Richard Madeley has long outstayed his welcome on Good Morning Britain

On yesterday’s Good Morning Britain, Richard Madeley, the real-life Alan Partridge, wondered aloud whether the death threats received by Labour leader Keir Starmer were “that big a deal”.

Madeley said: “Now, we learned yesterday that Keir Starmer says he’s getting death threats online – people calling for his execution.” His guest, Conservative commentator Andrew Pierce, replied: “Well, I think politicians get that all the time.” Madeley obligingly added: “I was going to say, actually, is that that big a deal?”

In Madeley’s topsy-turvy world, perhaps receiving death threats from people who want you executed is actually not that bad.

However, only four months on from the killing of David Amess, the Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea who was fatally stabbed during a surgery for constituents, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Madeley might have engaged his brain before he opened his mouth.

Amess isn’t the only MP to have been killed in recent years. Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen, was murdered in 2016 by a far-right extremist.

Online threats can and do translate to offline harm – to dismiss them as “not that big a deal” is deeply ignorant and untethered to reality. It also misses another vital point, which is that a political culture where death threats are normalised is not something we should accept.

In 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn said: “I want a kinder politics”, this is what he was talking about. In the same speech, Corbyn called for an end to personal abuse in politics, something that he never engaged in as leader (or before, or since), despite being on the receiving end of the most virulent hate campaign carried out against any Labour politician – in my lifetime at least.

If our political discourse has become poisoned to the extent that death threats are just brushed off as something that MPs “get all the time”, then we need to see urgent change and a disinfecting of the political sphere – not be told to basically “get over it” by two blokes on breakfast telly.

Remember, the death threats received by Keir Starmer were triggered by our actual prime minister casually throwing out an unhinged right-wing conspiracy theory in parliament to distract from his own egregious behaviour and the lies he told to cover it up. That is where politics in this country is at present: degraded, in the gutter – and hastened there by those at the top.

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Poor Richard, he’s not the whole problem – just one part of it. Scarcely a week can go by without him making some inappropriate, misinformed or downright ignorant comment. It happens with such regularity that I’m not sure why any GMB viewers are surprised. Perhaps he’s trying to out Piers Morgan Piers Morgan.

In the last nine months alone, Madeley has victim-blamed a young woman who experienced drink spiking, conducted an inappropriate and invasive interview with the traumatised survivor of a deadly fire, made a misogynistic comment about Angela Rayner, called a climate activist a “fascist” and dubbed Oxford students “thick”. How exhausting it must be to be Richard Madeley.

Madeley was wrong to say what he did about the threats received by Starmer – as he is about so many other things. Death threats are always a big deal. They’re also a serious criminal offence in Britain. This morning, Madeley addressed the matter on GMB, reiterating the “obvious statement that death threats clearly are never acceptable”.

He said: “I tried to pose a question on one of our early discussions on the programme about how prolific online death threats are. I didn’t actually quite press it properly, I didn’t go into it enough.” If that was indeed the direction he was going in, he was doing so in a pretty opaque way.

The offensively foolish, pompous and out of touch shtick from male media personalities like Madeley isn’t just feeling tired – it has outstayed its welcome.