Diary – 24 August 2002

Despite feeling ghoulish, my wife and I found ourselves drawn to the television set whenever an important development took place during the grim vigil at Soham. By the very nature of the event much of the footage and commentary was banal and, like the press, unavoidably intrusive. Sky was sharper, the BBC’s much-mocked News 24 had better tone – a bit like the difference between tabloids and broadsheets, I suppose. Both deployed retired ex-detectives, including John Stalker, in ways I’d not noticed before, knowledgeable, discreet and wise. Yet, rare in the age of 24/7 TV news, there weren’t any pictures of what this was really all about: unfathomable evil at large in a sleepy English village. We each had to use our imagination. Much worse.

An American friend, recently returned to work in London, says that foreigners would feel very unflattered if they realised how much of the Bush team’s bellicose rhetoric towards Iraq is for domestic electoral consumption.