Wherever there is catastrophe there is cliche.

The most popular adjectival cliche following the Manchester bombing is ‘cowardly’. It has been repeated by politicians and commentators time and again.

But how is a suicide bomber cowardly? It surely demands courage of a high order patiently to fabricate a device which will bring about one’s own death, and then to deploy it.

Like the high-sounding terms which are similarly employed in such circumstances – ‘British values’; ‘our way of life’; ‘our freedoms and our liberty’ – ‘cowardly’ is probably a code word for something else. But it is hard to say what.

Or is it, perhaps, simply a way of avoiding consideration of the critique of our culture which close encounters with Islam (radical or otherwise) inevitably bring?

Like the worst sort of old world imperialists (whom they constantly decry) modern day liberals are, after all is said and done, intoxicated with their own rectitude