3 hours ago
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The email invitation arrived shortly after 7am. Nigel Farage would be making an “address to the nation” an hour later. The grandiosity. The self-importance. An address to the nation is something usually delivered by the monarch or the prime minister during an emergency. Not from a leader of a political party with just eight MPs.
There again, pomposity is now Nige’s last resort. A few months ago, we would all have been invited to a press conference in central London. Now he is a virtual prisoner in his own home. Afraid to subject himself to awkward questions about the £5m he says he was “gifted” from a Thai crypto billionaire. So Reform is effectively leaderless. All we get to see of Nige is the occasional video from an indeterminate location. He is a man determined not to be found by anyone.
The feed cut in. This time he appeared to be in the middle of a field. As many of us had guessed, it turned out he wanted to talk about the brutal murder of Henry Nowak last December. An 18-year-old man who was handcuffed by the police as he lay dying after the killer stabbed him and falsely accused him of racism.
After the court had delivered its verdict on Monday, Henry’s father had given a dignified and moving statement. He asked that politicians not use his son’s death as a chance to promote their own agendas. “We don’t want his death used to create further division, hatred or tension,” Mark Nowak said.
All of which was water off a duck’s back to Farage. Because Nige is just not the kind of guy to miss out. Who cared what Henry’s dad had to say? Their tragedy was just their tragedy. Farage wasn’t going to let such a golden opportunity go to waste.
Division, hatred and tension? Bring them on. They were his life blood. He can’t survive without them. And what better time to use them then now? Just lately Reform has been losing support to Restore in the Makerfield byelection. Now was the time to try to bring the 3% of the country who are out-and-out racists back into the fold. Time to let the bigots know that he hadn’t gone soft.
Farage began by saying he was going to play the body-cam footage of Henry’s last moments. Thankfully, he didn’t realise there had been a technical glitch and that all we could see was footage of Nige continuing to look gormless in a field. Farage then repeated Henry’s last words, “I can’t breathe”, comparing them to George Floyd, whom he described as a “career criminal”. Only there was no comparison. Floyd was murdered by a police officer. Nowak was murdered by Vickrum Digwa, a young Sikh man who was obsessed with knives.
Yet for Nige, the murder wasn’t a personal tragedy for the Nowak family. It was a tragedy that had been years in the making. A story of mass immigration. Black and brown people coming to this country with the expressed intention of killing white people. British culture was under threat. So much so, there was now two-tier policing where the benefit of the doubt was given to foreigners. This was diversity, equity and inclusion gone mad. The streets were no longer safe for white people. He had this on the word of Allison Pearson, a columnist so mad even the Telegraph doesn’t promote her stories any more.
Britain was unrecognisable as the country it once was, Nige said. It was time for the big white fightback. No matter that when a white person is killed by a foreigner, it is the cue to repress minorities still further and when a black person is killed by a white person, it is the black person’s fault for being here in the first place. An unmissable provocation.
Henry’s family had responded with dignity. Farage was not about to do the same. “It is time to respond with pure cold rage,” he suggested. An invitation to violence. Riots, as in Southport. Who to take it out on? One is too many and a thousand never enough. There’s bound to be a potential killer among them somewhere. Nige ended by saying he feared where the country would be in a couple of years’ time. Him and me both.
There was no sign of Farage in the Commons later in the day when home secretary Shabana Mahmood made a statement on Nowak’s murder. Of course there wasn’t. Nige can’t be seen in Westminster. Too many people might spot him. Better to be under house arrest. Instead, there were just his Reform outriders of Robert Jenrick, Richard Tice, Suella Braverman and Lee Anderson.
Mahmood tried to play it straight. As the prosecution had also said, she asked MPs not to treat this as a trial about Sikhs or racism. It was murder, pure and simple. Though of course the police must be asked to account for their actions. She too was at pains to keep the politics out of the tragedy.
A plea that was wasted on the shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, who went in Farage-lite. It had only been his intervention that had forced the government to make a statement. An outright lie. A statement had always been planned. The Philpster then brought up the cases of Valdo Calocane and Axel Rudakubana, as if this proved that the whole of Britain was institutionally racist. Rather than these were the exceptions. Philp can lower himself to any occasion.
The Lib Dem Max Wilkinson and Labour’s Tan Dhesi both called out Reform for exploiting the tragedy to promote their own racist ends. Tice boorishly tried to shout them down with cries of “Rubbish”. Dicky really is a beta male. Destined to never amount to anything but a cheerleader for Nige. He doesn’t even realise he will never get any thanks for it. The point about Dicky is that he will always be dispensable. Collateral damage.
Jenrick used his moment to insist “white lives matter”. Whites were now the embattled minority in a country run for and by foreigners. It must stick in his throat that Mahmood is of Pakistani descent. Shabana suggested that now was not the time to pit white Britons against black Britons. It was way too late for that.
