How tempting it is to rush to the aid of Clare Melford, one of the five people told by the Trump regime that they cannot have a US visa on the grounds that their presence in the country is not conducive to America’s commitment to free speech. It is hypocritical, one might say to Team Trump, to make a show of defending free speech by banning people you don’t like from entering your country. Indeed, that was the reaction of Chi Onwurah, chair of the Commons committee on Science, Innovation and Technology. She said last week: ‘Banning people because you disagree with what they say undermines the free speech the administration claims to seek.’ Before accusing the Trump administration of hypocrisy, however, we should know who Melford is. Let’s look at her approach to the subject of free speech.

Melford was once a general manager of the entertainment television channel MTV. In 2012, in an episode of the BBC Radio 4’s Four Thought titled ‘Buddah in the Boardroom’, Melford said that she left the company following a bizarre-sounding meeting with a ‘long-haired sailor’. She was living in Stockholm at the time, and she came across this man (she didn’t say how) who asked her a life-changing question. ‘You work for a media company,’ she remembered him telling her. ‘Have you ever wondered whether advertising is a good thing? After all, we live on a finite planet.’ This rather banal query apparently put her in a state of ‘existential angst’ about the ills of capitalism. She resigned........

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