The ‘Foxy Knoxy’ case has stirred a deep prurience about women and murder

It was true in Orwell’s day and it’s no less true now: there is nothing the British public likes more than a good, old-fashioned, grisly murder. Sixty-odd years ago, when Orwell wrote The Decline of the English Murder, the crucial ingredient was some hidden, shameful, sexual misdemeanour – almost always adultery, but sometimes homosexuality. The implication being that back then committing murder, and thus risking a possible death sentence from the courts, was preferable to some sordid secret leaking out. The English murders, the ones the public liked, were those committed in desperation by the deeply ashamed – a consequence, as Orwell saw it, of a hypocritical society.

We have changed as a nation. The liberalisation of the divorce laws means that one no longer needs to kill one’s wife in order to facilitate an extramarital affair. You can just leave and few people, save for your ex-wife, will think any the worse of you for it. Similarly, homosexuality is now not merely legal but to ascribe to it a transgressive status will soon be a criminal offence. There is no requirement in either case for people to reside in a state of desperation – and shame has been pretty much expunged, as a concept, from our vocabulary.

If Orwell were writing today, he would, I suspect, recognise that we still enjoy a sexual connotation to our murders, but that now they should be as depraved and explicit as possible, and the participants – murderer and murderee – young and attractive. The killing of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher, from Coulsdon in Surrey, is a grim and harrowing story and it has dug its claws into the psyche of the British public and, seemingly, is not about to let go. Meredith was enjoying what is known as a ‘gap year’ â” something else with which Orwell would have been unfamiliar â” in the Italian town of Perugia.