I have just learned that the nurse who is believed to have taken the hoax telephone call at the hospital where the Duchess of Cambridge has been a patient, has herself been found dead, having ended her own life.
May she rest in peace.
I have wondered recently where all this stuff about the press will lead. Add to the press the effects of social media and we now witness the ability of the typed and recorded word to become insidious and insinuating in the wrong hands. Once, you needed only to refuse to open a newspaper if you didn't want to be reminded of your faux pas. Now, with the world of the smartphone and millions of armchair barristers, and we witness reactions that have now crushed a good woman to death. I wonder how many lives she saved, or how many more she might have gone on to save? I wonder if you condemned her in a Tweet that you wrote and that she may have seen?
What is clear from the Leveson inquiry is that parts of the Press have been scribing its own moral code for years. Any suggestions that we actually regulate it has been met with dismay from Ms Chakrabarti as an infringement of human rights. I often find myself yelling at her picture on my TV screen as it seems that she often defending the human rights of those who paid no heed to the human rights of others. The advocacy seems to slip a level these days.
In an age when anyone with a 'phone or a computer can type words and make them visible to anyone suitably equipped anywhere in the world, we find ourselves in an age where we are suddenly in the possession of much power. We seem to love it when radio folk play pranks on someone, and we laugh heartily at the poor dolt who falls over when tricked. Now a woman is dead. Maybe a mother? Certainly a daughter.
When will this all end? When will the moral compass start to make its way to magnetic north? Why do we bleat so often about Rights but so rarely about responsibilities? Why do people have to die so that we are given a cheap laugh?
Not a glorious end to a week, really.
