Where the heck was Starmer? When Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood grudgingly made a 1.40pm Commons statement on Henry Nowak’s murder, the Prime Minister was absent. Back in 1999, Jack Straw gave the House his reaction to the death of Stephen Lawrence and Tony Blair sat beside him. Blair had a nose for public sentiment.
Sir Keir lacks that. He is a vacuum, a void, no more substantial than the white feather under some conjuror’s silk kerchief.
While other politicians commented on this dreadful murder, Sir Keir crouched in Downing Street. All we had from him until late afternoon was a faceless official’s line that the matter had been discussed at Cabinet mid-morning. The PM spent the rest of his time meeting the president of Ghana and the leader of the Belarusian opposition. Priorities.
Finally, at 5pm, came a TV clip in which Sir Keir claimed, twice, that he ‘felt sick’ when he saw the Nowak footage.
By then the sulphuric acid had long been uncorked. Nigel Farage produced an 8am video, shot in the Surrey countryside while en route to an airport to reach Makerfield for a day’s by-election campaigning. In his seven-minute film he called for national ‘pure, cold rage’ at the Nowak murder.
Mr Farage’s performance, fluent but unscripted, alleged media complicity in ‘anti-white prejudice’ surrounding the murder. There had been ‘silence, absolute silence’ from journalists, he claimed, jabbing a finger at the camera.
I’m afraid this allegation was ignorant or outrageous. Exactly what did Mr Farage think the judge would have said had we all been writing about the case willy-nilly before last week’s verdict? Kemi Badenoch appeared on ITV’s breakfast show soon after the Farage video was released. She expressed outrage at the murder, and at times seemed to well with emotion, but she managed, furthermore, to avoid agitating for rage and division.
While other politicians commented on Henry Nowak’s dreadful murder, Sir Keir crouched in Downing Street for most of the day, until he greeted the president of Ghana, says Quentin Letts
‘Enough of this nonsense where we keep separating everybody!’ she said.
Before too long Mr Farage’s former colleague, now rival, Restore’s Rupert Lowe, was pogo-sticking about on social media, demanding public approval to execute Henry Nowak’s murderer. From Texas, Mr Lowe’s billionaire employer Elon Musk brought his characteristic understatement and calm to the issue with a series of X posts speaking of death and racism.
He and others kept using that powerful, ghostly image from the police body-cam footage of Henry Nowak’s handcuffed palm, eerily white amid the blue-latex-gloved hands of our supposed protectors.
At Westminster we heard that the Commons statement would be delivered by one of the Home Secretary’s understrappers, Sarah Jones.
Happily Ms Mahmood saw sense and did it herself. She spoke of the murder as ‘evil’ and for a few minutes it worked. She was a petite, neat ball of moral firmness.
Yet as the session continued, that initial favourable impression faded. Her staccato voice lacked variety. She insisted that ‘there can of course be no suggestion of two-tier policing – no one would ever stand for that’; but that was exactly what was being suggested in households up and down the kingdom. Too many police officers and politicians have indeed ‘stood for’ and even encouraged it.
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Many in the Commons finally seemed to see this yet the Government was slow to the realisation.
Sikh MPs were aghast at the murder. Gurinder Josan (Lab, Smethwick) struggled with his habitual ineloquence, and somehow that lent sincerity to his remarks. A sorrow expressed clumsily can be more persuasive than one that is spoken off-pat. Tan Dhesi (Lab, Slough) noted the wartime patriotism of Sikhs and accused the absent Mr Farage of ‘politicising people’s pain’. Richard Tice (Ref, Boston) shouted ‘absolute rubbish!’ and ‘shame on you!’ at Mr Dhesi.
Sir Edward Leigh (Con, Gainsborough) said many white people felt the police were ‘so terrified of being called racist’ that they under-reacted, as in the rape-gangs scandal, or over-reacted, as in the Nowak case. There was ‘a role for the Home Secretary’.
There is a role for a Prime Minister, too, if we had one.
