Jag was right to drop that silly Aussie

This week has been a bit of a mixed bag for the celebrity tweeters of this world. Kanye West earns the otherwise elusive respect of millions by apologising for Imma let you finish; Kevin Pietersen is fined for tweeting about knobs and Australian Olympic swimmer and rugby fan Stephanie Rice was dumped by Jaguar for tweeting that the Springboks are “faggots”. Specifically, she tweeted, post the last-minute Wallaby victory: “Suck on that faggots!” Not really the sort of thing that’s open to misinterpretation, then.

Fellow Aussie, Olympic gold-winning diver Matthew Mitcham — who happens to be gay — came to Rice’s defence, also on Twitter (would that make it a twefence? Sorry), saying that the comment was offensive and thoughtless, but he knew she was not homophobic. “She meant no malice, and she has apologised for her careless comment posted in the excitement of the moment,” he said.

Naturally, this has descended into one of those enervating how-pathetically-PC-is-this debates. Those who think Jaguar totally overreacted seemed to have confused a marketing problem with a freedom of speech issue, and a few seem to have got their knickers thoroughly knotted over this. (The best response I read was this observation: “Jaguar was upset that ‘the gay community’ would get be offended by being compared to a bunch of useless overpaid idiots. I’d be offended too if someone compared me to Springbokke.”)

I think Jaguar was absolutely right to dump her, and I’m somewhat mystified as to what possessed them to hire her as a brand ambassador at the beginning of this year in the first place. Yes, she’s obviously very good at getting from one end of a swimming pool to another, but does that automatically qualify her to personify a car that comes with wood veneer trim and 10-way power bucket seats?

Rice’s other sponsors have not dumped her, but when you’re selling bras and panties rather than $100 000 sports cars, that’s a much easier call to make. If I were the brand manager of an energy drink, say, I’d be less worried. If asked, I’d say that we are all human and we understand how sport fires us up and we say (and tweet) things we might regret later. Slip-ups are understandable. A bit of controversy would be a good thing: if Kevin Pietersen’s turned into a nice, likeable, restrained sort of chap, we’d all be terribly disappointed.

But as a luxury brand, Jaguar lives or dies by the perception of whether it communicates classiness (which is, of course, why a lot of singularly unclassy people drive luxury cars and hip hop stars with gold in their teeth drink Cristal champagne, but the argument holds in principle). Many of Jaguar’s customers are gay. And no matter your sexual persuasion, would you want to buy a Jag if every time you thought of the brand, you were reminded: “Suck on that faggots!”

So there’s no real debate about freedom of speech here. Here’s the thing with being a celebrity who is continually bucketed by fat splodges of wonga for promoting this jewellery store or that underwear brand. You don’t get to say what you like. On a public forum like Twitter, where everything you say is visible to everyone, you have to subject yourself to continual censorship. That’s how it is.

I can see more celebrity tweet scandals looming. The trouble with Twitter is that it offers a false sense of intimacy, while persuading the unwise to forget how public it is. Combined with the ease with which anyone can jab in a quick tweet on the old iPhone, and it’s a recipe for trouble. We all tweet things we probably shouldn’t. But we’re not celebrities, and nobody really cares when we’re rude about the sheepshaggers.