Mike

THE voice of the extreme right, Katie Hopkins, called on ‘Western’ men to rise up last week in her latest barf on social media.

It was inevitable the horrendous Manchester Arena bombing would be grist to Ms Hopkins’ malevolent mill and it wasn’t long before her bile-fest began.

With some families having barely started to come to terms with their loss, and others not knowing if their children were alive or dead, Hopkins’s ‘measured’ response to the grief was seemingly to call for genocide.

The last line of one of her tweets on Tuesday morning after the Monday night attack read: “We need a final solution.”

The final solution was the Nazi expression for the Holocaust. She quickly took it down and replaced it.

Hopkins said the tweet was changed because there was a literal error in her #Manchester, although final solution was also replaced with “a true solution” in the second version.

As for what her final solution, or true solution for that matter, was, Katie Hopkins Hopkins didn’t say. The truth is no one has an answer.

Not even Morrissey, former lead singer of The Smiths, had one.

The Mancunian miserabilist put out a whinge against politicians who he says are never the victims, seemingly forgetting the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox by a right-wing extremist, and then revealing his big truth.

That people in Britain are too scared to say in public what they say in private. As to what that is in the context of the Manchester bombing, Morrissey didn’t say.

Some thought the implication was they were scared to denounce immigrants although how that squared with the suicide bomber being British born, I don’t know.

It’s at times like these I really hate social media. Odd, I know, for someone whose livelihood in part depends on it and who could be labelled a hypocrite here as what I can be accused of doing is jumping on the Hopkins bandwagon.

In my defence, when I first heard about the attack, waking up to the Today programme on Tuesday morning, my initial reaction was heartfelt sympathy for the families involved.

The second was the sinking feeling at the thought of the social media reaction to it, an inevitable tsunami of bile.

Being charitable, Hopkins can be viewed as the ‘Father Jack’ of social media, the drunken priest in the classic comedy series Father Ted who periodically shouts ‘girls, feck, drink’ to amuse his public.

While Hopkins uses less well thought-out words, the inspiration is obvious.

Hopkins and Morrissey make unlikely bedfellows and maybe there’s a duet in it.

‘Bengali in Platforms’ from Morrissey’s ‘Viva Hate’ album seems the most appropriate. Morrissey