If I could remove from the journalists’ lexicon a single word, and with it remove the moronism to which it gives throat, that word would be “gaffe”. Like a flock of demented parrots we shriek “gaffe! gaffe! gaffe!” whenever anyone in public life says anything interesting. What others would call speaking out, we call speaking out of turn. The voicing of unpalatable truth, we call indiscretion.

Taking a flyer, we call dropping a brick. We peck to pieces any politician who breaks cover and speaks his mind. Soon only grey heads tucked below parapets and mouthing platitudes remain.

Then the media parrots chorus “boring! boring! bland! bland! Why is politics so grey? Why do public figures hedge and dodge and fudge? Why don’t our masters tell it straight?”

May I suggest why? Because we have wrecked the careers of those that do. Because we have punished the outspoken, jeered at the colourful and sniggered at originality wherever we sniff it out. Because we have hunted down and killed individuals who venture from the trench.

And now we have started to persecute the confiding of private opinions too. There was something creepily Orwellian in the way the Canadian Prime Minister’s communications director, Françoise Ducros, was this week forced into resignation for an overheard remark she made in private expressing an opinion which was purely her own. When Ms Ducros called George W Bush a moron, nobody imagined she was acting as the mouthpiece of her boss, Jean Chrétien. We assume that politicians’ servants have opinions of their own, while being required on set occasions to express the opinions of their masters — and we are quite capable of marking the difference.

We can mark the difference, too, between a considered statement and badinage. Apparently the word “moron” appears as regularly in her vocabulary as, in Alastair Campbell's, do less printable descriptions of politicians. Confident our words will not be chiselled into rock we all enjoy jocular overstatement. Plainly her personal opinion of the US President is not high, but all the rest was hyperbole intended to amuse. Ducros was not even a public figure in her own right. The reaction of the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, was to “dismiss it as something from someone who doesn’t speak for the Canadian Government”.

He was right. What justification can there be for turning into an affair of state what should have been an embarrassing little paragraph in a gossip column? When Margaret Thatcher was quizzed on her reaction to a press report that one of her ministers, Richard Needham, had been overheard on a mobile telephone saying (of her) “I wish that cow would resign”, she laughed and replied that if this was the worst her colleagues were saying she could count herself lucky. Most of us admired her for reacting like that.

There are injustices which with the passage of time lose their power to shock. But there are some at which our feeling of injustice grows.

The way Glenn Hoddle was forced to resign because he believed in reincarnation angers me still — angers me more even than it did at first. Time has blown away the synthetic indignation the press (and, disgracefully, the Prime Minister) pretended to feel on behalf of the disabled. Time leaves exposed in all its naivety one small, thoughtless remark about misfortune in this life being punishment for misbehaviour in a previous one: a negligible opinion expressed without intention to offend by a man who never claimed to be a professor of religion but was at least searching for the meaning of life.

Thus, now the brouhaha has died, time throws the unfairness into sharper relief; and just because the media’s interest has moved on, why should yours and my sense of justice stale? True, the England football coach entertained some crackpot belief about reincarnation, karma, and punishment. So what? About a billion people in the world believe this. Being an unbeliever has the virtue of helping one stand back from all religions to see each as inherently no less preposterous than any other.

Has any public figure in Britain who is a Hindu been invited by the Prime Minister from a Richard & Judy sofa to resign on account of his religion’s implied slur on the disabled?

Somewhere there is probably a baseball manager who is a Calvinist and believes that mankind is divided into the Elect and the rest.

Somewhere there will be a football coach who is a Roman Catholic convinced the heathen are damned to eternal hellfire. Somewhere there will be a Jewish tennis star who thinks that she belongs to the Chosen Race, or a Muslim impresario who believes Allah will smite all pagans. I am still ashamed of what the press did to Glenn Hoddle, and the recent new outbreak of media gaffe-itis refreshes the shame.

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