Do something at least with killers’ bodies

LAST week it was revealed that the bodies of Ian Brady, the moors murderer, and Salman Abedi, the Manchester bomber, are still lying in morgues because no crematorium or funeral director will do the necessary, which is about as daft as it gets.

When Myra Hindley died she was cremated and her ashes secretly scattered to avoid her grave becoming a focus for hate or vandalism and I had assumed the same had happened to Brady.

For utter madness and superstition it is difficult to beat the tweet of Michael Fogg, a funeral director of Sheffield, who said all his colleagues in the country should unite in saying no so the pair should be “left to rot in hell”. Well, their souls may well be doing that for all we know but their bodies are preserved in a morgue and cannot rot in hell. They can only uselessly clutter up needed facilities here on earth.

One person did however beat that tweet and it was a source from Glasgow Council who said “it may give some tiny crumb of comfort to relatives and friends of their victims to know they are in anonymous purgatory”.

Eh? Their bodies are not in any purgatory, anonymous or otherwise. They are in a morgue and utterly unaware of the fact because they are dead.

It is all reminiscent of Charles II, who dug up Cromwell and displayed his head in an act of revenge for the execution of that monarch’s father. We haven’t made much progress in 350 years if we still seek to punish dead bodies.