That is the claim still being made by Farage and his allies: on Monday, he posted a new video about Rudakubana’s referrals to Prevent and said: “The cover-up has been a disgrace. I was right all along.” On the timing of his initial intervention, when the frenzy over the false claims about the suspect were at their zenith, the Reform leader had nothing to say.
But if “cover-up” means a voluntary withholding of information that ought to be public, probably with an eye on political or professional advantage, then the answer is clear: no.
The initial disinformation is straightforward to deal with: those claims were untrue, and demonstrably dangerous, in that they fuelled the riots that convulsed much of the UK in the aftermath of the attack.
There was a window of a few hours as the rumours circulated before the police said that the suspect was not an immigrant. But since that information might have dispelled the disinformation rather than showing it to be true, and since there was no visible benefit to keeping it quiet, we can probably attribute that to flat-footed media management while dealing with a terrible crime.
The second claim, that information showing that Rudakubana was a terrorist was maliciously withheld, needs a bit more unpacking.
There are two issues here. One is the complicated legal process attached to eventually charging Rudakubana with terrorist offences but not designating the attack itself an act of terrorism.
That will seem absurd to many people, but it is also a matter of law, rather than interpretation. Vikram Dodd has a useful explainer on the issues involved here. And we should reserve judgment on how the definition was applied here until after the sentencing hearing on Thursday.
The other is about contempt of court. As Starmer acknowledged yesterday, it is true that he and many others knew some of the details to emerge after Rudakubana’s guilty plea early on. But as any journalist covering the case would know, publishing information that risks collapsing a jury trial is a serious matter.
It is standard practice for anything that might prejudice a jury to be held back until a trial is over or there has been a guilty plea, and that’s what happened here. If Jenrick had been genuinely concerned that the legal process be respected, he would not have made his incendiary comments.
It is probably unrealistic to expect everyone who sees a headline about Southport and an alleged cover-up to have absorbed all of these details. But that only increases the responsibility on public figures to avoid misleading claims. That is all the more important in the context of the initial disinformation and riots, which fuelled a persistent narrative that the state was refusing to admit that multiculturalism was ultimately to blame.
What lessons can we draw from all this?
The fact that the cover-up claims are ill founded doesn’t mean that there aren’t many lessons to be drawn from the Southport case.
For the police, there could hardly be a more powerful example of the importance of effective public communication. The information vacuum between reports of the attack and the police saying that the suspect had been born in the UK only lasted a matter of hours, but as the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Jonathan Hall, said in September, that gap “was filled with false speculation”.
For the government, there is the question of whether an attack like this should be viewed as terrorism. Keir Starmer said yesterday that the law will be changed to allow “extreme individualised violence” to be charged as terror offences, a response to the changing nature of terror threats of all ideological stripes that will feel long overdue to many.
Starmer also noted that “I don’t think anybody could ever have looked the victims and their families in the eye” if they had broken the contempt laws and risked collapsing the trial. And it is reasonable for politicians to be cautious in such cases.
But it is also true that contempt laws feel increasingly outdated, and that the definitions of what counts as contempt are so subjective that most media outlets will take a very conservative approach. With so much disinformation circulated online with scant regard for the law, it is surreal that outlets that might report more responsibly are the only ones staying out of the game. (I wrote about all this in the context of the Lucy Letby case last year.)
And there is an important distinction to draw: even if the law feels arcane, following it in the normal way is by no definition a cover-up. Anyone claiming otherwise has a share of responsibility for the climate of distrust that has become such a toxic accompaniment to this devastating case.
