Virginia Blackburn

IAN BRADY is dead. At last. That ghastly case continues to haunt us decades on. The victims’ families will never fully be at peace. Like poor little James Bulger, there was something so uniquely horrible about the Moors murders that it tainted the spirit of the nation. Someone pointed out this week that the death penalty was abolished in 1965 and the trial of these two monsters began in 1966. A year or so earlier and they’d have got the fate so many believe they deserved.

I am not exactly a proponent of the death penalty, although if anyone deserves it, people who tortured children to death rank pretty high. But the Moors murders also gave rise to the repulsive campaign to free Myra Hindley on the grounds that she had repented. Maybe she had – that is between her and God. But there are some crimes that are so terrible that the perpetrator should never be allowed to walk free and that most certainly applies to what those psychopaths did.

At least with the death of Brady we will be spared what we got when Hindley kicked the bucket in 2002. With Brady there is a sense of revulsion combined with relief that he has gone. With Hindley there were obituaries, which actually talked about her “warmth” and “humour”. They didn’t reflect the majority opinion of course, just a section of the liberal elite who felt that it’s wrong to punish criminals and that jails should be places of rehabilitation, not incarceration.

But the fact that there was a campaign to free her and that people could actually write such stuff displays a moral vacuum. The woman killed youngsters in terrible THERE comes a moment when a female celeb of a certain age stops looking like herself. Jane Fonda avoided this. Madonna did not. Now Victoria Beckham, whose lips mysteriously seem to have doubled in size, is getting perilously close. Step back Victoria – and ask Jane for the number of her surgeon, fast.