There’s a time when politicians should know to keep silent. We all want answers to the horrific attack on the dance club in Southport that left three children dead and five others critically injured. We want to make sense of the senseless. It’s a normal coping mechanism. We need to feel as if we are in control. Even when it’s obvious that we aren’t.
Because sometimes the answers are slow to reveal themselves. Sometimes there are no answers. Not ones we want, certainly. The trick is to be able to wait. To live with the feelings, however unbearable. To endure the tragedy. Not to try to will it away. Grief can be a waiting game.
It was right that Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper should have visited the scene of the murder on Monday to lay flowers. To try to give words to the unimaginable. None of us can know what the victims’ families are going through. We are the lucky ones in this. Spared the immediate sense of loss.
Formality demands that something is said by the prime minister and the home secretary, but no one pays that much attention. The sentences are bog standard. Cut and pasted from previous prime ministerial appearances at such tragedies. The shock. The call for calm. The promise that justice will be done. The insistence that such a crime must never happen again. Though somehow it always does. Horror has a way of endlessly reinventing itself. Not all of us play by the same rules.
It was also right that the local MP, Patrick Hurley, should have made a brief statement after the rioting on Tuesday night. The people of Southport are his constituents and he has been elected to be their public voice. But everyone else should take a step back. Did we really need to know what the Green party’s response to the rioting was? Of course not. Though that didn’t stop them issuing a public statement.
Did we really need to know James Cleverly thought that the government should crack down hard on the rioters and online disinformation? As if Starmer and Cooper were kicking back their heels and thinking: “You know what? Those rioters have had a tough few days. Maybe we should go easy on them this once.” And, in any case, it’s all a bit much from a Conservative party that has done so much damage in the past few years by stoking culture wars.
But all this is fairly low-grade performative politics compared with Nigel Farage’s latest offering. Late on Tuesday afternoon, the home secretary gave a statement to the Commons on the Southport murders. Here was Nige’s chance to put any questions he might have had about the tragedy directly to Cooper. Except he was nowhere to be seen. For someone who has been so desperate, for so long, to become an MP – he was successful at his eighth attempt – he spends little time in Westminster. It’s not nearly a big enough stage for him.
So where was Farage? In his Clacton constituency? Don’t be silly. He had taken to his own Facebook page and X to deliver his message to the country, bypassing parliament. As if he thought he was the one who should be running the UK. As if he were a man of some importance. Not some bottom-feeding grifter.
Nige began with some platitudes. He was shocked by what had happened. His heart went out to the families. Only you would be pushed to have found much compassion there. Like many narcissists, he’s incapable of genuine emotion for anyone other than himself.
Then we got to the nitty-gritty. There were rumours swirling around about the person who committed this terrible act. That would be the rumours on far-right conspiracy websites. We weren’t being told the whole truth, he declared. Some say the suspect was being monitored by the security services. Others say he wasn’t. We were left with little doubt which version of the truth Nige preferred.
“The police have said this is a non-terror incident,” said Farage, his face a picture of scepticism. For Nige, any police denial is an admission of guilt. Everything merely fuels Farage’s certainty. Why are we being told by police only that the suspect is a 17-year-old boy who was born in Cardiff? The fact that it’s the law not to reveal the identity of anyone under the age of 18 accused of a crime is cast aside. In Farage’s world, it’s all part of the same conspiracy.
There has been no comment from Farage since a mob of far-right extremists converged on Southport to attack the mosque. Quick to incite hatred on Tuesday, he has been slow to condemn it the day after. An apology would be too much to expect. Sorry isn’t in his vocabulary. He has learned well from Donald Trump.
Southport, meanwhile, tries to heal itself as best it can. Some local people have been out rebuilding the wall outside the mosque that was knocked down in the rioting. They will have to live there long after the politicians have left the scene. They know that the bottom line is that there can be no guarantees. The human condition is messy. Bad things happen to good people. They always have and always will.
