Hehe. Ronson writes a book about men whose lives become organised around an all-consuming fixation, until every disagreement, friendship, professional setback and random interaction gets absorbed into the same explanatory system. Graham spends weeks furiously denouncing Ronson for suggesting that this describes him. Then somebody says, essentially, perhaps other things matter too, and Graham immediately replies: “What’s more important than children being mutilated and women losing their rights?” There it is. The entire thesis, live on X. Because the revealing part is not whether Graham sincerely believes those things. He obviously does. It is the apparent inability to conceive of a mental room in which anything else may temporarily be the most important subject. Somebody else choosing another priority becomes evidence of moral failure. Ronson discussing his behaviour becomes complicity. Helen Joyce being criticised becomes another example of the same conspiracy of cowardice. Every road leads back to the castle. That is precisely why “Man Who Was Rude on the Internet” is such a hopeless description of Ronson’s argument. Rudeness is almost incidental. You could remove every swear word Graham has ever typed and the phenomenon would remain sitting there in its underpants, glowing. The extraordinary thing is that Graham appears determined to publish the director’s commentary to his own chapter. Ronson: Here is a man whose worldview became so totalising that he increasingly interpreted his relationships, career and wider society through one consuming political struggle. Graham, for several consecutive weeks: THAT IS A DISGRACEFUL LIE AND HERE ARE MY NEXT 299,529 POSTS ABOUT THE POLITICAL STRUGGLE.

This is where the idea of Ronson’s “treachery” becomes slightly operatic. There is an independent filmmaker knocking around the British circuit who owes me about £500 from roughly twenty-five years ago. I lent it when £500 was a fucking enormous amount of money to me. He has never paid me back. We barely speak. I therefore have perfectly legitimate grounds to think: you cheeky bastard. What I do not do is ponce around like Iago in Othello, explaining that this betrayal shattered my psyche and transformed the subsequent quarter-century of my behaviour. Because adults routinely fall out. Sometimes there is a genuine grievance. Sometimes somebody behaved badly. Sometimes two people simply decide that dealing with one another has become more trouble than it is worth. Friendship is not a blood oath administered on a Scottish heath. And we see the mechanism in spectacularly mundane circumstances. You go out on the lash with the same group every fortnight. One bloke gets banjaxed on Stella, starts arguments with strangers and inevitably spends closing time trying to square up to a bouncer. Eventually the WhatsApp invitations dry up. His friends have not formed a conspiracy against him. They have simply concluded that Saturday night is considerably nicer without watching Darren attempt to headbutt a security guard. Women do it too. Somebody spends every gathering gossiping, bitching, manufacturing feuds and demanding that everyone take sides. Eventually she discovers that the group chat has developed a mysterious silence. Again, no congressional committee was convened. People simply got tired. That is the missing variable in all these attempts to turn Linehan into the betrayed hero of a Jacobean tragedy. Perhaps Ronson did things Graham regarded as disloyal. Fine. Examine them. But Ronson is one person. Graham’s estrangements, professional difficulties and endless online conflicts involve rather more than one person. At some point, if the same social explosion keeps occurring with different people in different rooms, you have to entertain the possibility that the common denominator is the bloke carrying the matches.