The late Muammar Gaddafi

It's not been very edifying. Even TalkSport radio's Drive Time show, not hitherto noted as a hotbed of liberalism, was thundering against the lack of taste displayed by television news programmes which showed footage of the last moments of Colonel Gaddafi's life.

The worst, though, passed them by: the closing credits to BBC1's This Week showed the footage accompanied by the Adam and the Ants classic Dog Eat Dog. They did manage to find the apposite lyric ('What's a warrior without his pride?'), and there was the excuse that Adam was in the studio on other business, but it was unpleasant to say the least. It really shouldn't be the BBC's role to glory quite so openly in someone's death.

Elsewhere the Corporation's Kevin Connolly wondered whether Gaddafi is the last of the buffoon dictators. And he, quite rightly, points out that amongst Gaddafi's absurdities was his fondness for dressing as 'a white-suited comic-operetta Latin American admiral, dripping with braid':
Heaven forfend that such self-indulgence might be seen in the mature democracy that is today's Britain: