Can a TV celebrity – who turns out to have been a child-molester – be “erased” from the records? His blue plaques can be melted down; charities can drop his name like a hot (and diseased) potato. The damage to his victims is not so easily removed. Nor can we, who used to like the man, retrospectively alter that fact.
But, however symbolically, we can – and must – refuse to recognise any honour (formal or informal) which he enjoyed.
We are told, for example, that the Vatican need not posthumously withdraw a papal knighthood: because it ceases on the holder’s death. Not good enough. Better to declare that he never was a papal knight.
Can’t be done? Sure it can. Lance Armstrong is not a former champion: he never won the Tour de France. Look it up.
(Go further. Unlike papal knighthood, sainthood is intrinsically retrospective: it can only be awarded after the person dies. Can’t it similarly be withdrawn? Some of the church’s mediaeval “saints”, re-examined, might turn out to have been murderous bigots – in the manner of the 9/11 killers. Should they keep their honour?)
By the way, I’m not pointing any fingers at the broadcaster, the hospitals, the charities for whom a child-molester may have worked. They are rather victims (albeit very much secondary victims) of his duplicity.
In the same way, the Hillsborough revelations – however disturbing – will not erase the heroism of PC Bill Barker, who died defending a flood-hit community three years ago this month. Nor that of WPC Fiona Bone and WPC Nicola Hughes, recently murdered.
Nor (as we approach Remembrance Day) should we doubt the heroism of Lt Edward Drummond-Baxter and L/Cpl Siddhanta Kunwar, the latest of our soldiers to die in Afghanistan. If the war itself is idiotic, so was the “Great War” of 1914-18. And that does not stop us honouring those who served and died.
Their names will live forever.
Some names I would sooner forget.
