by Brendan O’Neill, Spectator
The first thing the mob kills is its own humanity. Long before they sink their collective claws into the target of their flapping ire, they lay waste to their own decency. We see this in the digital hounding of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Behold the ugly gloating over a man’s downfall. Witness the peddling of false accusations. The shame, right now, belongs less to Andrew than to those who have made a bloodsport from his troubles.
What do we want from Andrew? When will the mass stalking of him like a wounded deer finally be satiated? When his head is on a spike? When all memory of him is scrubbed from the public record? I get it – Andrew is far from a sympathetic character. He strikes me as boorish, pompous, and unlikely to take kindly to republican riff raff like me. But so what? Don’t even the disagreeable deserve fair treatment and the presumption of innocence?
The hunting of Andrew has gone too far. Admit it – you can feel it. His arrest this week on suspicion of misconduct in public office unleashed yet another round of prideful animus for the former prince. Social media was a riot of malicious glee. Then came that photograph of him in the back of his car following his release from custody. He looks startled, haunted, frightened. The mob lapped it up. They wrung pleasure from his pain.
That picture is everywhere now. On the front page of every paper – naturally – and all over X. It has been turned from an image of one man’s anguish into the emblem of a dying elite. The relish of the mob over Andrew’s hollow-eyed torment horrifies me. One comic whipped his followers into a frenzy of medieval jeering by saying this is the face of a man who after 66 years of coddled life has finally ‘had the briefest of glimpses of the real world’. ‘Plenty more where that came from, I sincerely hope’, he said.
We don’t even know if Andrew is guilty. He hasn’t even been charged.
Read also: ‘It’s a disaster’: Late Queen’s chaplain speaks out on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrest from Premier