Which murder victim’s ambulance does the would-be statesman chase? Can you be said to “speak for England” if there are other times you wimp out on speaking at all, either out of self-preservation or moral smallness, or just not actually giving much of a toss? The questions arise after Nigel Farage moved himself into pole position with an explicitly incendiary speech in the wake of the appalling murder of Henry Nowak.
The good news for Nigel is that he has struck political gold: increased numbers of people saying “I don’t like him, but I agree with him on this”. The less good news for the nation he’d like to lead is that, when dealing with murders that rightly horrify and outrage the country, you can’t be sure which Nigel Farage will turn up. If, indeed, he turns up at all. Today, I’d like to look at three murders spread evenly over the past decade – all of which caused national outrage – and how Farage conducted himself in the wake of each.
The first murder is that of Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen, who was murdered outside her constituency surgery during the 2016 EU referendum campaign by a far-right terrorist who shouted “Britain first” as he shot and stabbed her. She was 41. While other political leaders met the moment, Farage vanished from it entirely. He did not, as he did this week, hire a last-minute Airbnb and use its idyllic rural scenery as backdrop for an address to the nation. In fact, Farage went to ground for days. When he resurfaced, his deepest thoughts appeared to be with the momentum of his campaign. “I think we had momentum before this terrible tragedy,” he reflected wanly. “When you are taking on the establishment you need to have momentum.” Will no one think of the momentum? Eight days after Cox’s murder, Farage’s referendum victory speech crowed about doing it “without a single bullet being fired”.
The second murder was that of Sarah Everard, who was kidnapped in London in 2021 by a serving police officer. He drove her to Kent, where he raped and strangled her before burning her body. She was 33. On this occasion, Farage did have something to say. And that was: “We must not allow the tragic murder of a young woman to turn into attacks on men and attacks on the police.” Why did he not feel moved to coin a phrase like “women’s lives matter”? As they were crying out to tell people during that febrile time, women had good reason to have lost faith in policing and justice. Less than 1% of reported rapes in England and Wales led to a conviction. Five years on, only 2.8% of recorded rapes even lead to a charge or summons within a year. When police broke up a peaceful vigil for Everard, arresting and cuffing attenders, Farage does not seem to have made a statement at all. Later, he would say: “When we saw the [Wayne] Couzens case, I thought it was horrific, but you know what, you’re going to get one bad person in any large group of people.”
Even two weeks ago, when three teenage boys were spared custodial sentences for raping two girls, Nigel doesn’t seem to have emerged from the silence that followed the discovery of his £5m gift from a crypto billionaire to make a statement about no-tier justice for women. These days, his slogan is “Only Reform will protect women and girls”. Will they? Feels like quite a punt.
The third murder is that of Henry Nowak, the student who was stabbed by a Sikh man in Southampton, and to whose final moments the police were summoned by the murderer on the lying pretext that he had been racially abused. Henry died in handcuffs, telling police he couldn’t breathe. He was 18. In the wake of the murderer’s conviction, Henry’s father explicitly asked that his death not “be used to create further division, hatred or tension”. Yet here, at last, is a murder Farage seems to have decided he could go all-in on. He hired the Airbnb. He told us what it said about our country.
But the thing about these three murders is that they told ALL of us something about the state of the nation. Separately, they told us things about radicalisation, misogyny, institutional failure, women’s sense of their safety within society, toxic political culture, race, policing, the folly of imagining our problems to be the same as the US’s, the misuse of the law – and so much more. So many things. And when you are prime minister, you are prime minister of all the things. Not just the ones you happen to truly care about, or think will give you a leg-up.
This week, Farage explicitly summoned anger, and many suspect we’ll be seeing more of it on our streets this summer. Nigel is the sorcerer’s apprentice and anger is the magic he thinks he can control. Yet he isn’t a courageous statesman and he never has been. A lot of people don’t care about that now, when they’re righteously angry, which is understandable. But a lot of them will end up caring about the fallout from that lack of courage and statesmanship in the end, if he makes it to Downing Street. If you want to speak for a nation, you should speak consistently, even when it is hard. You should listen to people, even if they’re not your natural constituency. And you should turn up, always – not just when it suits or moves you. Otherwise, what are you? Nothing but a two-tier politician.
