I’M NOT quite sure why I find pictures of swastikas crudely sprayed on Jewish or Muslim graves more shocking than the sight of, say, similar racist graffiti on the shutters of ethnic minority-owned corner shops. In our culture, disrespect for the dead remains perhaps the ultimate statement of visceral hatred.

Reports that the tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery was desecrated yesterday do not make the motivation immediately apparent. Although the Evening Standard reveals simply that it was daubed with paint, my presumption is that some sort of sloganeering was involved.

This action will have been undertaken for a reason, and the obvious suspects are the political right. Maybe this was the work of hardcore facists, maybe this was some sort of prank on the part of tipsy Tory student activists. We may never know.

An attack on what is basically an oversized bust of one of the people who shaped the modern world is something that Marx’s admirers – a category in which I include myself – can live with. The paint will scrub off soon enough, I guess.

But just as vandalism perpetrated in Jewish and Muslim graveyards is designed to hurt not the individual families of the deceased but entire communities, there is little doubt that this was meant as a symbolic assault on the left in its entirety.

Whoever is responsible would like to do to us exactly the same things they would like to do with the other human beings that they despise. We should consider it a warning.