Mark Steyn's column about the murder of Kenneth Bigley was pulled by the Daily Telegraph this week on grounds of taste. Steyn has now put his censored column on his own website. The fact that it was pulled -- and pulled by the Telegraph, of all papers -- indicates the extent to which the climate in Britain has now become so warped that the whole centre of moral gravity has shifted from rigour to rigor mortis.

I think one or two things Steyn said did go over the top -- endorsing the Billy Connolly jibe, for example. Murder should never be joked about or jokingly exhorted, whatever the underlying purpose of such a remark may have been. But Steyn's general point, that the mawkish sentimentality and ersatz emotion of the response to Bigley's ordeal, not to mention the attacks by Bigley himself and his brother on Tony Blair rather than on his captors, only serve to make further hostage-taking and murders more likely, is true, hugely important and needs to be said very loudly.

Steyn makes a further crushing point:

'By contrast with the Fleet Street-Scouser-Whitehall fiasco of the last three weeks, consider Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq on April 14th. In the moment before his death, he yanked off his hood and cried defiantly, “I will show you how an Italian dies!” He ruined the movie for his killers. As a snuff video and recruitment tool, it was all but useless, so much so that the Arabic TV stations declined to show it.

'If the FCO wants to issue advice in this area, that’s the way to go: If you’re kidnapped, accept you’re unlikely to survive, say “I’ll show you how an Englishman dies”, and wreck the video. If they want you to confess you’re a spy, make a little mischief: there are jihadi from Britain, Italy, France, Canada and other western nations all over Iraq – so say yes, you’re an MI6 agent, and so are those Muslims from Tipton and Luton who recently joined the al-Qaeda cells in Samarra and Ramadi. As Churchill recommended in a less timorous Britain: You can always take one with you. If Mr Blair and other government officials were to make that plain, it would be, to use Mr Bigley’s word, “enough”. A war cannot be subordinate to the fate of any individual caught up in it.'

Brutally put -- but a brutal truth nevertheless. The fact that this was perceived by the Telegraph to be unsayable merely makes Steyn's point for him.