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Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones believed in rehabilitation. And yet their deaths are being used to further a draconian agenda
A while after her father died, my best friend said something that has stuck with me ever since. “When you lose someone you love, you leave the land of the living. And you want to stay there with them, with their memory. Grief is the process of reluctantly making your way back.” In the years following, my own experiences of loss proved her words to be true. When all you want to do is sit quietly with someone’s memory, even other people’s voices are the most jarring intrusion.
But what the families of Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt, the two named victims of Friday’s terror attack in London Bridge, are going through is almost beyond comprehension. Compounding the terrible experience of bereavement is the horror of loss being turned into a public commodity. While it was always somewhat inevitable that a terrorist attack during a general election campaign would be wielded for grubby political gain, it doesn’t make it any less nauseating. Perhaps most tasteless of all is the Times reducing the theft of two young lives to a set of polling projections: as though such fathomless loss can or should be understood through the lens of a 3% swing in key marginal seats. Looking at some of the coverage, I can’t help but wonder if years of covering the grotesque chicanery of Westminster politics has desensitised journalists in the same way as watching nothing but horror films might. Continue reading...