Murder and politics

Six months ago an old friend of mine was murdered on his doorstep. This week his killer was sentenced to life imprisonment. In both cases, the first I heard of it was when someone I follow on Twitter posted a joke with a link to a news story. Both jokes were whimsical rather than callous — both were, in fact, musing on which Sunday evening television detective would most likely solve the crime — but whimsy in these circumstances feels like callousness. The tweets made me very angry.

I read the reports of the trial. The murderer had made a spreadsheet of his potential victims, for robbery or kidnap, with their names in one column, planned modus in another and ‘reason’ in a third. The reasons varied — often it was ‘Tory’, at other times ‘scum Tory’. But while many reports noted that his only other attack was against a well-known Conservative donor whose wife raised the alarm before he was able to force entry, this detail, that the murderer considered being ‘scum Tory’ a reason for premeditated violence, was only mentioned in one report.