Stephen Daisley

Kelvin MacKenzie’s baffling compulsion to pick at Liverpool has brought him up a cropper again, with the Sun pulling his latest polemic on Everton FC player Ross Barkley. MacKenzie has compared the footballer, recently victim of an assault in a nightclub, to 'a gorilla at the zoo' and added that, in Liverpool, 'the only men with similar pay packets are drug dealers and therefore not at nightclubs, as they are often guests of Her Majesty'. Liverpool is outraged. Fair enough. Everton has mimicked Anfield in banning the Sun. Why blameless footie hacks should be punished is beyond me, but that's up to the club. In a fairly extraordinary step, however, the Sun has suspended its columnist and denounced his copy as 'wrong', 'unfunny', and 'not the view of the paper'.

I’ve had just about enough of being told how to feel about what happened last Wednesday.  I feel angry. I still feel shock. I feel a keen ache for the families of those murdered, especially the loved-ones of PC Keith Palmer.  I feel that cold spite that works its way into your heart at times like these, vengeful cruelty passing itself off as hard-headedness. When I remember this, I feel ashamed to have given in to it.  I feel scared of an ideology that crashed into the 21st century in an outrageous spectacle but has now made its choreography more low-key.  I feel contempt for the demagogues who seek to exploit the raw emotions of After Wednesday. I feel disdain towards those rolling their eyes at the locution ‘After Wednesday’.

Ulster is where memory burns long and forgiveness comes slow. The death of Martin McGuinness will pass without the spilling of sorrow by many Unionists in Northern Ireland and here in mainland Britain, where the IRA’s terror campaign paid regular, outrageous visits, there will be those who mutter a cold ‘good riddance’.  Douglas Murray writes:  '[W]hile the eulogists lament the fact that McGuinness hasn’t enjoyed much of his old age, our thoughts really ought to be with the many people who – thanks to McGuinness and his friends – never made it as far as middle age.’ This is undoubtedly true. McGuinness was a terrible man who did terrible things and the good things he did in later years did not change that.

'They will hate you because of who I am,' Jesus says in the Gospels. He forgot to add: 'And the ones who don't have a clue will point and laugh.' It's a lesson Carol Monaghan has learned abruptly. Monaghan is MP for Glasgow North West and a member of the Scottish National Party. A former science teacher, it’s fair to say she hasn’t grabbed the media spotlight in the way some of her colleagues have since entering Parliament in 2015. Still, she’s gone about her duties as an MP, seeing to the needs of her constituents, and serving on the Commons science and technology committee. This week, the TV cameras finally found her. On Wednesday, Monaghan turned up to her committee and was met by a colleague’s question. What was that on her forehead?

Given our seamy obsession with serial killers, real and fictional, one would expect the crimes of Stephen Port to have made more of a mark on the national psyche. Port was convicted in November of the rape and murder of four young men in Barking, east London over a 15-month period. His modus operandi was cold and calculating: He would contact men on gay hook-up sites and incapacitate them with 'date rape drug’ GHB, before sexually assaulting and murdering them. A further seven men were drugged and/or raped but lived. Port is serving a whole-life sentence; he will die in prison. What makes these crimes particularly shocking is that the Metropolitan Police apparently had multiple chances to stop them and failed each and every time.

Yakov Blotnik, world-weary custodian of the synagogue in Philip Roth’s short story 'The Conversion of the Jews’, has a simple outlook on life: “Things were either good-for-the-Jews or no-good-for-the-Jews”. The Blotnik Test confronts us as the new administration in Washington begins to take shape. We've just seen the first hints of what to expect at today's joint press conference between Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. The US president used to it to break with the US's decades-old commitment to a two-state solution, insisting the arrival at a peace deal was more important than its details. “I’m looking at two states and one state,” he admitted.