Was it right to jail the man who urinated at Keith Palmer’s memorial?

The wheels of justice have, for once, turned with decent haste and Andrew Banks is now banged up. Banks’s crime? To relieve himself at Saturday’s demonstration just inches away from the memorial of PC Keith Palmer, who was murdered trying to prevent an Islamist terrorist gain access to Parliament in 2017. The contrast between supreme sacrifice and supreme idiocy can hardly be greater. My reaction, like those of many others was repulsion at what looked like a disgusting act of desecration. 

Westminster Magistrates’ Court was told that Banks had consumed 16 pints, hadn’t slept, didn’t notice PC Palmer’s memorial and was in London to ‘defend statues’ but he couldn’t say which ones. As a composite of many of those involved in the disorder and violence of last Saturday that led to 113 arrests, this is a decent proxy. Witless, drunken incivility calls to young men like Andrew Banks every weekend in the year. It was his dumb luck to be photographed on this one looking like he was doing the very thing he had been lured to London to stand up against.