My blue tick humiliation

I was one of the first people to take up Elon Musk’s offer to purchase a blue tick, the Twitter equivalent of VIP status. Not because I didn’t have a complimentary one – I did, believe it or not – but because if you sign up to Twitter Blue it means you can post videos on the site that are longer than a couple of minutes.

I had noticed that my friend Konstantin Kisin had put up a speech he’d made at the Oxford Union and it was getting lots of views. I spoke in the same debate and gave what I thought was a much better speech, so wanted to put mine on Twitter, hoping it would prove even more popular. I asked him how he’d managed to get around the two-minute limit and he said you had to sign up to the premium service. So I took the plunge, posted my speech, then obsessively monitored the views it was getting, waiting for the moment it would overtake Konstantin’s. In retrospect, I may have been wrong about how much better my effort was than his. At last count, his speech had 10.5 million views and mine had 30,500.

My humiliation didn’t end there. Since introducing the subscription option, Musk has been gradually removing the high-status badges from those who haven’t paid for them and last week stripped a final tier of celebrities of their blue ticks: Beyoncé, Cristiano Ronaldo and Kim Kardashian, among others. That didn’t go down well, as you can imagine. Many of the A-listers who’d been denuded of their elite status announced grandly that they wouldn’t dream of paying $8 a month for a privilege that had meant nothing to them in the first place.