s bigger than that. It shouldn’t be about me; I am one scared person among tens of thousands. Maybe some police officer somewhere today will stay his hand over a form, hesitating to inflict the nonsensical cruelty of an NCHI or other so-called hate crime on some poor man or woman who made a bad-taste joke or texted or tweeted something ridiculous or inappropriate or mean or rude or, yes, plain offensive because I spoke out and made a fuss.
So many times, this column has tried to highlight injustice, things people struggle to remedy themselves, and use The Telegraph’s heft to bring about change. It is quite clear that policing must urgently be rebalanced towards solving actual crimes instead of imaginary ones. Britain must, once again, be a fair and free country. If that Britain is gone forever, I will leave and I won’t be alone.
I’m not sure what the next week will bring (a lawyer told me to keep his number in my purse in case I’m arrested) but I’ll keep you posted.
A final thought for the big, scary chaps in Essex Police’s Gold Group, convened to look into a middle-aged woman and a year-old tweet: “Though she be but little, she is fierce.”
Allison Pearson will be discussing her ongoing legal action with Liam Halligan on their Planet Normal podcast on Thursday. You can listen at telegraph.co.uk/planet-normal or wherever you get your podcasts
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