What Rothbury tells us about modern Britain

Two thoughts about the drama in Rothbury last night.

The first is the ridiculousness of the rolling news coverage from Sky and the BBC. They had little to report once it was known that had been found and was threatening to shoot himself. After that they were in the way, both metaphorically and literally. The parallel Stephen Tall draws between their coverage and The Day Today is instructive.

I also have a lot of sympathy for Johann Hari's view that this level of coverage increases the risk of copycat killings. Every violent, inadequate individual now knows how to become a celebrity.

Still, I did watch some of the coverage, so I suppose I was complicit in this folly.

Secondly, and more encouragingly, I was impressed by the lengths the police went to in an attempt to stop Moat killing himself. Here was a man who had murdered one person and tried to kill two more, one of them a police officer. Yet they tried to talk him out of shooting himself.

I have always been struck by the contrast between two hostage events that took place in my younger day. In 1975 four IRA men were cornered in a flat in Balcombe Street in Marylebone and took its two occupants as hostages.

The siege lasted six days and eventually the men gave themselves up and nobody was harmed. This, we liked to think in 1975, is how we did things in Britain. We were not trigger-happy like the Americans.

Fast forward to 1980 and things looked rather different. Then the siege of the Iranian Embassy was ended by an SAS assault in which one of the hostages and five of the six Iranian gunmen were killed. Two more hostages were injured in the cross-fire.

These two hostage incidents were perhaps not comparable, but the way the SAS were lauded in the subsequent days suggested that the British were starting to see themselves in a very different way. This reaction was symptomatic of the coarsening of our national life that took place over the Thatcher years.

The Iranian Embassy siege may also marked the start of rolling news coverage - they even interrupted the snooker (no small step in 1980) to show us the conclusion.

If events at Rothbury suggests that there is still validity in the Balcombe Street view of how we do things in Britain, then I am encouraged.