In defence of forgiveness

It is often the small constants in the culture that give the game away. Much of the news today is not about anything significant, but rather a sort of lower gossip. Every day, some new scandal bubbles along. Someone is found to have said something once, often a long time ago. The culprit is shamed and condemned.

Take the case of Frank Hester, a donor who has given an estimated £10 million to the Conservative party. Few had heard of him until recently. Then it was reported that at a meeting at his company headquarters in 2019, Hester said that Diane Abbott MP made him ‘just want to hate all black women because she’s there, and I don’t hate all black women at all, but I think she should be shot’. Cack-handed, and unfunny, this comment was an easy one to condemn. Hester was widely criticised and he swiftly apologised, adding that his remarks ‘had nothing to do with [Abbott’s] gender nor colour of her skin’.

But the story wouldn’t go away. Kemi Badenoch accurately said that it was ‘pure media bubble speculation’. She went on to say that ‘we need to get to a place where we stop chasing people around and looking everywhere for the racism’. That memo didn’t reach the media or the many people who want to make life as difficult as possible for the present government. Having first refused to censure the comments, the Prime Minister was soon forced to do so, insisting they were ‘racist and wrong’.

There it might have stopped. But some people don’t want to let such things stop. Abbott claimed that the remarks were ‘scary’ and last week she reported Hester to the police. West Yorkshire officers say that they’ve now set up an investigation into the alleged comments.