Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Don’t let the corpse get cold Vol 2

See 'Don't let the corpse get cold' for a bit of history from me on how the Mail & chums like to put the boot into folk when they're recently dead, presumed dead and even not quite dead yet. Yes, even before she was dead, lying in hospital and unable to defend herself, the Mail couldn't wait, and ripped into dying newsreader Carol Barnes.

So with that previous in mind, it's not a surprise that Paul Dacre's finest couldn't give a shit about the feelings of those close to Tory MP Piers Merchant, who died yesterday.

The headline,

Piers Merchant: Tory sleaze MP dies of cancer, leaving behind wife who stood by him after sex scandal

lets you know how sensitive the piece is going to be. And it deteriorates from there.

Mr Merchant hit the headlines over his affair with glamorous blonde Soho hostess Anna Cox at the height of the election campaign in 1997.
Days before polling day, he was photographed by a national tabloid newspaper kissing and canoodling with17-year-old Ms Cox in a park in his constituency.
...
[Mrs Merchant] was still by his side in 2004 when Mr Merchant was caught out again cheating on his wife with 41-year-old property consultant Caroline Bew in yet another tabloid sting.

Look, Merchant was the kind of person whose politics I can't stand. But that doesn't mean it's right to piss all over his grave before he's even in it. There should be some dignity awarded to all human beings in the aftermath of their death - these people have families, and loved ones - and Merchant has two children.

Think about that for a moment - two children. Two children who, if they picked up a newspaper or clicked on the internet, would read that kind of garbage about their father just hours after he died from cancer.

I must be some kind of ridiculously oversensitive idiot, because I think that's pretty low. Of course there's no point in airbrushing personal history when a public figure dies; but surely does every single detail have to be gone into like this? It seems a little unsavoury.

The Mail, of course, will be the first to cry foul when Margaret Thatcher dies, and many people will be less than respectful about her (I'll try and keep the fireworks to a minimum). But while Thatcher caused hatred and resentment among millions of people, this poor sod did nothing more than be a human being - a human being with faults and failures, of course, but so what? The truth is they couldn't care less about the dignity of death or the feelings of relatives. They've made that abundantly clear.

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