Raoul Moat and Facebook

It was one of the most annoying traits of the last Government that it felt the need to have an opinion on everything. Tony Blair was even known to issue statements about soap opera storylines.

I had hoped that David Cameron would do better on this score, but last week he was to be found condemning a Facebook group which described murderer Raoul Moat as a legend.

Politicians and rentaquotes queued up to express their dismay that 30,000 had joined and called for Facebook to ban the group.

Kelvin McKenzie described them as “sick” and “thickos”.

Even if all of everyone of those people were mindless idiots they only accounted for 0.006 per cent of Facebook users.

The group has now been voluntarily removed and we can’t check what the reality of this episode was, but I suspect there were a multitude of reasons why people joined - ranging from a sense of mischief to a desire to express some disquiet about aspects of the police operation and media coverage. In order to join in the conversation people would have had to click on the ‘like’ button.

Anything that makes Raoul Moat look like a hero is deplorable, but we can work that out for ourselves without politicians rushing to tell us what we can and can’t do on Facebook.