In its brave stewardship of his memory the tribute offered by his brother to Martyn Hett, one of the Manchester victims, gives us all something to aspire to
From all I have read about the luminous-sounding Martyn Hett since he was murdered at the Manchester Arena on Monday night, he sounds like he would have relished his brother’s jaw-droppingly brave stewardship of his memory in the days since. When Martyn’s name began trending on Twitter, Dan Hett’s response was a masterclass in sombre seemliness: “He would, I think it’s safe to say, be fucking loving this.”
The next day, Mariah Carey had posted a picture of Martyn in a Mariah Carey T-shirt, accompanied by a devastated quote about the death of a member of her fandom. His brother’s response was one of those jokes that makes you gasp and laugh at the same time: “I was a little dubious about Martyn’s recent bold social media move,” he deadpanned. “But it worked.”
God, the sheer balls of that. How on earth can he manage to be properly funny at such an unimaginably awful time? Properly, involuntary laugh-inducingly, heartbreakingly, inspiringly, tragically hilarious? Their mother, Figen Murray – previously the beneficiary of one of Martyn’s genuine social media moves, when he managed to sell out her under-appreciated knitting craft stall – clearly raised some extraordinarily spirited children. “Martyn’s life was not wasted,” she said in the most noble and dignified of interviews, as she held a clutch of knitted teddies.
I must say I kept thinking of them as our old friend Abu Hopkins continued to preach hate on Twitter all week. Occasionally there are cultural moments where it seems right to pick a direction – to turn towards those who offer an ideal of who we as people might wish to be, and turn away from those who offer nothing, and do even that artlessly. The horror of Manchester is one of those moments.
Whatever our idealised “British values” are – and codifying them would obviously be appallingly against British values – they feel to me better embodied in the heroically black humour of Dan Hett in the days after his brother’s murder than in anything Katie Hopkins has said or written, ever. In fact, were television’s Vernon Kay to host an episode of the ITV show Family Fortunes in which 100 people were asked to name British values, humour would probably rank at number two, after democracy and before regarding 40 minutes of unpleasantries about the weather as our birthright.
Without wishing to go out on a limb, any Family Fortunes contestant who answered, “Calling for a final solution?” would probably earn their place in the quiz show hall of shame. And yet, this was what Hopkins did call for, the very morning after the bombing. As she put it: “We need a final solution.”
The bigger the horror, the smaller Katie has always seemed, and this week she appeared vanishingly so. Indeed, one of her employers – LBC radio – has decided this is the moment to vanish her entirely. This morning it was announced that madam was to leave the station by the exit marked “mutual consent”.
No doubt, no doubt. Either way, there is no need to offer a syllable of congratulation to LBC, which went ahead and hired Hopkins even after she’d written a column describing migrants as cockroaches. Although I suppose it’s possible that they’re watching the last five years on tape delay, and are only up to 2013. They’ll be really kicking themselves when they finally get up to speed.
Clearly, Katie’s departure from the airwaves is hard lines for those who trade in fake Churchill quotes and the like, who have just discovered that free speech is the right to say what you like within the law, and not the right to have a boringly repetitive radio show. Who knew? For those catching up on this incredibly subtle distinction, and there do seem to be a few, Katie can still say whatever she likes on social media – and in the Daily Mail, for as long as Paul Dacre will retain her services.
But LBC seems to have decided, to adapt the senior officer in Top Gun, that Katie’s ego was writing cheques her body couldn’t cash. Then again, it is reported she has cost the Mail group at least £474,000 in libel damages and costs thus far, while she was found personally liable for £131,000 of the same after losing a case to the writer Jack Monroe. So it is possible that – how to put this? – Katie’s hand may soon be writing cheques her bank account can’t cash.
Still, this latest unemployment development is all exactly as predicted in the Book of Hopkins. As she explained portentously last year: “One day I will say something that takes it so far over the line I will have to go and I accept that too. I think that is part of the condition of living your life on the line.” Living your life on the line … I do like how Katie makes “being a twat on the radio” sound like fighting in ’Nam.
Even so, I’m afraid our contestant doesn’t get to take a lot home with her. We must relieve her of her favourite poses, with this week’s “suffer the children to come to me” a case in point. Never forget that Katie Hopkins gives so much of a toss about the children affected by an extremist murder that she has pursued a relentless online vendetta against Brendan Cox, who has the temerity to have been widowed by a rightwing extremist last year.
Similarly, you never heard her say anything about the horrific murder of schoolchildren at Sandy Hook, or any of the other school shootings in the United States. Being furious about that isn’t going to get her booked on Fox News, and consequently it wouldn’t get a run-out in one of her 3,000-word, five-verb columns.
Perhaps the only thing Katie does get to take home is her antipathy to laughter. But then, the defining characteristic of self-styled “voices of the people” is their total and utter humourlessness, which has its roots in a terror of being undermined.
Katie’s spiritual analogue is Roderick Spode, PG Wodehouse’s piss-take of Oswald Mosley, and a chap to whom Bertie Wooster is moved to remark: “The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting ‘Heil, Spode!’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?’”
Well, did you? Certainly, Katie has her followers. They always have their followers: horrendous, needy bores who, had they been born under other stars, might have found themselves drawn into the orbit of alternative preachers of hate.
But their cause is not – to borrow an insult they can understand – true Britishness. It is a perverted form of Britishness, because it has no jokes. Ever. At all. If I may be so presumptuously bold, Martyn Hett’s brother contains more Britishness in his typing thumb than Ms Hopkins contains in her entire output. His spirit will remain something to which we can truly aspire, long after hers has gone the way of all Spodes.