Just how much of a total arsehole, and I mean total human slime of the highest order does someone have to be before you can solemnly swear that you could not stand next to them on any issue?

I ask this because of a conversation I had yesterday with a friend of mine about the one and only Richard Littlejohn.

Mr Littlejohn, as is well known, is a “journalist” who writes (at the moment) a column for the Daily Mail. It is typically full of badly thought out right wing diatribe that at times borders on the racist and is regularly utterly offensive. It is though genius in that it appeals straight to the mob culture that normally only the Sun and the News of the World get anywhere near.

At the end of last year RL wrote a piece in his column that plumbed new depths of utterly offensive crap. It concerned that prostitutes who were being murdered at an alarming rate in Ipswich. He basically said they were of no great loss, no one cared, it was an occupational hazard and that they chose to be there.

It was so utterly vile in its tone that at that moment he passed into that category of people who I utterly loathed, who’s total lack of humanity in receiving money for writing something that offensive sent him of the scale in terms of how much of an utter prick he really is.

Yesterday however I was told that he had made a very well made, sensibly thought out and sensibly reported film on the rise of anti-Semitism in western Europe. He was trying to draw attention to how it was on the rise and no one was challenging it while the likes of the BNP were spreading it.

Now the BNP are an utterly vile organisation, who’s leader Nick Griffin is the very epitome of human slime. He spreads hate, division, racism and homophobia where ever he and his cronies go. And he and Mr Littlejohn have had a very public falling out over the film (not that they got on anyway RL once describing NG as “knuckle scraping scum”).

Now my friend who had similar opinions on RL said that on the basis that my enemy’s enemy is my friend it made RL one of his closest friends.

I could never go that far but it has made me stop and think, how quickly should we push someone away who’s views and actions we may find contemptible when they could be a very useful ally against someone far worse?

I don’t have the answers to that one I’m afraid, but it’s worth sleeping on!