In 2010, I started a campaign against Rod Liddle becoming editor of the Independent as it was rumoured he would. When I say campaign, I mean that I joked on Facebook that I should be the editor, not him. People took it seriously as though there were a remote possibility of this when everyone knows I am allergic to offices, don’t believe in meetings longer than 10 minutes and am the world’s crappest schmoozer.

My credentials were simply that I loved that paper and did not want it edited by a racist misogynist, which is how I then perceived Liddle. The common assault on his pregnant girlfriend, for which he accepted a police caution but later denied, was public knowledge.

Whatever part of the left Liddle claimed once to represent, his downtrodden man-of-the-people-libertarian-shtick was already apparent. He sent me some odd messages, called me “Suze”, slagged me off because I worked at the Mail on Sunday, which had claimed he left racist messages on football forums (some of which Liddle has denied).

The best bit was that I had a party to celebrate NOT becoming editor of The Independent, a job that no one would ever offer me anyway, but this is the way I like to carry on in this carousel of nonsense that is the media.

Liddle carried on, too, upping the ante in that now-familiar: “Will no one but brave little me talk about immigration?” tone. He moved such views right into the mainstream. Poison is what happens when you speak truth not to power, but to bait the powerless.

It is neither funny nor clever, but it titillates the right’s intelligentsia in magazines such as the Spectator. The respectability of a periodical allows Liddle to now write: “I have spent the morning trying to draw a cartoon of a black person without it being racist. It’s bloody difficult. Especially the lips.” Puke-making. From web forum to the heart of the establishment (Muslim women as postboxes, anyone?) – the publication of racist and Islamophobic comments is now permitted.

This didn’t happen overnight in a vacuum. We can crow all we like over Katie Hopkins’ recent financial troubles, but it doesn’t change the environment that allowed her to flourish. I lost track of when she went too far, of when she began freelancing for any far-right cause that would have her. She became the woman in the street, the woman who gets her facts wrong, who hates her own weakness so much that she turns her bile on to the very weakest.

She does not have the smarts of Liddle. I say that without irony. He knows what he does; she is a dumb opportunist. It was OK to call drowning migrants cockroaches. Editors let her do that just as the Spectator enables its “alt-right” bros. The mainstreaming of racist discourse manifests through Ukip, the EDL, the Yaxley-Lennon groupies – but it is made credible by print journalism, by adults saying things for which children would be reprimanded. To discuss the psyches of a Liddle or a Hopkins, who are just begging to be denounced by liberals, is for another day. White supremacy is reaching power in the US and neo-Nazis gather in Europe.

We have witnessed full-blown racism becoming respectable as public discourse. Enablers of addicts allow them to escape the consequences of their actions. Editors have done this. So no, I don’t have the wherewithal to edit a paper, but I sure as hell know that these editorial decisions are nothing to do with free speech or even journalism. I would not publish this filth, that’s for sure.

Classy Cerys Matthews has the common touch

Cerys Matthews … ‘We all have the onus on us to keep progress going.’

You’ve got to love Cerys Matthews staging a one-woman bit of class war on her BBC 6 Music show. She doesn’t want to play music from people who have been given the “leg-up” of going to private school. She would like to play music from a wider pool of people. She said, quite reasonably, that social mobility has stalled and that “we all have the onus on us to keep progress going to make sure all classes, all colours, all creeds, all genders get the opportunity to get where they need to be going. That’s not happening at the minute.”

The charts are dominated by folk who went to private school. Just as acting is. Just as publishing is. Every time this is mentioned, some poor sap will say it’s not fair because children don’t get to choose where their parents sent them to school. The public-schoolchild cri de coeur is always: “Its not my fault, but I just happened to have an enormous amount of contacts as well as being supertalented.”

Either culture, in the widest sense, represents all of us, or it is simply finishing school with a soundtrack. Certainly, culture failed to represent what was going on in this country, as Brexit seemed an utter shock to the entire artistic establishment.

Of course, working-class artists break through and are then fetishised for their authenticity. It was ever thus. The fact that the dreadful Tory MP Philip Davies has called for Matthews’ resignation is a good sign. Seriously, has he nothing better to do?

The idea that Cerys will not play Florence + the Machine, Coldplay and Clean Bandit but will play Nina Simone, Ghostpoet and David Bowie means she has not simply class, albeit of the wrong kind, but taste.

The very liberal, lonely democrats

Is anyone at the Lib Dem conference apart from some TV crews? Where even is it? I speak as someone who used to go to these things, for my sins. There was that rose-garden interlude of Clegg and Cameron, but now where is this flock of super-reasonable beings to find a leader? Gina Miller is there, talking about the End of Chaos, but chaos is at least exciting; this is just collapse. The last time the Lib Dems entered my consciousness was when Hugh Grant, playing Jeremy Thorpe, told Norman Scott: “Hop on all fours.” Don’t tell Tim Farron.