Would you buy a used car from Nigel Farage? I wouldn’t. Would you lend a tenner to British TV’s most ubiquitous but least credible gob-on-a-stick populist? No way, of course you would not. Unless you were, to use the technical term, totally cuckoo for cocoa puffs.

Why? Because you would be unwise to take a word the man says seriously. About absolutely anything.

Hey, for all I know Brexit’s public-school-boy-city-slicker turned “mine’s a pint” man of the people is as honest as the day is long in his personal affairs.

But Mr Farage has also splattered the UK’s public discourse with more runny skitter than all the farmers in France in all the dirty protests they have ever staged.

Nigel calls this free speech. Or, as diehards yell in their block capitals, FREE SPEECH (trademark, the internet).

This means the former UKIP leader does not get the jail for his rank patter. And - you know what? - that is damned fine thing and means, among other things, that the rozzers won’t be hammering down my door after this column hits the newsstands.

Why do I bring this up? Because, as you’ll know already, Mr Farage has been splashed all over the papers and has been ranting and raving on TV because Coutts, a posh old bank favoured by toffs, has shut his account. How come? Well, the lads and lasses at Coutts - and I am quoting them here - regard Mr Farage as a “disingenuous grifter” who panders to racists. Spot on, bankers.

Now there is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing about whether this the only reason the bank decided not to do business with the Brexiteer. In fact, that is in dispute. I am not going to try and adjudicate that row.

Farage and a helluva lot of other people, some of whom can’t stand Brexit and its politics, think Coutts has committed a dreadful outrage. Nobody, they argue, should be “unbanked” for their views (assuming that this is, in fact, what happened). Even the bank itself - under pressure from politicians - has said sorry.

This is where I would want to go back to the questions at the beginning of this article. Would you do business with Mr Farage? Should his right to free speech compel you to do so? Me? I try to avoid getting embroiled with “grifters” in any way, especially financially. I guess risk-averse Coutts feels the same way. Which may be why they are still in business. They are not, after all, running a charity for demagogues.

This is a fascinating episode, I think, because it illustrates how the way we talk about free speech has changed. Very crudely, I suspect most of us used to believe individuals could say what they like as long as this did not seriously impair the rights of others. So, to use the old schoolroom cliche, it was fine to give a show a blown raspberry of a review but not to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre.

These days, I feel, many of us see the right to free speech as imposing a duty on others. So, it is not so much “I can say what I want’ as “you must listen to me” or, in Mr Farage’s case, “you have to do business with me”.

Let’s put it another way: I am writing this column in The Herald. The editor next week might decide she is bored to death of my diet of nerdy, woke nonsense and replace me with, say, Mr Farage, or, far more likely, since this is a serious paper, with somebody who is not an actual idiot. Does that affect my freedom of expression? My goodness, of course not. I don’t have the right to be published. Nobody does. Words, even when freely expressed, can have consequences.

The Farage case is especially intriguing because his supporters seem to think there is a right to have a bank account. There SHOULD be. There is not.

Roughly a couple of million Brits do without the easy bill-paying most of us take for granted. These are usually the very poor, the very marginalised, the very young and the very old. Their inability to access basic financial services is cruel, and ends up meaning they pay more than the rest of us for, say, their lecky. So should Mr Farage have the right to a post office account to settle for his beer? Yes, and so should everybody else. Should Coutts be forced to do business with a man they think is a grifter?

We have hit broadly similar issues before. Though usually right wing culture warriors are on the other side of the argument.

Think of all those stories about, say, Bible-thumping Christian bakers who have been forced, by the law of the land, to sell cakes for gay weddings. They were, for example, championed by The Daily Telegraph, the paper that has lambasted Coutts for taking its stance on Mr Farage.

Refusing to decorate a sponge because you’re a ghastly homophobe is not exactly the same as not doing business with somebody you think is a grifter.

But are we ready for a difficult national conversation about how we litigate rights and duties on free speech in a world where so many of us do not see eye to eye? Not yet, it seems.

Meanwhile, Mr Farage, ever ready to dog-whistle conspiracy theories, has been raving about Remoaners being behind his account being shut.

Heck, he is talking about people like me, I outed my own pro-EU “bias” at the 2016 Brexit count in a drafty Grangemouth gym hall. How? By humming Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, the anthem of European peace and unity, in the Gents. I had not even realised I was doing it: my defiance was subconscious. Does that mean I automatically do not trust Brexit supporters? No. Take Tom Harris, who led the anti-EU campaign in Scotland. Would I lend the former Labour MP a tenner if he needed his train fare home? Totally. Character: it matters more than politics.