Police accused of ‘appalling’ attack on free speech with probe into Telegraph journalist

Boris Johnson, Elon Musk and senior Tories hit out at Essex force for refusing to give details of investigation into Allison Pearson

A police force has been accused of an “appalling” attack on free speech after launching an investigation into a Telegraph journalist.
Essex Police is facing a backlash from critics, including Boris Johnson, over its investigation into Allison Pearson for allegedly stirring up racial hatred in a social media post last year.
The force has refused to give the award-winning writer details about which post on X, formerly Twitter, is being investigated, or who made the complaint against her.
Two police officers called at Pearson’s home at 9.40am on Remembrance Sunday to tell her she was being investigated and invite her to a voluntary interview. She was told, however, that the officers were not allowed to disclose the specific focus of an inquiry.
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary and former policing minister, said: “It is completely wrong that the journalist was not even told about the particulars of the allegation when she was doorstepped by the police, intruding into her Sunday morning without warning. I am deeply concerned this will have a chilling effect on free speech and free expression.”
In a post on X, Mr Johnson, the former prime minister, called the behaviour of the police “appalling”.
This is appalling. How can Starmer’s Britain lecture other countries about free speech when an innocent journalist gets a knock on the door – for a tweet? Our police have their hands full of burglaries and violent crime. They are being forced to behave like a woke Securitate -… https://t.co/HaXc1tsokW
“How can Starmer’s Britain lecture other countries about free speech when an innocent journalist gets a knock on the door – for a tweet?” he wrote. “Our police have their hands full of burglaries and violent crime. They are being forced to behave like a woke Securitate – and it has to stop.”
Donna Jones, who formerly chaired the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, said the refusal to provide any information about the allegation or accuser went against natural justice.
“How is she supposed to make a decision about going into a voluntary interview without being told those things?” she asked.
In a statement on Tuesday night, Essex Police said officers had opened the investigation under section 17 of the Public Order Act 1986, relating to material allegedly “likely or intended to cause racial hatred”.
The force said the alleged offence was being treated as a criminal matter and not a non-crime hate incident, as Pearson recalled being told on Sunday.
On Wednesday, the force issued a second statement, accusing The Telegraph of presenting “wholly inaccurate information” as fact.
The complaint was passed to Essex Police by another force. It is understood to have been assessed twice by different officers before Essex decided to seek a voluntary interview with Pearson.
A spokesman for Essex Police said: “As a police force, we investigate matters which are reported to us without fear or favour, no matter who makes a report or to whom the incident concerns.”
The backlash, however, reached across the Atlantic with Elon Musk joining senior British politicians in criticising the police treatment of Pearson.
Mr Musk, the world’s richest man and now a key figure in Donald Trump’s new US administration, posted on X: “This needs to stop.” He later added: “This is insane. Make Orwell Fiction Again!!”
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said: “This is Orwellian in the extreme. I’m absolutely appalled that Allison and others like her have to live in fear for months without ever being told what has been said against them. People must be worried sick. We are very much in the territory of a thought crime here, where the accusers are called ‘victims’.”
Liz Truss, the former prime minister, claimed the incident was “yet another affront to free speech”, adding: “We must speak out and fight back against this appalling bullying of Allison Pearson.”
Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, said: “The police should be focusing on tackling the crime wave on our streets, not digging up years-old tweets.”
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, a former Tory leader, said: “What we are seeing is the police force turning into the thought police. The police have far more important things to do than following up on someone’s concerns about what someone wrote a year ago.
“This is definitely George Orwell’s 1984, very Big Brother-ish. I feel sorry for the police, who seem to be so badly led that officers are forced into this nonsense. What the public wants is for them to crack down on shoplifting, violent threats and anti-social behaviour.
“If you want to know what hate is, that is hate. They should deal with that rather than targeting journalists whose job is to speak freely.”
Pearson told Mr Farage’s GB News programme on Wednesday night that she was likely to attend a voluntary police interview.
She said: “I am probably going to go in for an interview. The Free Speech Union, which is a brilliant organisation, is helping me. They are giving me a solicitor, so if I have to go into the police station and have a voluntary interview I will go in, and maybe then we will find out what I am accused of, and then we will see how it progresses.”
Essex Police maintained that the specific focus of an investigation would not be disclosed as a matter of course at an initial meeting between officers and those involved.
Roger Hirst, the police and crime commissioner for Essex, said it would not be appropriate for him to comment on a live investigation, adding: “The law is the law. It’s not my job as PCC to say what is and what isn’t the law. It’s to make sure that the police act effectively and efficiently in exercising it.
“If we don’t like the law the way it is, that is a matter for Parliament.”
Writing for The Telegraph about the incident, Pearson said she was “shocked” to be confronted on her doorstep on Remembrance Sunday while still in her slippers and dressing gown.
“I was definitely shocked. Astonished. That too. Upset. How could I not be? It’s never nice having the police at the door if you’re a law-abiding person, because police at the door can mean only one of two things: tragedy or trouble,” she wrote.
“But to have them here on the saddest most solemn date in the calendar with this kind of malevolent nonsense, it was surreal.
“I have hundreds of black and Asian followers on X/Twitter, none of them ever suggested I’d said something bad or hateful. Besides, who decides where you set the bar for what’s offensive? This is supposed to be 2024 not 1984, yet the police officers seemed to be operating according to the George Orwell operational manual.”