‘You’re trending on Twitter,’ said the Spectator books editor Sam Leith, who knows his social media. Am I? How exciting! What have I done? Sam explained: a young black man called Freddie Gray (ie not y) had been killed by cops in Baltimore, and a campaign for justice had begun online.
It’s funny when your namesake becomes a cause célèbre, even if the name is spelt differently and the story is as sad as poor Freddie’s. Lots of messages from friends start coming in: ‘Apparently people are rioting about your death’, ‘You’re causing real problems in Baltimore’, ‘Never knew you had so many American fans’, ‘You’re famous at last!’. And so on. One American, thinking, I think, that he was tweeting the dead Freddie, said ‘RIP’ to me. LOLs.
In the real world, the Freddie story just got bigger. The hashtag ‘#blacklivesmatter’ has turned into an expression of rage on the streets.
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As the second Trump term looms in the near distance, it’s become a bit of a cliché to say that ‘a stopped clock is right twice a day’. Pinko liberal Nats like myself have had to get used to the fact that for all our disagreements with the man on policy and style, there are
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