We can’t do away with the idea of fair punishment

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when it became the norm for outrageous behaviour to result in the perpetrator losing their job after an online campaign. This modern-day incarnation of claiming a scalp, which used to be the preserve of the political Left, now appears to have spread to the Right of the political divide, too. Late last week, an NHS contractor resigned from her job after a video of her intimidating a supporter of the US president at an antiTrump protest went viral on social media. Over 3,000 people had reportedly signed an online petition calling for her to be sacked.

I suspect many more than 3,000 people were outraged at the thuggish behaviour of 36-year-old Siobhan Prigent and her comrades – I am certainly one of them. The group shouted abuse and even pushed the Trump supporter around, laughing and jeering at him as a milkshake thrown by the mob hit him on the head.

I was struck by the sheer hate emanating from a supposedly anti-hate demonstration. It seemed to me that the game plan – to convince their political opponents of the power of love, peace and brotherhood through unadulterated loathing and contempt – was a bizarre one, doomed to fail. The message they sent out instead was that dehumanising one’s political opponents is perfectly justified, which of course sounds rather like the vitriolic culture these very people accuse Mr Trump of espousing.

This is precisely why I find the immediate demand for Ms Prigent, the now infamous face of the mob, to be sacked from her job to be deeply troubling. Stripping someone of their job and possibly their career is stripping them of their dignity. It is a very grave punishment. What qualifies

us to pronounce it on a fellow human being of whom we know nothing other than what we saw in a 30-second video?

Can we be certain beyond any doubt that it wasn’t a moment of madness for an otherwise perfectly decent person? And if she is indeed a thoroughly unpleasant human being, are nasty individuals not allowed to earn a living in our society?

It is, of course, important that an adult is held to account for their actions. We no longer put people in the stocks in the middle of busy marketplaces, we have evolved enough as a society. Instead, though, we name and shame those who offend our sense of justice with a view to extracting a sign of contrition from the perceived wrongdoers.

In this case, Ms Prigent has apologised and it is entirely possible that the Trump-supporting grandfather who was treated abysmally by the mob might find it in his heart to forgive her and her fellow agitators. The incident will almost certainly fade in the memories of the rest of us. Her apology should have drawn a line under the matter. It should not have gone as far as her feeling compelled to resign. That is a leaf straight out of the playbook of the selfrighteous hard Left.

This Oresteian cycle of doing to your political opponents what they have done to you in a futile attempt to settle scores is a path to mutual destruction. There will be no divine intervention, so it is up to us mere mortals to invoke grace and reinvent the Furies.

Otherwise, the tragedy carries on. FOLLOW Dia Chakravarty on Twitter @DiaChakravarty;

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The events in Peterborough may have confirmed what you had suspected all along. The Brexit party did not win a seat at Westminster. Justifiable conclusion: there is not going to be, contrary to overexcited hyperbole, an imminent realignment of British political life. The two major parties are not going to slide into extinction to be replaced by a chaotic, fragmented, incoherent mess in which stable government will become impossible. Hence, Britain’s remarkably rational democracy will survive this wobble intact.

This may seem like rather a lot of moral weight to hang on one by-election result, especially as I tend to believe – like most political commentators – that individual by-elections mean very little. Paradoxically it is on just such reasoning that this particular one seems significant.

The voters of Peterborough knew that they were not responsible for electing a government, so they could have played merry hell with their votes and elected the Brexit candidate out of sheer, infuriated mischief. But they didn’t. And if they chose not to do it – or rather, if not enough of

them chose to do it – in these safe circumstances, they are surely not going to do it in an actual general election.

So I will stick my neck out here and say that the nightmare of an immediate apocalyptic political meltdown is highly improbable. The collapse of support for the two main parties, which has been such a feature of current opinion polling, the Euro elections and this by-election, has occurred with the kind of dramatic suddenness that is generally the sign of a brief storm.

It is worth remembering that in the general election of 2017, the two major parties took a record-breaking 80 per cent of the national vote, largely due to the wipeout of the Liberal Democrats and Ukip. In Peterborough this was particularly so: in 2017, the share of the vote going to the two major parties was 94.9 per cent. In last week’s byelection their collective vote share fell to 52.3 per cent. Any change that happens that fast in politics is likely to be fleeting.

But what is quite possible is that the Brexit party will split the Tory vote in any coming election, thus making impossible a Conservative majority government and possibly allowing a Labour-SNP coalition. That is the real, serious threat. The rest is hysteria.

There are roughly two ways to avoid this. Nigel Farage’s outfit could do the decent thing and not put up candidates to contest the seats at least of Tory Leaver MPs. Somehow I can’t see this happening. Or the Conservative party can elect a leader who is unambiguously, incorruptibly, adamantly determined that we should leave the European Union no later than October 31. I am afraid that there is no other sensible option. readerprints@telegraph.co.uk

I do understand why some of the most eminent leadership candidates, notably Michael Gove, have hedged on this. There is a sense that the party must be united and that those Conservatives who believe that leaving with no deal would be a neardeath experience need to be cajoled back into the fold – not least since they have demonstrated their capacity to wreck any parliamentary agreement.

But what is the plan? Would this avowal to consider delaying our exit be abandoned pretty quickly once the leader took office, thus adding to the suspicion that this was all cynical manoeuvring? Or, perhaps worse, will it reinforce the belief among Tory voters that Mr Gove – who is already thought to have supported Theresa May for far too long – is unreliable in his judgments?

These doubts apply twice over for those candidates (Jeremy Hunt) who are shifting on a daily basis from a hard deadline position to a maybe/ possibly/wait-and-see vacillation: saying that you would really, really like to come out on October 31 but if that isn’t possible… well then perhaps not, just won’t cut it. There is a very fine line between reasonableness and opportunism. And cutting back the commitment to a promise that we will leave by the time of the next general election is not reassuring.

What the Leave voter fears most now is that any delay to leaving will become indefinite until eventually it turns into remaining. If the electorate smells any whiff of having-it-bothways, they will turn away in revulsion. They have had quite enough of that with Mrs May.

In any event, trying to make oneself acceptable to the irreconcilable Remainers in Parliament may be

What the Leave voter fears most now is that any delay to leaving will become indefinite until eventually it turns into remaining

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion less relevant than it once seemed, since so many of them are now preoccupied with the anger of their own constituency parties, and there are at least a few sensible Remainers (Nicky Morgan, Amber Rudd) who are widely seen as acceptable go-betweens with whom to deal. If it came to it, are there enough irreconcilables prepared to split the party asunder over a leadership candidate who could save their seats?

It is time to look outwards to the voting public rather than inwards to the poisonous factions within Parliament. If the parliamentary Conservative party cannot see this then they need to be told it firmly by the members in the country who understand the weather in their own constituencies.

So what does all this amount to? That It Will Have To Be Boris? Quite possibly. There are some fairly obvious problems with this. The most important of them is not his private life, about which most voters do not give a fig. What is more serious is that his popularity in the past has relied on his slightly goofy good humour and apparent (but not real) disregard for official responsibility.

That he has often seemed not to take public office terribly seriously has been a kind of charm, especially as London mayor. But it would be positively alarming in a prime minister – especially at a time of constitutional crisis. He maintained an uncharacteristic silence during the early weeks of this campaign, perhaps in order to make the emergence of a relaunched persona more credible.

Boris 2.0 is going to need a new gravitas to sit alongside the old jollity. Pulling it off will be quite a feat.