Hate talk should be Left alone...

I CAN’T pretend I know award-winning author Chris Brookmyre well, although he knows me sufficiently to pinch my name for a minor character – a Labour spin doctor – in one of his dark novels.

Mr Brookmyre is not a fan of the new regime at the White House and he tweeted to his 16,000 followers a prediction that President Trump’s Press Secretary Sean Spicer would die in an auto-erotic asphyxiation incident.

In my book, to coin a phrase, that comes dangerously close to rejoicing at the prospect of a man’s death.

I am bemused by Spicer. You may recall Comical Ali, mouthpiece for Saddam Hussein, who denied there were any Americans in Baghdad.

The air was filled with the crack of small-arms fire while yards from Ali – who lives today in exile in the United Arab Emirates – US Army armoured fighting vehicles manoeuvred on the banks of the Tigris.

There was more than a touch of that madness as Spicer crossed swords with all and sundry over how many people did or did not attend the President’s inauguration or if a ban can be called a ban. Why bother, Sean?

But none of it makes me wish Spicer, a married man of 45, dead.

Funny how the Left always denounce the inhuman ‘fascist’ Right, while the irony of calling for a pogrom on their opponents is lost on them.

Revile Trump and Spicer if you like, but to defeat them you must engage them intellectually, not relish calamity – real or imagined – being visited on them.

People dancing in the street after Margaret Thatcher’s death left me queasy on a human level.

So, too, does jigging on the grave of a man not even dead yet.