How far should we go to defend free speech?

This week sees the official launch of the Free Speech Union — an organisation that stands up for the speech rights of its members. It’s my baby, but a number of people have come on board as directors, including Douglas Murray and Professor Nigel Biggar. I’ve also had a lot of help behind the scenes from people who got in touch after reading about it in this column. I was on the Today programme on Monday to talk about it and have done a number of interviews since. By the time you read this, I’ll be recovering from the launch party, scheduled for Wednesday night.

So far, it’s going pretty well. About 1,500 people have contacted me wanting to join since I first started talking about it in August and I’ve managed to persuade some fantastic people to be on the various advisory councils, including Sir Patrick Garland, a former High Court judge; the historians David Starkey and Andrew Roberts; the satirist Andrew Doyle; The Spectator’s columnist Lionel Shriver; a number of journalists-cum-intellectuals, such as Claire Fox, Matt Ridley and David Goodhart; and 17 academics, including a professor of history at Harvard, the behavioural geneticist Robert Plomin and the feminist historian Zoe Strimpel. Now that the website is live (www.freespeechunion.org), people are signing up at the rate of one every five minutes.

There’s been some push-back, of course. There was a puerile attack in the Guardian in which a columnist pointed out that our name for the basic level of protection extended to all members — ‘Sword and Shield’ — was suspiciously similar to a far-right German festival called ‘Shield and Sword’. As ‘guilt by association’ goes, that’s almost as feeble as the attack launched on Yorkshire Tea earlier this week because Rishi Sunak, the new Chancellor, posed next to a sack of its teabags.