Sympathy and admiration aren't emotions you'd expect to be engendered by a man who shot his ex-girlfriend, killed her boyfriend, maimed a policeman for life, and had a history of assaulting previous girlfriends. But sympathy and admiration are, it seems, what a lot of people feel for Raoul Moat. By late yesterday, 9,708 people had registered their "like" of a Facebook site called R.I.P RAOUL MOAT YOU LEGEND! [♥], and the numbers were climbing. Messageboards, blogs and newspaper websites have been flooded with commentary ranging from the thoughtful to the unprintable.
Approaching the latter end of the scale were those who bizarrely blamed the entire fiasco on women, from his girlfriend to women in public service: "At his court appearance they would have handcuffed him to a 'policewoman' to prove a point," suggested one. "If there had been any police 'women' armed with guns he should have opened fire on them and taken one down with him. Women are the problem today."
But many thought he might be mentally ill: "Poor Man. He obviously had a problem, what I don't know, but I just think he desperately needed help and didn't know it," wrote one reader of the Daily Mail website. "I don't think this guy is evil or a bad person i think he made a huge mistake . . . Everyone makes mistakes," wrote another.
And then there were those who felt revulsion at the 24-hour news coverage and size of the police hunt. While repulsed by what Moat had done, they were also impressed that he had managed to elude such a huge operation for an entire week. "I don't agree with wat [sic] he done but he did have his reasons, the lad is a legend in my book – he out ran and out smarted the police for over a week."
While in some eyes, that created a kind of twisted glory – "enuff respect my man . . . your da best soldier 2ever cum outa da north" – criminologist David Wilson's glib and patronising assessment, to Sky News, that Moat had tapped into "that dispossessed, white working-class, masculine mentality" and become a "kind of anti-hero" might also have a kernel of truth in it.
