Apocalypse now: nobody dead

As I write, the people of London still appear to be living and breathing. Somehow we have survived another Attack of the Killer News Headlines.

The “Poison Gas Cloud” or “Cloud of Doom” that we were told would hit the city has disappeared into thin air. The “Apocalyptic Inferno” did not last until the end of the week, never mind the end of the world. And the explosion that was “Just Like an N-bomb Blast” inexplicably failed to reduce Hemel Hempstead to another Hiroshima. A headline to sum up much coverage of the Buncefield oil depot fire might be: “Apocalypse Now: nobody dead”.

Of course the biggest fire in peacetime was a big story. But what is it about the atmosphere today that means a one-off accident must spark an explosion of alarmist speculation about the environment, public health, polluted water and milk, looting and terrorism?

That supposed poison cloud of doom soon turned out to be, in the words of the Met Office, “nothing more nasty than you’d get from a regular bonfire”. The worst that happened to most victims of the “N-bomb blast” seemed to be waking up to shattered glass on their duvets. While gangs of looters failed to materialise on the streets of Hemel Hempstead, local people did, going about their business. The centres set up to help traumatised residents quickly proved redundant; one mum evacuated to the leisure centre said that the main effect had been to make her children“very excited” about being given free pizza and allowed to use the ice rink.

Yet far away from Buncefield others were getting hot under the collar, searching the ashes for evidence to support their pet concerns. Although it is hard for a layman like me to see how global warming could cause an oil depot explosion in Hertfordshire, one Blairite commentator said the smoke was “a stark reminder of what pollution looks and feels like”, giving warning of more to come unless we start living “duller lives” to counter climate change. Those who really want such a “stark reminder” could look back to the dark, dull days of December, 1962, when an old-fashioned London smog killed almost a hundred people in three days.

What we are living through is not Apocalypse Now but, as Susan Sontag, the American critic, described it, a mood of “Apocalypse from now on” — a sense of impending doom that never seems to arrive. Every time the worst-case scenario fails to materialise, the professional fatalists caution about invisible “long-term” effects; thus a leading environmentalist reassures that, however little harm the Buncefield smoke has done, “over the long term it poses a cancer hazard”.

After inhaling clouds of doom-mongering for 24 hours, one 21-year-old local told reporters: “I’ve had a headache since yesterday morning and I just don’t know what is in that cloud.”

He should have taken two tablets and gone to lie down in a dark room with the television off — or better still, gone out to get some fresh air to blow away the smog of miserabilism.

• THE JURY who found Andrew Wragg guilty of the manslaughter, rather than murder, of his terminally ill ten-year-old son, and the judge who gave him a two-year suspended sentence, obviously had some sympathy for the parents of a severely disabled child. But I have less sympathy for his defence team’s argument, that the ex-SAS soldier had diminished responsibility due to the stress of working as a security guard in Iraq. In a future murder trial, it will surely be open to anybody who has set foot in a warzone — or anybody else said to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder — to claim that the pressure made them do it. We have become used to stress and PTSD being used as an explanation for the problems of life. Now it seems they can also be offered as an excuse for taking one.
• # IT WAS a hoot to hear Ken Livingstone’s lawyer tell a standards tribunal investigating his clash with a journalist that the Mayor of London should have “the right to be offensive” back to hacks. Indeed he should. But this intolerant politician has spent his career trying to ban words and opinions that he finds offensive. Now Livingstone seems hoist with his own petard — a phrase that derives, entirely appropriately, from the old French for being “blown up by your own fart”.