Iain Macwhirter Iain Macwhirter

How a tweet got me sacked 

The cover illustration for Douglas’s seminal cover piece, ‘The Scruton tapes’ (Credit: Morten Morland) 
issue 05 November 2022

I always advise younger journalists never to use irony or make jokes on social media, so when I was effectively sacked for alluding to an edible fruit of the palm family, I should have known better. And of course I did know better. I deleted my three-word tweet within minutes. But screenshots live for ever. There are no second thoughts on Twitter, no clarifications allowed. No second chances either. It is judge and jury and will take away your career, reputation and livelihood at the click of a mouse, if pusillanimous employers allow it to.

I’d been in countless Twitter storms in the past over Scottish nationalism, hate crime, gender. It’s what Twitter does. So when the editor of the Scottish Herald, for which I had been a columnist for more than 20 years, rang to tell me I was suspended, I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. The order had come from ‘upstairs’.

Written by
Iain Macwhirter

Iain Macwhirter is a former BBC TV presenter and was political commentator for The Herald between 1999 and 2022. He is an author of Road to Referendum and Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won a Referendum but Lost Scotland.

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