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It always troubles me when I catch myself agreeing with former Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore. 

I never understand how a decent and civilised man manages to hold political views which would make Britain a far less decent and civilised place.

But this week I've caught myself cheering him on, after he was fined for refusing to pay for his TV license.  He writes in the Telegraph: 

"This saga began in October 2008, when BBC Radio 2 broadcast, on The Russell Brand Show, a sequence in which Brand and his guest, Jonathan Ross, made several obscene and threatening telephone calls to the answering machine of the elderly actor Andrew Sachs. The calls were about how Brand had slept with Sachs's granddaughter. The chief theme of the "prank" – as its defenders liked to call it – was the humiliation of hearing about your granddaughter's sex life, and of the public hearing it, too."

Moore doesn't mention that the high note of the sequence - the bit that had Ross rolling in the aisles - was the extraordinarily witty remark: "He fucked your granddaughter."

Moore doesn't want any of his money going to pay the ludicrously enormous salary Ross was paid to be crass and cruel. I'll sign up to that.