Can Jeremy Clarkson’s critics take a joke?

There is always a tipping point in Twitterstorms. A moment at which the digital hysteria over something somebody said becomes far more offensive, and far more dangerous, than what that person said.

You can feel when it happens, when the shift takes place, when it is the behaviour of the howling mob that becomes the truly shameful and anti-social thing, far more than the utterance that so outraged the mob in the first place.

We have reached this tipping point, already, in the fury over Jeremy Clarkson’s comments about Meghan Markle. The clamour for Clarkson’s head is now a far graver insult to decency and liberty than the thing Clarkson himself wrote in the Sun.

I don’t like what Clarkson wrote, for the record. I’m no fan of Meghan Markle but fantasising about marching her naked through the streets so that people can throw poo at her – as Clarkson did in his column on Friday – strikes me as tasteless.