Whatever the rhetoric, Masood was just a deluded loser
You know what Margaret Thatcher would have said about Westminster Bridge. She'd have delivered her "oxygen of publicity" diatribe. She'd have told assembled editors that reporting terrorist atrocities - spreading fear and alarm - was doing the terrorists' job for them. We once pondered the problem of a Belgrave Square bomb blanketed in silence. It would have been the same for parliament's gates. (Oh, and turn off the sound when Martin McGuinness does a TV interview.)
Like many effusions from Mrs T, this was all a tad overdone, not to say ludicrous. How could the massed ranks of media pretend that central London wasn't a chaos of gridlock and screaming ambulances? But there was - and always is - a countervailing argument for balance and self-restraint. Silence is one thing; hysteria is quite another.
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