I have to agree with the tenor of the Spectator's op-ed piece. I remember being in Liverpool covering the arrest and pre-trial hearings of the two boys who were later convicted of the murder of James Bulger, and the coupling of mawkishness and malevolence I found there made my flesh creep.
The same folk who would be screaming like harpies at the prison van and wanting to lynch the terrified children inside would start weeping buckets at the mere mentions of the death of a 'poor little babbie' they'd never met.
I've also covered a couple of other emotive court cases on Merseyside, and I have to say that nowhere else have I encountered the sort of 'getting off' on raw emotion I foudn there. It's as if it's not enough to wear your heart on your sleeve'; you have to whack people in the balls with it as well. If lynching ever makes a comeback in the UK, my money's on Merseyside as the place where it starts.
Maybe I'm an up-tight, buttoned-up southerner, but I found that the Scousers reacted over-emotionally to every imagined slight - or at least the Scousers on the streets did. I'm sure that there were plenty of decent, self-effacing Liverpudlians who cringed at the antics of their fellow citizens, but it was the keeners and wailers on the streets who got the attention.
And look at the whingeing that has followed the Spectator piece. Take the piss out of Crouch End or Camberley and it's a nine-minute wonder, but take a tilt at Liverpool and you'll never hear the end of it. What's interesting is that there seems to be more noise about the perceived disrespect to Liverpool than the possible disrespect to Ken Bigley, who hadn't lived there for some time.
Yes, his death was disgusting, but maudlin inarticulate mass-hysteria isn't going to help.