Will the usual suspects resist the temptation to exploit the Southport horror for their own ends?

A blame game over the Southport killings has started, writes Joe Murphy. On one side of the battleground is the prime minister, the police and the bulk of the traditional media – on the other side are the new political insurgents, led in the UK by Nigel Farage

It is normal for a blame game to break out after a national tragedy. But responses to the Southport atrocity point to a more profound battle – not about culpability and prevention, but about who you can trust.

On one side of the battleground are the prime minister, the police and the bulk of the traditional media with its professional reporters and fact-checkers. On the other side are the new political insurgents, led in the UK by Nigel Farage, with their digital legions of disruptors and conspiracy theorists that are amplified and rewarded by Elon Musk.

Somewhere in the middle is the official opposition; a Conservative Party struggling to resolve its own identity and torn between a traditional instinct for acting responsibly – and its growing fear of losing to Reform’s more swashbuckling approach.

Today’s hearing heard harrowing evidence of Axel Rudakubana’s savage behaviour, including that he inflicted sadistic levels of violence towards some victims and told police he was “happy” that he had killed children. A victim impact statement from dance teacher Leanne Lucas, stabbed in the back, said the violent misfit “targeted us because we were women and girls”.

Responding to the hearing, Keir Starmer called it “an atrocity” and “one of the most harrowing moments in our country’s history”.

“We owe it to these innocent young girls and all those affected to deliver the change that they deserve,” he said, without specifying what the change would mean.

In her response, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch condemned Rudakubana’s “barbaric” attack, but also chose to highlight some of the issues that are constantly raised by right-wing disruptors, including “the transparency of information during and after the unrest that followed”.

Badenoch also said she would not duck “hard truths” and she would “not hesitate to challenge the prime minister on the task he has to ensure that those we welcome into Britain share our values”. It was “absurd” that the prime minister was debating online knife sales rather than “how we safeguard our society from extreme ideologies”.

My statement on the sentencing of Axel Rudakubana. pic.twitter.com/vtqtqMRpUn

— Kemi Badenoch (@KemiBadenoch) January 23, 2025

Her comments gave oxygen to three allegations made by Farage and his online allies. First, that there is a state cover-up of the facts about the Southport atrocity; second, that it was an act of ideologically driven terrorism, which elements of the right suggest must mean Islamic terrorism; third, that immigration was a relevant factor – despite the plain fact that Rudakubana was born in Cardiff 18 years ago.

Reform MPs responded to the sentencing by calling for the return of hanging, ignoring the inconvenient fact that UK law prohibited the death penalty for people aged under 18 at the time of their crime. “This is what is required!” tweeted Lee Anderson MP next to a picture of a noose.

Farage did not wait for the end of the hearing before stepping up his own campaign to assert there was “an appalling cover-up” of evidence that Rudakubana was a terrorist. In a letter to deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, he demanded she apologise for having accused him of “conspiracy theories”. Farage’s original remarks were made in the immediate aftermath of the attacks last July, at a time when riots were feared, fuelled by online claims that the killer must be an immigrant and an Islamist. Farage speculated: “I just wonder if the truth is being withheld from us.”

Whether the murders should be classified as a terrorist attack, rather than the actions of a misogynist obsessed with violence, is bound to be a matter of debate. The definition in law of terrorism requires an ideological motivation, which Rudakubana appears to lack, but the prime minister has suggested that new legislation may extend the definition to lone misfits in order that preventative powers can be more widely used.

Although Rudakubana pleaded guilty to two terrorism charges – possession of ricin poison, and downloading an al-Qaeda training manual – these facts, which were only made public three months after the attacks, do not necessarily prove a cover-up took place.

The training manual, for example, led some to assume Rudakubana had been hooked on al-Qaeda websites and propaganda. However, we learned from prosecutors that he had downloaded “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants: The al-Qaeda Training Manual”, an academic paper by a professor of political psychology at George Washington University. This paper does include the manual, but it is annotated with scholarly comments. I found it freely available online – not published by al-Qaeda but by the United States Air Force Counterproliferation Center, whose address is Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.

In addition to brewing ricin in a Tupperware container under his bed, Rudakubana possessed dozens of weapons, including multiple knives, a machete and arrows. These details may suggest an obsessive desire to kill motivated him, rather than ideology.

Sentencing, Mr Justice Goose said speculation about whether or not the attack was an act of terrorism “misses the point”. It was “equivalent” to terrorism because of the extreme level of violence, but did not fit the legal definition as it lacked a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.

Starmer has signalled new laws to restrict online sales of knives in future, with two-part authentication to prove a buyer is 18. When The Sun gave its front page to Starmer criticism of Amazon for supplying Rudakubana with his murder weapon, Boris Johnson’s former chief of staff at No 10, Dominic Cummings, now an outspoken admirer of Musk, sneered in a tweet: “How the bullshit old media works & why nobody trusts it any more – desperate spin doctors try to shift blame from Whitehall’s uselessness to AMAZON and the Sun r****** swallow it.” Cummings concluded: “Lucky for us @elonmusk bought Twitter.”

While it may be fair to say that Starmer’s plans have a whiff of something must-be-done-ism about them, Cummings’s intervention was designed to direct a confused public to trust the internet rather than newspapers or ministers.

He may be pushing at an open door. Despite the proliferation of fantasies and lies dressed up as truths by online writers, Ofcom recently revealed that internet platforms have overtaken TV channels as the most popular source of news in the UK. Some 71 per cent of UK adults consume online news, with 70 per cent using television, marking a “generational shift”.

But the disorder that followed the Southport killings has already shown the dangers of online misinformation and far-right exploitation. Among myriad false assertions that notched up millions of views was a claim by the alleged rapist Andrew Tate on X (Twitter), who told nearly 10 million followers the killer had come “straight off a boat”. Right-winger Tommy Robinson and former mayoral contender Laurence Fox implied Islam was to blame.

The disrupters were active again during the sentencing hearing. Musk retweeted to his 214 million followers a post from a right-wing commentator containing sensitive disclosure which the television news channels had hitherto declined to publish out of consideration for the distressed relatives.

Dan Wootton, the former GB News presenter and online pundit, alleged on X: “The MSM [mainstream media] cover up of the Southport Massacre continues.” He then added other details that traditional media decided were too horrendous to report.

There is no doubt that serious failings occurred over Rudakubana that, in Starmer’s words, “leap off the page” but in the reaction to the distressing revelations from the sentencing hearing, the question is whether politicians and pundits will resist the temptation to exploit the tragedy for their own ends.