Forget ‘virtue signalling’ – ‘empathy patrolling’ is the new moral phenomenon

I’ve had just about enough of being told how to feel about what happened last Wednesday. I feel angry. I still feel shock. I feel a keen ache for the families of those murdered, especially the loved-ones of PC Keith Palmer.

I feel that cold spite that works its way into your heart at times like these, vengeful cruelty passing itself off as hard-headedness. When I remember this, I feel ashamed to have given in to it. I feel scared of an ideology that crashed into the 21st century in an outrageous spectacle but has now made its choreography more low-key.

I feel contempt for the demagogues who seek to exploit the raw emotions of After Wednesday. I feel disdain towards those rolling their eyes at the locution ‘After Wednesday’. I feel all of these contradictory impulses, sometimes at the same time, and yet I’m not supposed to feel any of them. Simon Jenkins told me so.