News reaches us of an assassination so baroque, so floridly absurd, that it could only have sprung from the mind of a decadent age. A suspected gang leader, stepping off a plane at a major airport, was met not by handcuffs but by a flower bouquet. Nestled among the lilies and roses: a blade, a bullet, or perhaps something more exotic. The victim crumpled; the killer vanished into the crowd. British intelligence, we are told, is on alert. How very reassuring.
Let us not pretend this is merely a criminal settling of scores. This is a sign of the times, a perfect symbol of an era that has lost its moral compass. The Victorians, for all their hypocrisy, at least understood the theatre of violence. A duel at dawn, a private affair conducted with a certain grim formality. Today, we have assassins dressed as delivery men, murder disguised as kindness. The bouquet is the perfect metaphor: sweet-smelling on the surface, deadly underneath. It is the very essence of our age of subterfuge, where everything is a brand, a performance, a lie.
Compare this to the fall of Rome, where poison was slipped into wine at banquets, where murder became a dinner-party entertainment. We are not there yet, but we are on the glide path. The airport is our forum, the check-in counter our colosseum. And what do we call this? We call it 'organized crime.' As if the adjective 'organized' confers some respectability. No, this is something far more primaeval: a return to tribal warfare conducted with email receipts and flight itineraries.
British intelligence being 'on alert' is a phrase that should chill the blood, not warm the heart. It means they will issue travel advisories. It means they will share data with foreign agencies. It means nothing will change. The assassins will find new flowers, new delivery methods, new airports. The cycle will continue.
What is the answer? The Romans thought they could hybridise their culture with that of their conquered peoples and maintain order. They were wrong. The Victorians thought the trappings of civilization—the rule of law, the ritual of the duel, the stiff upper lip—could contain the beast. They were wrong too. We have given up even the pretence. We have no rituals, no code of honour, no shame. We have only targets and metrics, and now bouquets.
The real question is not who killed the gang leader. The real question is why we are surprised. We have allowed the state to wither, allowed the police to become social workers, allowed borders to become porous. We have created a world where the most efficient way to kill a man is to dress it up as a gift. The assassin understood the age better than the intelligence services: he knew that a man would accept flowers from a stranger, because we have taught everyone to be polite, to take the bait, to not make a scene.
Mark my words: this will not be the last such assassination. It will become the new normal, a standard operating procedure for the criminal class. And when the flowers are delivered to a politician, a judge, a journalist, do not say you were not warned. We are past the point of no return. The bouquet has been thrown, and we are all dancing to its tune.
