Why tackle someone’s argument when you can just pick a word and take offence at it?

Michael Gove was on BBC Question Time the other night, fielding questions about such contentious subjects as education, immigration and benefits. But when he browsed the internet afterwards to see what, if anything, was exercising the web about his performance, he was surprised to discover that his greatest crime had been an innocuous turn of phrase in response to a jibe from David Dimbleby.

Dimbleby had idly wondered why Gove was so disliked by the teaching profession, to which Gove replied that this was a loaded question on the lines of ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ This elicited a huge outpouring of internet hatred from the usual online victim groups to the effect that it was outrageous that a government minister should make light of the very serious problem of domestic abuse.

No, I wouldn’t have believed this either if I hadn’t myself experienced such immense obtuseness from BBC audiences on two occasions recently.