On Wednesday, BBC radio presenter and comedian Danny Baker posted a black-and-white retro photo meme that showed a chimp accompanied by two well-dressed chaperones, with the caption “Royal baby leaves the hospital.”

If we believe that this was a joke mocking the mixed-race origin of the newborn Archie, whose mother Meghan Markle is half-black, then this is a clear-cut cause for dismissal. Characterizing black people as simians has a long and inglorious history.

But what if we take the furious Baker at his word – that his “mind is not diseased” so he didn’t think of the “possible connotations” and deleted the tweet voluntarily as soon as he was alerted to them.

While he can occasionally be opinionated, Danny Baker is a Corbyn-supporting lifelong left-winger whose forty-year broadcasting career – thousands of hours of unscripted radio chat – had previously managed to skirt a single notable racism controversy. Talking of Occam’s Razor, Baker himself wrote how inconceivable it is that he would voluntarily bring this upon himself for the sake of being edgy.

Some would say that even genuine ignorance is no defense. That a man in the public eye should be more aware of the context and impact on others of what he posts online.

But Baker’s backstory provides its own context, which the many who demanded his sacking simply chose to ignore because it makes condemning him easier.

This is not to exonerate Baker, but simply to point that punishing language is not the same as punishing murder: there is always a grey area where you are sentencing suspects for thoughtcrime, or perhaps even catching the innocent in the dragnet.