Lyra McKee’s murder reveals the ongoing menace of political violence

I’ve been writing and talking about my dead friend Lyra McKee for the best part of two days, and have little to add to my tributes to the talented, lovable, warm, kind, empathetic, funny, curious, eager, original, hard-working, brave though thin-skinned, wise but sometimes naïve, ambitious but ego-free, pint–sized dynamo, who regarded journalism as a sacred calling and practiced it nobly during her short life.

I admired and loved Lyra, not least because she focused so much of her work on telling the stories of unfashionable people: as Forbes magazine put it in 2016 when they listed her in the Europe media list of the significant 30 under-30s, her passion was ‘to dig into topics that others don’t care about.’ Similarly, she ignored tribal and identity battle-lines, most noticeably when it came to LGBT activism. Lyra wanted single-sex marriage, but she was never going to fall out with her socially conservative friends over it: in her 2017 TED talk the message was that if you want to convert people to your point of view, you talk to them as friends rather than insulting them, and respect their beliefs as you would wish them to respect yours.

Lyra’s murder has made her famous, which has brought with it various ridiculous comments from public figures.