Pure, Cold Rage. Warm, Clean Hands.

When does anger become leadership? And who takes responsibility when that anger escapes the television studio?

Photo by Elliot Sloman on Unsplash

Barely 24 hours after I made the note that Nigel Farage had been conspicuous in his absence, out he came, scurrying in front of a camera.

With an “emergency address” no less, sounding for all the world like he was not only measuring the curtains for Number 10, but already waving away the movers who had just decamped all his bits.

The first thing to acknowledge here is that the failures of police in the arrest of Henry Nowak are egregious. This, I am very sad to say, is also not a new thing.

There have been far too many instances of the police in recent years doing anything but acting in the public interest, and this is especially true when it comes to women and minorities.

Whether it be the failures internally that allowed the murderer of Sarah Everard to remain employed in the Met even after years of very serious misconduct, the inaction taken against David Carrick that gave him carte blanche to sexually assault scores of women, or the complete and total disinterest in the case of Stephen Port that allowed him to murder four young men, it is fair to say that policing in this country is foundationally broken.

The root causes for this are manifold, and deserve a piece all on their own.

Farage’s intervention this week follows a pattern that while not specific to the man, is certainly one that he has honed into a fine political art - the innate ability to identify genuine public anger around an issue and weaponising it to his ends.

Like I already mentioned, police failures are absolutely not new, and we deserve to continue the conversations already started by the likes of the reports from Baroness Casey, however, this is not what Farage is suggesting.

If this were, truly, about policing, Farage’s politics and history would look far, far different. He would be talking about accountability, recruitment, oversight, institutional culture, austerity, public trust, leadership, complaints handling, training and the torturously long collapse of public trust in the men and women who are supposed to protect us.

He would be asking for recognition that police failure doesn’t just affect one group, but many, and not just jumping onto the most convenient window for his worldview. Because the failure by the police sometimes looks like racism. Sometimes it looks like misogyny. Other times it’s homophobia or class based discrimination or just outright incompetence. Far too often, it’s a miserable, fatal cocktail of the whole lot.

Farage, however, has zero interest in that sort of analysis, because ultimately looking at something with nuance and context doesn’t produce the emotional surge that he needs to promote himself. Saying that police failures affect whole communities and we need to invest and modernise policing, doesn’t get an already angry person off their sofa to chuck stones at police.

It also has another political benefit.

Until this week, one of the more awkward conversations surrounding Reform UK concerned the £5 million donation from Christopher Harborne and the increasingly convoluted explanations that have followed. Questions about the source of information, allegations of phone hacking, whether the matter was reported to the appropriate authorities, and the broader relationship between Reform and one of its largest financial backers were beginning to gather momentum.

They aren’t gathering much momentum now.

Instead, the political conversation has shifted exactly where Farage is most comfortable: away from questions he must answer and towards questions he can ask. Away from scrutiny and towards outrage. Away from the mechanics of power and back into the emotional territory where he has spent most of his political career operating.

That may be fortunate timing. It may be coincidence, however, it is difficult to ignore the fact that a story raising uncomfortable questions for Nigel Farage has been rapidly replaced by one in which Nigel Farage once again gets to play the role of angry outsider.

Which is, what has happened, and in scenes that were worryingly reminiscent of the Southport riots from July and August 2024, protests and demonstrations broke out in Southampton tonight, leading to 11 officers being injured.

Whether or not Farage’s statement yesterday led directly or indirectly to these injuries will be debated ad nauseam by the commentariat and Twitterati for months to come. What is undeniable, however, is that he chose to pour “pure, cold rage” into a political environment that was already running dangerously hot.

It leads me to an incredible sense of frustration, this. The fact that his words will help spur on hurt and violence and anger and hate - and he can walk away. Each time.

And I’m in no way at all saying people shouldn’t be angry - I’m angry that there has been yet another egregious failure by police to treat a young man with respect. I’m furious that his family are now left looking for answers that should not have been necessary in the first place, and that public confidence in policing has yet again been allowed to break down to the point where incidents like this start to feel familiar - regardless of ethnicity, gender or class.

Anger, however, is not the same thing as leadership.

Leadership needs you to do something more than simply identify an issue, problem or grievance and pointing at it while shouting loudly into people’s hearts - it needs a willingness to channel all that frustration, anger and “pure, cold rage” into solutions, accountability and reform. It needs you to accept a certain amount of responsibility for the atmosphere that you yourself have helped to create.

All of this is absent in all that Nigel Farage does - and there is zero repercussion for that absence.

Today, eleven police officers are injured. People have been arrested. Southampton is dealing with unrest. A city is now arguing about itself. And at the centre of all of it sits the death of an eighteen-year-old whose father publicly pleaded for his son’s murder not to become a political football.

That, perhaps, is the greatest tragedy here.

Henry Nowak’s family needed answers. They needed accountability. They needed a serious conversation about why their son was failed so catastrophically by people who were supposed to protect him.

Instead, within hours of Farage standing in front of a camera, decrying his “pure, cold rage”, the story had become yet another front in Britain’s endless culture war. Another opportunity for politicians and voices on the right like to harvest outrage, feed it back into the system and then step aside when the consequences arrive.

Tomorrow Nigel Farage will move on to the next grievance, the next betrayal, the next emergency. Henry Nowak’s family, however, will still be grieving. And the rest of us will still be left with the same broken institutions, the same unanswered questions and eleven injured police officers as a reminder that anger is easy to ignite, but much harder to control once it catches light.