Crow and Thatcher: speaking ill of the dead
Is it too soon..?
The bad-taste text messages wing their way round the radiowaves more and more quickly after disaster strikes. It took nearly 12 hours for someone to pluck up courage to make the 'landing lights' joke after Lockerbie. Now they're being shared in minutes with the first one always asking 'is it too soon?'
Newspapers have not yet, thank goodness, gone into the business of making fun of people's ill fortune, but they have long since abandoned the notion 'never speak ill of the dead'.
The warts-and-all style of obituary became acceptable through the Eighties and now few holds are barred.
When Margaret Thatcher died there was much instant grave-dancing, although Bob Crow waited a couple of days to say that he would not shed a single tear for the woman he held responsible for 'destroying the health service' and to express the hope that she'd rot in hell. With the 30th anniversary of the miners' strike upon us, the Iron Lady is much in many people's thoughts - and they are not affectionate thoughts, since those most engaged by the anniversary are those who most opposed the Thatcher approach.
Yesterday our newspapers were more generous to Crow than they had been in recent weeks and, while reminding readers of his liking for the finer things in life and the unfortunate timing of his Brazilian holiday, the coverage was positive from the left and polite from the right.
How long could that last? One day.
The bad-taste text messages wing their way round the radiowaves more and more quickly after disaster strikes. It took nearly 12 hours for someone to pluck up courage to make the 'landing lights' joke after Lockerbie. Now they're being shared in minutes with the first one always asking 'is it too soon?'
Newspapers have not yet, thank goodness, gone into the business of making fun of people's ill fortune, but they have long since abandoned the notion 'never speak ill of the dead'.
The warts-and-all style of obituary became acceptable through the Eighties and now few holds are barred.
When Margaret Thatcher died there was much instant grave-dancing, although Bob Crow waited a couple of days to say that he would not shed a single tear for the woman he held responsible for 'destroying the health service' and to express the hope that she'd rot in hell. With the 30th anniversary of the miners' strike upon us, the Iron Lady is much in many people's thoughts - and they are not affectionate thoughts, since those most engaged by the anniversary are those who most opposed the Thatcher approach.
Yesterday our newspapers were more generous to Crow than they had been in recent weeks and, while reminding readers of his liking for the finer things in life and the unfortunate timing of his Brazilian holiday, the coverage was positive from the left and polite from the right.
How long could that last? One day.
 Max Hastings
Today you can hear Max Hastings spluttering from a 50-mile range as he rages about the 'unadulterated tosh' of Boris Johnson's tribute: 'He played a big part in the success of the Tube and he shared my goal to make transport in London an even greater success.' Well yes, Boris was the one person guilty of hypocrisy yesterday. Those spats weren't invented and only a month ago Crow had said that he had been waiting seven years for the mayor to invite him to a meeting.
For Hastings the way to go was apparently to keep schtum for 24 hours and then come out with all guns blazing: 'Crow saw class war as an ongoing smash-and-grab raid, in which his own function was to blackmail and bludgeon the keepers of the public purse to give his members whatever he could get for them, at whatever cost to innocent bystanders and taxpayers..' There are several hundred more words in this vein, but Hastings really tests the limit of after-death etiquette with his final three sentences: 'We need not now express hopes for Crow as he did about Thatcher, for an afterlife of misery. May he rest in peace. But none of us, save his comrades beneath the Red Flag, should have to pretend that Britain is a worse place without him.' |
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