The lesson of Peter Grimes

'We shall tame his arrogance!' screams the angry crowd. 'We'll make the murderer pay for his crime.' And they set off in pursuit of the man they think has killed a child. Peter Grimes is always a gripping and chilling opera, but the superb performance at Glyndebourne last week took on fresh layers of meaning.

Two boys die in the care of the tragic, hopeless Grimes; and we were sitting in Sussex, not many miles from where Sarah Payne's body had been found a fortnight before. Grimes is pursued to his death by a vengeful mob; and we weren't very far from Portsmouth where, on Thursday night, another mob acted out the News of the World 's 'name and shame' campaign by attacking the home of a supposed paedophile before the paper suspended its campaign.

Whenever I see Peter Grimes, I find I've forgotten what an ambiguous work it is. 'Heroes' aren't always heroic - Othello kills his wife, Tristan betrays King Mark's trust, Faust sells his soul - but Grimes is especially problematic: doomed and pathetic, but impossible to love. He is boorish to those who try to help him, and brutal to the boy apprentice who does, after all, die in his charge, as his previous apprentice had.

It is an opera that could describe the crime of paedophilia and how we should deal with it. Before the News of the World paused in its rabble-rousing, several writers, including two in the Guardian, said that the paper should not be condemned out of hand. Rebekah Wade's motives aren't mercenary or meretricious, one assured us; parents welcomed the exposure, insisted another. And the News of the World (in its completely uncynical way) had enlisted Sarah's own parents.

To say that we have by now seen and heard enough of Gordon and Sara Payne might seem harsh, but it's obvious that they are the last people whose opinion should be sought at this time. Unlike the childless Miss Wade, I write that as someone with two children close in age to Sarah, and someone who doesn't automatically think that child abusers, or other criminals, are victims of society. To any parent the very idea of a child's violent death is unimaginable, something to be suppressed from one's consciousness. Still, I can just about envisage what my reaction would be if it happened to my daughter. I would quite likely, in the moment, want her killer to be burned at the stake or broken on the wheel, which is exactly why my views should not be acted on.

What is the rule of law for if not to canalise individual rage and to objectify vengeance as justice? Peter Grimes vividly shows the decline from justice to vengeance. At the beginning, Peter is in front of a coroner's inquest after his apprentice has died at sea. The verdict is accidental death. 'But that's the kind of thing that people are apt to remember,' the coroner grimly adds, as the News of the World would agree. By the end pursued by the mob chanting 'we'll destroy!' Grimes is driven to his end. Vengeance is theirs, and justice has been frustrated, as it is when our own mobs attack the homes of supposed paedophiles.

For a newspaper to claim that this is in the public interest is not only hypocritical but false. Against the utter horror one child's murder arouses in every parent is the fact that only half a dozen or so children are killed every year by strangers in this country (far more are killed or abused by their own parents). And against the News of the World 's pretence that it is performing a service is the voice of a woman on Friday saying triumphantly that 'we've cleared the rubbish out,' the boast of every lynch mob, from Crabbe's and Britten's 'Borough' to Portsmouth.

That shattering and rather horrible opera does not offer easy answers, and certainly doesn't point to any. If one had to draw a political moral from his story it would be that criminals may deserve prosecution, but not persecution. That's a distinction which editors and journalists should be able to grasp without the help of great music.