Shortly after Bob Crow’s death was announced on Tuesday, Nigel Farage sent the following tweet: ‘Sad at the death of Bob Crow. I liked him and he also realised working-class people were having their chances damaged by the EU.’
Cue a predictable storm of Twitter outrage. Farage was attacked for trying to make political capital out of Crow’s death. The following tweet, from the ex-FT journalist Ben Fenton, was typical: ‘Bit off-key for @Nigel_Farage to link a tribute to Bob Crow to his own anti-EU rhetoric, I think.’
Now, some of those criticising Farage had a political axe to grind. They were claiming Farage had broken an unwritten rule that they clearly don’t believe in themselves. I wonder how many of those same people attacked Bob Crow for saying he hoped Margaret Thatcher would ‘rot in hell’ just after she died? Not many, I suspect. In other words, they were guilty of precisely the same lapse in taste — using someone’s death as an excuse to promote their own agenda — as they were accusing Farage of.
To be fair, I don’t suppose many of them were conscious of this double standard. Hypocrisy is often described as ‘blatant’, but it’s rarely obvious to the hypocrite. On the contrary, the reason it’s so common is because people aren’t aware they’re engaging in it. Expressing moral disapproval produces such a pleasurable ripple of self–satisfaction that people rush to judgment without bothering to reflect on whether they’re guilty of the same sin. And it’s not just those on the left. One of the custodians of public decency who was affronted by Nigel Farage’s tweet was Tom Newton–Dunn, the political editor of the Sun.
Death is particularly good at bringing out people’s inner Mary Whitehouse. I ran up against this when I wrote an unflattering blog post about the fashion designer Alexander McQueen shortly after he died.
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