Stuff Wot I Wish I Had Wrote

How about the following brilliantly vituperative sequence of words in The Spectator of 8 January (behind with my reading again) - it's Taki of course and yes I do know that he's indefensible so I won't even try,

The coarseness, greed, avariciousness and ruthlessness of such people make the crude social climbers of yesterday seem to possess plenipotential dignity by comparison. Underneath the flashy jewels there is a moral and intellectual sewer the size of the Serengeti Plain. I've never met the woman and I hope I never will, but one thing that's sure is that after her arrival the deluge.

It's that final sentence which is so delicious. In the same edition there is a goodish little piece by Toby Young which predates the most recent arrest in  the lamentable Joanna Yeates murder case (for current detail see Murder Charge ). At an earlier stage Yeates' landlord had been arrested and promptly demonised in the press, only to be released without charge. He was condemned in the court of public opinion for the crime of being a bit of a middle-class weirdo, rather like Camus' L'Etranger who was executed for failing to cry at his mother's funeral. I've banged on before about the rule of law, due process and other liberal inconveniences. These things bloody well matter. They're complicated, they're abstract, they are definingly humane. All of which goes rather further than Young's column, but it is what he meant - Toby Young Column