Sane people all over the country were horrified, but largely unsurprised, that right-wing publication the Daily Telegraph had called for a political leader to be unlawfully killed.
The offensive, rabble-rousing article was written by journalist Allison Pearson, who subsequently denied having written the headline (implying that someone else wrote it), though she did not deny writing the juvenile, irresponsible piece underneath the headline. While this correspondent has no idea what the headline to this article will be (as someone else is going to write it), I can only hope it is suitable karmic.
In the adolescent, third-rate piece of doggerel in question, columnist Allison Pearson referred to Ms Sturgeon as looking like ‘the love-child of a Bay City Roller and a Shetland pony’. This was a clever journalistic ploy in that it claimed the ‘moral high ground’ generally occupied by people who think demeaning people’s physical appearance is both big AND clever.
It also pandered to the average Telegraph reader’s two main interests, disposable pop music and bestiality. However, as the Herald’s political correspondent pointed out “This is gross hypocrisy as Allison Pearson resembles a badly-molten Barbie doll. And she’s Welsh.”
Beheading was removed from the UK statute books in 1973, and the death penalty for treason in 1998. This headline, therefore, managed to be both 19 and 44 years out of date simultaneously.
This represents something of an improvement for the Telegraph which generally requires Britain to conform to an ideal of cricket on the green, tea and scones, stickleback-catching children, and bumbling vicars dating from around 1932, and which never existed.
