Let’s get this straight. A few years ago, the Duchess of Sussex wrote a long, personal letter to her father about how he should stop leaking everything she said to the press. She had her PR adviser check over the letter and let her friends mention the letter anonymously to other press outlets. Then, when her father leaked it, she sued the press for invading her privacy. And this week, without even the need to go to trial and testify, she won.

The case, which according to lawyers in the field wasn’t even borderline, is just the latest example of the way that free speech is being boiled alive in this country by unelected, unaccountable bodies. Without any new laws passing at all, judges have been steadily eroding freedom of speech simply by prioritising one article over another in the Human Rights Act. And the Markle case is nothing compared to what is going to hit the statute book in the coming months when the Government passes a sweeping new law ostensibly intended to promote “online safety”.

The law will hand overwhelming new powers not just to judges, but to social media companies, regulators and police to curtail our speech. Once it passes, the drift towards censorship won’t just be a matter for newspapers and courtrooms. It will begin to sweep up anyone who ever lays hands on a keyboard or a phone to use the internet.

The Online Safety Bill began with good intentions, the best of which was to protect children from the onslaught of horrible stuff on the internet, like self-harm and anorexia videos, bullying and violent porn. But from humble beginnings, it has grown into a monster.

Its most monstrous feature is that it creates a duty for social media companies to suppress speech even when it is legal if it may be deemed “harmful” to anyone who might come across it. “Harmful” speech, it specifies, is any speech that might have a “significant adverse psychological impact” on someone. This theoretical risk of an impact is to be assessed by companies themselves, probably using their established procedure, which usually involves speech being flagged by an algorithm followed by a check by a human in some far-flung jurisdiction with no particular knowledge of this country or any of the people in it.

To give a ready example of the sort of speech that might be captured, consider the recent deletion from YouTube of a speech arguing against vaccine passports given by David Davis at a fringe meeting of the 2021 Conservative conference. YouTube’s system incorrectly flagged the content as anti-vax misinformation. It was only after a two-day media storm that the video miraculously reappeared. Good luck getting that result if you aren’t an MP.

Despite this, the bill has huge support across the divide in Parliament. The reason is simple: MPs are sick of being traduced on Twitter. A minister recently described it to me in visceral terms. Politicians have always known that a slice of the population will hate them, but before the advent of social media, such people couldn’t flood their communication channels with hatred while they were at home lying in bed. That experience has bred huge empathy in Parliament for anyone who has a bad time online and a complete lack of interest in the principles underlying a crackdown. After the murder of Sir David Amess, which many pinned on the online radicalisation of the murderer, sentiment amongst MPs hardened further.

What they don’t realise is that their “solution” to this problem does the opposite of what’s intended. It hands more power to Twitter and all of its rivals, not less. It appoints unelected corporate managers, algorithms and regulators as the ultimate arbiters of what’s “harmful” and who should be allowed to type what. Does anyone think that any of these groups will be inclined to protect free speech when all it brings is the risk of a fine from Ofcom? If we can’t even trust British judges to protect our freedoms, how on earth can we trust foreign social media companies?

What makes the position of the Tories in Parliament all the more baffling is that if you perform even the most basic of thought experiments, it’s clear their political freedoms are directly threatened by their own bill. How would a beefed-up Twitter or Snapchat censorship regime, designed by ultra-Left-wing HR departments in Silicon Valley, have policed Vote Leave’s claims on immigration? How would it have treated Boris Johnson’s column defending the right of some Muslim women to “look like letterboxes” by wearing the niqab? How would it treat politicians who declare that only women have cervixes? What about those who reject the concept of “white privilege”?

Fortunately, there is a rear-guard action within government to point out the most pernicious aspects of this legislation. Most damning to the bill is the fact that its huge scope actually compromises the original aim, which should be to protect children from specific kinds of content. The desire to police anything that’s legal but “harmful”, rather than simply specifying what it is Parliament wants to ban and how, makes the whole project so resource-intensive, subjective and difficult that no social media company will ever really be held properly to account for its decisions.

Meanwhile, even before this bill has become law, the goalposts keep moving. Another case up before the Supreme Court this week, known as “ZXC” versus Bloomberg, could make it illegal for media outlets to report when someone is under criminal investigation. In other words, judges could actively suppress reporting on the most basic acts of state power by deeming them to be “private”.

Outside the courts, a project of formal complaints to the independent press regulator IPSO by Miqdaad Versi, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, is steadily narrowing the bounds of what newspapers can and cannot say about Islam. Piece by piece, the freedom to know the facts and debate the issues of the day is being chipped away by officials, judges and faceless corporate bureaucracies. And MPs are about to hand them all more power than ever.

Instead of giving away power and creating more and more incentives to police speech, Parliament needs to reassert its primacy, make clear that it expects all arms of the state to prioritise protecting free expression over suppressing it and create powerful defences in law for those who are wrongly censored.

It’s time for MPs to turn off Twitter, put the phone down and start thinking critically. Otherwise, they may soon find that some self-appointed culture warrior in California has done their thinking for them.