I could start by remarking that we should not speak ill of the dead, quoting the pertinent Latin phrase: de mortuis nil nisi bonum (‘of the dead, only good’). But this would be to miss a key qualification because the whole quote (from Diogenes Laertius, circa ad 300) adds ‘dicendum est’: ‘is to be said’.
And that puts a different complexion on things. Commentators have preferred to describe the advice as an established social convention rather than necessarily their own opinion. Indeed it is often used as a sly way of indicating (without stating) the speaker’s disapproval of the deceased.
But if the phrase has been thrown once at my head by my newspaper readers this week, it has been thrown a score of times.
I have sailed into a storm over the late Tony Benn. A column I wrote for the Times the day after his death laid into his legend, and readers’ subsequent comments (though many of them supportive) underline how familiar we British are with the idea that the (recently) dead should not be criticised.
The BBC, meanwhile, has gone crazy for Mr Benn, apparently feeling no duty to achieve the balance of bouquets with brickbats that it made such elaborate efforts to contrive when Margaret Thatcher died; and even clearing the airwaves to rebroadcast favourites from his Secret Diary of Adrian Mole-style diaries: a grisly example of self-absorption without self-examination.
In an intimate diary it is to be hoped that awkward self-criticism and uncomfortable self-knowledge of the kind the diarist has previously shrunk from admitting in public will emerge in the small-hours silence of the confessional; but in Mr Benn’s case the widely promoted modesty of the public man is cast aside in the confessional, where immodesty is displayed in all its horror.
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