Lord Hutton announcing the results of his inquiry into the events surrounding the death of Government scientist Dr David Kelly, 2004. Image: PA/PA Archive/PA Images.
My friend, the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, once wrote about a quality he called “violent innocence”. This, essentially, is when someone denies their own internal violence by posing as an innocent victim and projecting their aggression onto someone designated as an enemy.
In his openDemocracy attack on my recent Times review of Miles Goslett’s book An Inconvenient Death: How the Establishment Covered Up the David Kelly Affair, Peter Oborne accuses me of multiple crimes, including of indulging in “vulgar abuse”, of being “snide and dishonest” and “malicious” and of being “an expert on sneering” – whatever that is. He then appears to suggest that this review makes me unfit to be chair of the free speech and expression advocacy group, Index on Censorship (in which capacity, incidentally, Oborne sought and received my assistance a few months ago).
