A couple of hours after I read the first reports that Jo Cox had been attacked, I took my iPhone out of my pocket to delete the Twitter app.
I can’t remember exactly what time it was, but the news from Twitter – which I’d been reading earlier on my desktop computer – suggested that the MP wasn’t going to pull through.
Also, we knew that her attacker was a white British man, not an immigrant. That made it inevitable that some members of the Remain camp were going to make rhetorical use of the tragedy to further their cause. Which they did.
On the other hand, if Ms Cox’s killer had been an immigrant, some Leave supporters would have exploited the outrage just as viciously.
Such is the world in which we now live. I couldn’t bear to watch this drama play out on social media. Also, I didn’t want to get drawn into angry exchanges about the EU as a young woman lay dying in hospital.
So, sitting in a café, I tapped on the Twitter icon. That was mistake. If I’d wanted to delete the app instantly, I should have pressed on the icon gently so it started wobbling and I could have removed it without reading anything.
The tap opened Twitter and there, in the feed of tweets from people I follow, was a comment by a friend of mine who is aggressively pro-Remain.
The tweet was – to put it charitably – shockingly misjudged. It mentioned the attack on Jo Cox, the French National Front, drunken street thugs and, outrageously, the most eloquent and moderate voices in the Leave campaign. Its tone of “what are we coming to?” fooled nobody.
But the message was expertly crafted – you can say a lot in 140 characters if you’re as clever as this guy – and by the time I saw it the tweet was going viral.
So I postponed deleting the app and, instead, used it to quote the tweet along with my own message: “Unfollowed”.
Later in the day, my friend (or maybe ex-friend: I don’t know how he’ll react to this article) deleted the tweet. I followed him again. He’s given to crazy outbursts of indignation – also my style, alas – but he’s not a nasty person. On the contrary: he’s kind and lovely.
His message was horrible, however. And that’s my point. If he really wants to know “what we’re coming to”, then I’d point to his tweet and say: “This”.
No political issue in living memory has provoked so many nice people to say nasty things. That’s hardly news to you, I’m sure, but from my uncomfortable perch as a right-wing member of the chattering classes I’m exposed to the full fury of both sides.
That’s when I’m not being furious myself.
I may have deleted Twitter from my phone, but I haven’t uninstalled Tweetdeck on my desktop computer. On Saturday I used it to send a direct message to Ronnie Convery, a hardline Scottish Nationalist who is inexplicably employed as spokesman for the Catholic Archdiocese of Glasgow.
The message was direct in more ways than one. Just two words. You can guess what they were.
Why was I so aggressive? Because Convery had just tweeted that Leave were on the same side of the EU referendum debate as ISIS.
That was despicable – an adjective that is being thrown round a lot in this debate, and not without good reason. Too many of us are coming to despise each other.
Not only do we impute the worst imaginable motives to politicians on both sides, but we also find ourselves accusing friends, acquaintances and total strangers of behaving shamefully. And they accuse us back.
Another friend of mine was recently at an ostensibly civilised, rather stuffy drinks party – the type where the canapés are usually more interesting than the conversation.
A smartly turned-out lady mentioned Europe. My friend said he was backing Leave.
“I was actually rather shy about it, but she did ask,” he told me. “I was prepared for a gentle ticking off for holding the wrong views – but suddenly I was being hissed at as if I was a war criminal.”
Was it inevitable that a referendum on the European Union should become so toxic? I’m not sure, but let me suggest three reasons why things have turned out this way.
First, as the former Canadian prime minister Jean Chretien points out, referendums “break people’s dreams” in a way that general elections tend not to. He should know: he was PM when Quebec voted to stay in Canada by a margin of less than one per cent.
Quebec voted in 1995, before social media. That’s the second, rather obvious, factor in this dispute. The internet hands a megaphone to extremists; those are the voices to which we respond, and in the process their extremism rubs off on normally even-tempered folk.
The problem is compounded by the general tendency of Facebook and Twitter to make their users more self-centred and shouty. We are less inhibited about public displays of rudeness, which is a disaster for people like me with hair-trigger tempers.
The third reason is a bit more difficult to explain. The question of whether to leave or stay in the EU has exposed more profound divisions in the British population than party allegiance.
It pits risk-takers against the risk-averse; unashamed patriots against liberal cosmopolitans; people who hate being told what to do against people who like telling other people what to do. The differences aren’t easy to pin down, but my impression is that this referendum campaign has told us more about each other than we really wanted to know.
That’s not a good reason for not holding it. I believe we urgently need to detach ourselves from the corrupt and fast-collapsing European Union. The fracture of friendships is a high price to pay for freedom and safety, but so be it.
What throws me into despair is the prospect that we’ll remain trapped in this failed project while still having to confront the wreckage of social relationships. A narrow victory for Remain will break dreams – and plant the suspicion that those dreams have been broken by a single, repugnant act of violence.
If that’s the outcome, then it won’t be enough to keep the Twitter app off my phone. Party invitations will be swept into the bin. I’m sorry if this makes me sound like a loony, but I just don’t trust myself not to make a bad situation worse.
