Forget ‘peace and love’. Protest language has turned violent

So Madonna says she doesn’t really want to blow up the White House. Her remarks at Saturday’s women’s march — ‘Yes, I’m angry, yes, I am outraged, Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House’ – have, she says, been ‘taken wildly out of context’.

She has missed the point. No-one remotely thought that she would personally mix the Semtex, or offer any help to someone else to do so. But she was using inflammatory language which she ought to know somebody, somewhere will take seriously. If an unhinged loner in the backwoods of Virginia heads to Washington with a pick-up full of explosives she will be culpable in the same way as Henry II was in asking, rhetorically, so he thought, who would rid him of a turbulent priest.

Last June, following the murder of Jo Cox, there was, rightly, a great-deal of soul-searching among politicians and commentators over whether the tone of political debate had contributed to the decision of Thomas Mair to murder his MP.