Bernard Ingham: Call me Rasputin or even Rottweiler, but never Mx

You could argue that the internet has promoted free speech. But only up to a point, Lord Copper. It is distorting democracy because it licenses minorities to give the impression of a widespread view and, at worst, bully politicians and those in authority into submission.

We need look no further than our universities to realise how far indoctrination by special interest groups has flourished under the influence of the computer. They seem to be preoccupied with consigning Cecil Rhodes and the tobacco traders WD and HO Wills to the dustbin of history and deliberately confusing everybody about an individual’s gender.

Cardiff Metropolitan University, in the cause of gender equality, has banned the use of such harmless words as “workmanlike” and “foreman”. And, blow me, HSBC bank is offering me the title of Msr if it offends my gender sensitivity to be called “Sir”. It doesn’t, but “Mr”, not “Mx”, will do.

Britain is not a better place for all this. The silent majority think the country has gone mad but see no reason to invite public ridicule by pronouncing it idiotic.

Personally, I could not care less what people call me. Indeed, I can confirm that when you have been publicly lambasted as often as I have over the last 40 years you take it as it comes – and goes.

My prize lashing came from a fellow Yorkshireman. Colin Robinson, FCA, of Devonshire Street West, Keighley, informed Mrs Thatcher by letter: “My friend Mr Armitage knew Mr Ingham in his Hebden Bridge days. He swears that some years back Ingham underwent a sex change and was formerly a Miss Elsie Ackroyd.”

“Miss Ackroyd”, he prattled on, “was apparently a formidable woman in those parts, equally well known for the sharpness of her tongue and the quality of her rock cakes”. I swore before the PM that I had never made a rock cake in my life.

It is ages since I was amiable. Instead, I am curmudgeonly, cantankerous, irascible, splenetic and forever erupting. The Sunday Correspondent in 1990 actually reported that “the PM’s crumple-faced, curmudgeonly Press secretary has been losing his temper of late”.

There is also an unhealthy preoccupation with my eyebrows which diverted the irreverent sketchwriters covering Margaret Thatcher’s funeral four years ago.

The Daily Telegraph in 1990 said my “eyebrows could win Crufts”. Robert Harris, my unauthorised biographer, claimed that they “writhe and heave like a pair of lovesick squirrels”. After this, I advised Mr Harris to stick to fiction, which he has done greatly to his enrichment.

And just to show how far things have gone, my barber, who visits me at home because of my infirmities, tells me that the old codgers in his clientele always inquire whether he trims my eyebrows. He does and they grow ever more luxuriantly.

This suggests that Alan Bennett in his desire to avoid eyebrows like mine – or indeed anything like me – has been wise to avoid their being trimmed.

My thatch has also come in for cutting remarks. “His hair is a peculiar red like an anaemic carrot”, wrote Craig Brown in The Times. His wife was not amused when I said: “Brown looks like Dylan Thomas pulled through a hedge backwards after a bad night.”

This brings me to dogs. It is not enough that I apparently qualify as a “Tyke”, which my dictionary defines as a cur or low dog. The late Jean Rook, Hull’s First Lady of Fleet Street, said I was “a cross between Heathcliff and a pit bull terrier”. I should perhaps confess that when we were both on this newspaper I called her “a fugitive from the Serengeti” on account of her coat.

Tom Condon, in Scotland on Sunday, vowed that I was “Mrs Thatcher’s personal Rottweiler” and the Daily Mirror that I was “a poodle turned rent-a-spleen”.

When you add the Independent’s “mound of poisoned suet” and the late John Biffen’s “rough spoken Yorkshire Rasputin” and “not the sewage, only the sewer”, you know you have made it.

In short, it is time society grew up and learned how to take it rather than dish it out. I feel no worse for being called all the names under the sun. Indeed, “Neandearthal man”, as the commentator Peter Oborne described me, finds it entertaining. Laugh and the world laughs with you.