For a day or so last weekend, some sort of sanity seemed to have returned to European politics. As had been expected, Jean-Marie Le Pen was well beaten in the second round of the French Presidential elections, with around 82 per cent of the voters joining together to elect Jacques Chirac.

True, some voters wore clothes pegs on their noses to signal their feelings about having to support Chirac in order to see off the far-right threat, and the number of votes for Le Pen gives no grounds for complacency. But the tolerable candidate had beaten the grotesquely intolerant one. The immediate threat was gone. We could all relax just a little.

And then, on Monday, the Dutch far-right populist Pim Fortuyn was shot dead outside a radio station in Hilversum, the Netherlands.

The crime has shocked people all over Europe. We didn't think that things like that happened to politicians here, mainly because they rarely do. Before this week, no well-known European politician had been murdered since 1986, when the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was gunned down in Stockholm.

And somehow, it seemed particularly shocking that such a thing could happen in the Netherlands - nice, liberal Holland, the hippy haven with its famously easy-going attitude to cannabis. As the Dutch Labour Party leader Ad Melkert said after Fortuyn's death:
'These are things you thought were just not possible in the Netherlands.'

Fortuyn presented himself as a defender of those Dutch liberal values. To some extent, he had a vested interest in maintaining them, given that he was openly gay. His frankness about his sexuality was admirable, especially given the right-wing audience he was seeking to attract. Not many openly homosexual people have made it to the top in politics, no matter what their ideological orientation. There are still quite a lot of voters who want to see the candidate posing with a spouse and children on their election leaflets.

So even if Fortuyn had been a centrist or left-wing politician, his honesty would have been commendable. But the idea of a proudly gay leader of the far right seems almost like a contradiction in terms. Neo-fascists, or even hard-line conservatives, are not noted for their broad-mindedness on questions of sexual orientation. He was liable to get the most personal hostility from the very people his most controversial policies might have been expected to attract.

Fortuyn was, therefore, brave to demand equality for gay and lesbian people. There was just one very large snag. He believed that gay rights, and those of women, could only be protected by denying the rights of others - specifically, those of Muslims and other would-be immigrants to the Netherlands. He proposed changing the Dutch constitution in order to make it possible for the country's immigration service to discriminate against Muslims, and allowing no more Muslim immigration into the Netherlands. In fact, he didn't want much more immigration into the Netherlands at all.

In short, he fought some pernicious prejudices, only to promote others.

None of which comes anywhere near justifying the monstrous, cowardly crime that was committed in Hilversum on Monday. The way to stop people with pernicious ideas is to humiliate them on election day, not to resort to murder.

The main reason for that is, of course, that killing people is wrong. But there is another important reason, and that is that you can't assassinate an idea. In the news coverage of the mass demonstrations in the Netherlands after the murder, those who were interviewed kept saying the same thing: that they wouldn't have voted for Fortuyn, but that the killing had nevertheless upset them deeply. The sense of shock and grief was overwhelming.

Most touching of all, for me, was the sight of a young woman in a headscarf. She explained that she was a Muslim, and that she therefore obviously disagreed with Fortuyn's attitudes. But, she said, when people had wrong ideas, you talked to them and tried to persuade them to change. You didn't resort to violence. She looked and sounded close to tears. Like so many others, she was horrified that such a thing could happen here, of all places, in her homeland.

Next week, a traumatised nation will go to the polls. The Dutch election scheduled for next Wednesday is to go ahead, and the Lijst Fortuyn party that Fortuyn founded will still be standing. The immediate shock and mourning will be over, but the murder will still inevitably overshadow everything else in the election. There'll be lots of understandable sympathy for Fortuyn's bereaved colleagues in Lijst Fortuyn.

I sincerely hope that the sympathy will stop at the polling station, and that Dutch electorate will emphatically reject Lijst Fortuyn. The great danger must be that some will vote LF as a protest against the murder, as a protest against political violence in general, or as a way of paying their respects to the murdered man. But the policies that Lijst Fortuyn stands for are just as wrong and divisive now as they were before the party's leader was so cruelly cut down.

You can't kill an idea - but you can reject it. And most of Lijst Fortuyn's ideas, especially on matters of race, should be firmly rejected.

Meanwhile, here in Britain, we lost one of the political heroines of my youth: Barbara Castle, whose passing was thankfully a peaceful one, in her sleep at the age of 91.

Ms Castle often publicly disagreed with Tony Blair's government in her later years, but the Prime Minister nevertheless paid a warm tribute to her.

He said:
'She was a radical and independent spirit... an extraordinary pioneer for women in politics. She was courageous, determined, tireless and principled, she was never afraid to speak her mind or stand up for her beliefs. Britain has lost a great political figure, and the Labour movement a heroine.'

How different the UK might have been if it had been Ms Castle - or Lady Castle, as she became - had been the country's first female Prime Minister instead of Margaret Thatcher. Even without becoming PM, she did more for women than Thatcher ever did. She became a cabinet minister in the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s, serving as transport minister and as social services secretary.

As transport secretary, Castle made a lot of enemies when she introduced the breathalyser test to detect drunken drivers. Few would now question the principle that getting drunk and then getting behind the wheel of a car was a stupid, irresponsible thing to do, but at the time many drivers spluttered that preventing them from drinking and driving was an outrageous infringement of their civil liberties. Ms Castle replied that she'd rather like the freedom not to be run down by a drunken driver.

As social services secretary, she introduced child welfare benefit, a significant financial boost to poorer families. She also did much to create the Equal Pay Act, Britain's first legislation demanding that employers pay women and men the same pay for the same job.

Even in old age, Castle remained politically active. She became an outspoken champion of pensioners' rights, a stance that often brought her into conflict with the Blair administration. When the government introduced a tiny increase in the weekly pension, she contemptuously called the amount of the increase: 'a fair price for a bag of peanuts.'

But for all her political fire, she always retained a sense of humour. Once, when asked for her opinion of the Queen, Castle kindly described Elizabeth II as 'a fellow professional'.

Barbara Castle was a true professional, and a real inspiration.

With so much tragedy around in world politics at present, it was just as well that the English local elections provided a moment of light relief, with the election of H'Angus The Monkey as mayor of Hartlepool.

For those who don't know, it should perhaps be explained that H'Angus is in fact a man named Stuart Drummond, who campaigned in the monkey costume he wore until recently as mascot of the local soccer team, Hartlepool United. The unusual name of the mascot came from a famous incident during the Napoleonic Wars, when a group of people from Hartlepool hanged a monkey because they believed it to be a French spy - hence the fact that Hartlepool people are, to this day, nicknamed 'monkey hangers'.

Rather disappointingly, Mr Drummond appears to have started taking himself seriously since he won the election. He has now handed in his monkey suit, and started asking to be known by his real name. I hope the good people of Hartlepool will insist that he fulfils the main pledge he made during the campaign: free bananas for schoolchildren.

I myself received an offer of alternative employment as a result of the local elections last week. As mentioned in previous columns, my local polling station is in Bradford's red-light district. Even if you go there during the daylight hours, as I did last week, there are under-dressed young women standing around on the streets.

I ended up standing on one of those streets myself for a minute or so, waiting for a gap in the traffic so that I could cross the road and get to the polling station. As I did so, a car sped by containing two women. As they passed, one of them shouted to me through the passenger window: 'How much, love?'

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