Allison Pearson and a series of terrible misjudgments

The Daily Telegraph is fond of telling its readers that youngsters should spend less time on the internet. But perhaps they should extend this advice to slightly older folk, like its columnist Allison Pearson.

The paper has devoted two front pages and 13 separate stories this week to the tale of how Pearson was plunged into a “Kafkaesque nightmare” – while wearing her dressing gown and slippers to boot! – when Essex police knocked on her door and told her she was under investigation for allegedly stirring up racial hatred in a tweet last year.

The paper has dragged Donald Trump acolyte Elon Musk into its coverage, further fuelling speculation that its top brass believe Twitter’s loose cannon of an owner might be tempted into wasting even more money by making a bid for the Telegraph titles.

And its big guns have come out to defend their colleague. “The Allison Pearson witch-hunt lays bare this country’s despicable slide into authoritarianism,” wrote Sunday Telegraph editor and fellow columnist Allister Heath, with typical restraint. He added: “Starmer’s Britain is no longer a free country – it’s an Orwellian dystopia”, that Pearson was a victim of “two-tier justice” and that police were “following Kafkaesque procedures dictated by an out-of-control technocratic machine.”

Heath called Pearson “a brilliant columnist much beloved of Telegraph readers” and declared that a “basic rule ought to be that the authorities should not come for journalists in free societies.”

But brilliant and beloved as she might be, it looks like Pearson made a series of terrible misjudgments in what seems to be the offending tweet. “Look at this lot smiling with the Jew hater,” she is said to have posted on Twitter, alongside a photo of what she took to be Met police officers with people carrying a green and maroon Hamas flag. The post also claimed that Met officers had refused when “invited to pose for a photo with lovely peaceful British Friends of Israel” on the same day.

Yet it seems that Pearson had confused Greater Manchester Police for the Met, and a Hamas flag for that of Imran Khan’s Pakistani party Pakistani political party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf – which made her highly inflammatory comment highly incorrect. The Telegraph say Pearson “deleted the post after the mistake was pointed out”.

Whether the whole thing is worth police time or not is for better minds than Rats In A Sack, but as if the situation weren’t messy enough, right wing hack Ben Sixsmith then added to the confusion by wrongly accusing both the police and Guardian of getting the wrong Allison Pearson – because he’d failed to spot a weird imitator account that cooied her original tweet.

On Friday morning Pearson told supporters that she was “overwhelmed with messages and distress at the moment… it is personally devastating”. One imagines that being called “Jew haters” for holding a Pakistani political flag might feel similar.