I have a question. What’s more ‘dangerous’ and ‘disgusting’ – a footballer sounding off on social media or a government minister threatening to clamp down on speech that he personally considers to be ‘not acceptable’?

For a government functionary to decree that some opinions are unacceptable, and therefore might have to be hushed, is the stuff of tyranny

It’s the latter, isn’t it? People saying zany things online is par for the course in a free society. But for a government functionary to decree that some opinions are unacceptable, and therefore might have to be hushed, is the stuff of tyranny.

This is the case of Joey Barton, the ex-footballer turned X loudmouth. Barton, a former Man City and Newcastle midfielder, has been spitting hot takes all over X, previously Twitter, for the past few weeks.

He’s held forth on women’s football, ‘wokeness’ and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). DEI is ‘BS’, he says, with superb Scouse frankess. His big bugbear is women commentating on the men’s game. He thinks they’re unqualified for such a task. He referred to two female pundits on ITV as ‘the Fred and Rose West of football commentary’, which is mad, obviously.

Now he has come to the attention, not only of fuming leftists on X who have branded him a far-right loon, but to an actual sports minister, Stuart Andrew.

Asked about Barton at a Department for Culture, Media and Sport select committee yesterday, Mr Andrew said he finds Barton’s views ‘dangerous’. They could ‘open the floodgates for abuse’ and that is ‘not acceptable’, he said.

He was asked by Labour MP Julie Elliott what might be done ‘from a government point of view’ about people like Barton who are ‘so offensive and so disgusting’. Andrew said he would ‘happily’ speak with social-media platforms about it. A Daily Mail headline boiled it down for us: ‘Joey Barton faces government action over his “dangerous and disgusting comments”…’

Those words ‘disgust’ me far more than anything Barton has said. Government action against a citizen for making comments? Is this Britain or Iran?

What Mr Andrew should have said in response to the question of what might be done about Barton ‘from a government point of view’ is: ‘absolutely nothing.’ He could have said that he finds Barton’s comments personally distasteful but it is not the government’s business, and never should it be, to police or punish people for their opinions.

The very prospect of ‘government action’ against Joey Barton should horrify us. It is a testament to the normalisation of censorship in recent years, especially censorship of the uncouth and unfashionable, that it doesn’t.

That a minister can imply that something might have to be done about a man’s opinions suggests Britain is losing the knack of liberty. The land of Milton and Mill is now run by officious cliques who think little of damning those who dare to speak out of turn.

As it happens, I disagree with Mr Barton on female pundits. I think some of them are very good. But I’m also a grown-up who understands that living in a free society means encountering views I disagree with and may even find obnoxious. Who understands that occasionally feeling offended is a very small price to pay for being free.

Yes, liberty means Joey Barton having the right to compare TV pundits to Fred and Rose West. I would far rather live in a society where ex-footballers have the right to say insane things on the internet than one where people might face ‘government action’ for speaking their minds.

The Barton controversy raises a burning question: who gets to speak in 21st-century Britain? The snobbery heaped on Barton cannot be ignored. More right-thinking, more middle-class users of X have branded him a thicko, a misogynist oaf, and far right, of course. A writer for the Guardian raged against his ‘empty intellectual shtick’. Well, he’s working class and from Liverpool, so he can’t be a real intellectual, can he?

You can almost hear the boundaries of acceptable thought being redrawn, ever more narrowly. Barton is being made an example of by those who’ve sworn an oath of allegiance to elite consensus opinion. Men like him – intemperate of expression, possessed of wrongthink – must be silenced, apparently. They’re too ‘dangerous’, too ‘disgusting’. You don’t have to agree with Mr Barton – on anything at all – to find such an idea repugnant.

It is Stuart Andrew, not Joey Barton, who should know his place. You’re a minister in a democracy, mate, not Torquemada.