I’d never be rude to a fatty. Honest, not rude

Luckily, I am not in front of the Leveson Inquiry having to make an actual case for freedom of speech. For I would descend almost instantaneously into common abuse, which is my default setting whenever I am short on information, which is most of the time. Indeed, I made myself very unpopular with the tubby Labour Murdoch-baiter Tom Watson in the early stages of the hacking scandal, when I expressed my horror on Twitter that the MPs cross-examining Rupert Murdoch in the select committee were so fat.

I don’t think I called anybody “fatty”, but I did point out how sad it was that, with the eyes of the world for once upon our elected representatives, it was just one pork-faced salad-dodger after another in a too-tight suit. What would the Americans with their handsome President think? Or the slim and always beautifully tailored Japanese? They would assume Britain was under the thumb of some sweaty lardocracy.

One after another, our dough-faced lardocrats took their turn in front of the world and I was appalled. Only when Louise Mensch came on, the first to wear an outfit not bought from a special shop, did I relax and think: “Okay, fine, this one the world can look at.”

But only seconds later someone threw a pie and she was off-air again. In some ways it was well timed, because when the session restarted the world really was watching, and there was normally sized Louise saying sorry instead of the other fat piggies. Watson would never have been so gracious. He was angrier about the waste of cake than the affront to parliamentary order, and of course the immediate ban imposed on pies in the committee room left his on-the-job snacking plans in tatters.

So furious, in fact, did Watson become, that he complained about my fattism to Rupert Murdoch himself, via Twitter. And indeed, SO steamingly mad with it was he, that in his formal complaint to the boss he called me “Hugo Rifkind”. They say having a very full stomach impacts on one’s sense of hearing, so maybe it affects other cerebral functions as well.

But I never called Watson “fatty”, I don’t think. While I am very much against fat people of every hue because of the moral turpitude their body shape implies, the meagre world resources they hoover up, the £4 billion drain they constitute on the NHS, and the space they take up on public transport, I would never be rude to their faces. Honest, but not rude.

But even the right to be honest about fat people is under threat now, after a report by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Body Image recommended that MPs should investigate “putting appearance-based discrimination on the same legal basis as race and sexual discrimination”, and making it an offence to describe someone as “fat” or even “obese”.

Under such laws, doctors would have to tell patients: “Well, Mr Arbuckle, your weight of 23 stone is completely normal, but when you die of hideous respiratory and cardiovascular complications, probably tomorrow, you will need a coffin with a lot more wood in it than some people.”

Insisting that appearance and weight are a prime cause of bullying, the report found that one in five people had been victimised because of their weight, and that most people were dissatisfied with their body image. Well, they ought to be. The latest Health Survey for England shows that in 2009 61.3 per cent of people were overweight. Those people should be ashamed of themselves, and they should change. There is no need to be rude to them. But they do not need legal protection. And calling them “fat” is no ruder than calling a drunk a “drunk” or a smoker a “smoker” or a shoplifter a “shoplifter”.

Fat children get bullied at school, the report claims. But how can that be? From what I can see these days, ALL schoolchildren are fat. How can it count as bullying when the only skinny kid in the class stands there pointing at 33 little porkers bursting out of their trousers and offers a feeble “fatty!”, before being sat on and squished to death?

And putting anti-fat language “on the same basis as race discrimination” wouldn’t make any difference to schoolchildren anyway. When I was 15, my pleasure in getting good O-level results was somewhat marred by having “YID” scrawled next to my name on the school noticeboard. I could hardly take legal action (like a “typical Jew”). But what could I do? I couldn’t cross it out, that would have looked pathetic. And I couldn’t leave it. So I cunningly wrote “YID” by the names of a few of the other (non-Jewish) kids who had done well, to make it look like the word was being used as generic abuse for swots — a stratagem so hilariously Jewish I cringe to recall it.

But it’s all so confusing. Are we making new rules or getting rid of old ones? Are we too rude or not rude enough? Only last week I was written to by David Davis, who is leading a campaign to remove the use of the word “insulting” from Section 5 of the Public Order Act, which, he says, makes it an offence for people to use “insulting” language.

“Nobody likes to be insulted, particularly in public,” he wrote, “but the right to freedom of speech includes the right to criticise, to ridicule and to offend and I am keen to ensure that that right remains available to us all.” Which suggests he thinks it is already an offence to call someone “fatty”, and that we must campaign to change that.

So we now have campaigns aiming to legalise and criminalise insulting language at the same time. It’s really very confusing.

After laying out his position, Mr Davis asked if I would come and talk about it at the House of Commons. And I replied quite honestly that while I supported his campaign, I could not put my name to it because what I am best known for is probably not what he means. I am generally perceived as just a mean old bastard who likes making fat people cry, and attaching my name to his cause could only harm it.

It is a perfectly Newspeakian paradox that in order to support a campaign for free speech, I have to pretend that I don’t.