David baddiel

Hunting Alice Bell began with an angry mob (is there any other kind?) outside a court building in 2012 brandishing misspelled placards and screaming at the eponymous Alice, who’d been convicted of providing a false alibi for her serial-killing former boyfriend. They were also, of course, having the time of their lives. We then cut to the present, when the fun of angry mobdom was flourishing online. After serving 18 months, Alice had been granted lifelong anonymity, but a masked man called True Crime Buster was now racking up the likes by ‘revealing’ that she was living in his hometown as Fran Da Silva – and urging his followers to ‘make her pay’.

I am a Jew. I live in a council estate in London where considerably more than half of my neighbours are Muslims. These people aren’t my friends, but we get along fine: I pick up their parcels; we coordinate complaints to the council about the strange, blue-tinged fluid that sometimes drips from everyone’s ceilings, as if someone in the penthouse had decided to fill their flat with jelly. Elsewhere, our distant cousins are doing terrible things to each other. It’s increasingly hard to imagine a world in which these distant cousins can live together, intermingled but mostly minding their own business – but that’s exactly what we do every day in London. Over the past six months I’ve started feeling extremely grateful for that.