Now I understand he's been through a lot, but I found the reaction of Tebbit to the death of Martin McGuinness today to be particularly spiteful and unpleasant.
I’m just pleased that the world is a sweeter and cleaner place now. He was not only a multi-murderer, he was a coward.
He knew that the IRA were defeated because British intelligence had penetrated right the way up to the army council and that the end was coming.
He then sought to save his own skin and he knew that it was likely he would be charged before long with several murders which he had personally committed and he decided that the only thing to do was to opt for peace.
He claimed to be a Roman Catholic. I hope that his beliefs turn out to be true and he’ll be parked in a particularly hot and unpleasant corner of hell for the rest of eternity.
Like I say, I get that he personally has suffered, along with his wife, due to IRA actions, but he's hardly alone in this. Plenty of other victims of IRA attacks have found it in themselves to, if not forgive, then to at least concede that McGuinness later in his life was instrumental in the Peace Process (which pretty much everyone should hail as a good thing) and praised him for that accordingly, but it seems Tebbit's reaction is particularly vitriolic, especially given at the absolute basic level there are people out there who have lost a father / grandfather today.
Still, maybe he's getting in early because he knows when it's his turn to kick the bucket there won't be a long queue of people to say nice things about him.
We are the angry mob, we read the papers every day.
We like who we like, we hate who we hate, but we're all so easily swayed.
Things can only get better.