They genuinely think their own opinions are so virtuous that they are entitled to silence others. I have read the attacks on me that have been circulated in these seats of learning, and they are enough to make the blood run cold. They look like charge sheets in some revolutionary show trial – a trial which I increasingly fear I may one day face in reality. Someone has usually spent days looking for things that I have said in the past, and then twisted them to give a false impression to the ill-informed.

The people involved clearly think they are doing a good thing. They sincerely feel that I should not be allowed to say the things I say, or write what I have written here. Many of them, I am sure, would like to see me punished for having said them, preferably after a public confession of wrongdoing. Interestingly, many of the passages they have twisted come from some years back, when speech in this country, especially on the sexual revolution, was undoubtedly freer than it is now.

And that scares me too. How much that we can freely say now will be regarded as borderline illegal ten years hence?