Speaking ill of the dead

Over the past few weeks, right-wing newspapers have made it clear that anyone who so much as murmurs objections to St Margaret Thatcher's biography (kitten-lover, washed the feet of the poor every evening, sent every miner a postal order on their birthdays, always the last to leave St. Patrick's Day ceilidhs) is a damned traitor who should be hung in Trafalgar Square and is bloody rude too.

In my ongoing attempt to point out that political discourse in modern Britain is politer than in any previous period, here's an obituary:

The subject is King George IV, spendthrift, hypocrite and bigot. He was ridiculed in life and damned in death by all and sundry. I find it hard to imagine a mainstream newspaper being quite so pungent about any royal or politician these days… even Prince Andrew or Tony Blair. 

Despite building the magnificent Royal Pavilion in Brighton (which the racist English Defence League recently mistook for a Mosque.

the only way George is at all remembered is as a foppish moron in his years as Prince Regent, memorialised so gloriously by Hugh Laurie in Blackadder the Third.