Katie Hopkins says something clever. And risk-free.

A particular horror that appends democracy and free speech is the right, earned over 1,000 years of political history, for folk who live in this country to stand up and say what they want.

Implicit in ‘stand up’ of course is people knowing who you are. In this at least, Katie Hopkins beats Twitter trolls: she is proud of her profile and cares not even slightly about the opprobrium she attracts.

The latest edition of The Journalist contains a feature about social media abusers. It’s mostly very funny. Not the trolling, which is largely unpleasant, but that otherwise intelligent and educated folk actually regard the anonymous abuse seriously.

It is here that Katie Hopkins, known in the trade as ‘Queen of Mean’ shows the way to go to more sensitive souls.

She admits that she is “…threatened on a fairly regular basis.

“Some threaten to rape me with a machete. Others that they are going to punch me in the face with a house brick. I don’t think that it is an issue. I suspect these are weak young men and women who still live with their mum, floss their teeth with their toe nails and eat their own ear wax for breakfast.”

For once, in my opinion, Ms Hopkins displays a degree of robust common sense.

The same edition of this fine professional organ includes a regular column by Chris Proctor, veteran journalist and stand-up, in which he also writes about dangerous (to the writer) tweets.

An example he cites concerns a woman who was offered a job by Cisco, the technology giant. She emerged from the interview, job offer in hand, and tweeted:“Cisco offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty pay check against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.”

The next tweet on her account, writes Procter, was from Cisco. It said that the job was no longer available. To her.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn on 23 February