The police turning up at someone’s door over a tweet has become alarmingly mundane in Britain. The slow corrosion of our rights, the steady stream of stories about arrests over memes and misgenderings, has numbed us to the authoritarianism of it all. But there is something about the Allison Pearson scandal that has made the slowly boiling frog realise just how hot it is.

Earlier this month, news broke that Pearson, a columnist for the centre-right Daily Telegraph, had been visited by Essex Police on Remembrance Sunday. Her crime? A year-old post on X. Two police officers knocked on her door and informed her she was being investigated for inciting racial hatred, and invited her to attend a voluntary interview. More chillingly, they didn’t disclose which tweet it was – or who her accuser was.

Thankfully, common sense has now, finally, prevailed. Essex Police announced late last week that they have closed the investigation, following advice from the Crown Prosecution Service. Still, Pearson’s brush with England’s poundshop Stasi has quite rightly made headlines not just in Britain, but also the world over.