‘He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city,’ Sherlock Holmes said of Moriarty. ‘He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson.’ Holmes did not say: ‘He is the Napoleon of criminality.’ Nor did T.S. Eliot of Macavity, who was accorded the same sobriquet as Moriarty. In the past week or so I have been surprised by the widespread strength of feeling against the term criminality.
At first I did not see the objection. As soon as he came back from his holidays to the riots, David Cameron spoke of ‘criminality, pure and simple’. He soon afterwards said he had his eye on telephones used for ‘plotting violence, disorder and criminality’. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, denounced ‘sheer criminality’ and ‘open criminality’. A Manchester police chief spoke of ‘senseless criminality’.
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