It felt like a criminal offence just listening to Nigel Finch's speech

Times

4 days ago

Nigel Farage's Summer of Crime is now into its third week, and we've reached the point in the plot where the boss recruits the other members of the gang, Ocean's Eleven style.
This was his third press conference on as many Mondays, all done behind his no-longer brand new 'Britain is Lawless' lectern. It's not hard to work out why he's doing it. Capturing the attention of the British public in the month of August is one of the easiest heists out there. You just have to say something, anything, and, for want of an alternative, people will listen.
Unfortunately, one of the first things Farage had to say was to urge the TV news channels that had shown up to please, please broadcast the press conference in full, because, yes, they might be about to discuss an extremely controversial crime that had allegedly happened recently in which court proceedings are very much currently active, but, don't panic, they absolutely definitely wouldn't be committing any sort of contempt of court.
Sadly, they did panic. Sky News and others chose almost this exact moment to play it safe and cut away, an editorial decision that would prove to be utterly vindicated, but we'll get to that in a bit.This time, he brought with him his two newest recruits. Yes, Farage has managed to once again break into the Tory vaults and this time he'd managed to bundle in to the awaiting getaway vehicle none other than the Leicestershire and Rutland police and crime commissioner Rupert Matthews.
Matthews bounded onto the stage, a former Conservative MEP, and an instant fully ambulant answer to the rarely asked question: 'Where has Harry Enfield's Tory boy been hiding for the last 30 years?' But Tory boys are straight from Reform central casting these days.
'We need to cut the dark heart of wokeness out of policing,' he said.
It was far from the only attack of the morning on woke, wokeness, the wokerati and the general scourge of the wokes. If the press conference felt poorly attended, it may have been because, while they spoke, a chap called 'wokes' was batting for England at the Oval, one-handed, with his arm in a sling.
The other new recruit was an extremely no-nonsense looking woman called Vanessa Frake, the former head of security at Wormwood Scrubs and the author of a best-selling book called The Guv'nor, about her three decades in the prison service. She is now Reform's 'prisons tsar'.
You can't help but be impressed by people like Frake, who've seen and done it all. There should be more of them in politics. But you also don't need to be all that impressive to say the things she had come to say. That it's just no good running the prison service into the ground, so that you have to release criminals early because you've got nowhere to keep them.
• Reform UK appoints Rose West's prison governor as justice adviser
She has not been in Reform UK for long, but it's clear she'll go far. She's already concluded that the solution is more money, for more prison officers and more prisons. She would, she said, 'like to see supermax prisons from America, over here'. This would, of course, cost tens of billions, which Reform UK don't have because they've spent everything they don't have many, many times over, but who's counting? Certainly not them.
They saved the very best 'til last. George Finch is already something of a celebrity, after being appointed leader of Warwickshire county council two weeks ago, at the ripe old age of 19. His victory speech, of sorts, a fortnight ago, was surprisingly impressive. This was not. Finch had been brought in to discuss the shocking case of the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton, over which two men have been arrested and charged.
Once someone's been arrested and charged with this sort of crime, and so will almost certainly face a jury trial, what you can and can't say about them, so as to not prejudice that jury, is quite a tricky area. It's also exactly the kind of thing that that sort of people who, for example, run local councils should know.
What you can't do is go on live televison and say that you begged the police to release to the public more information about 'the criminal', because 'the criminal' is not a 'criminal', not until he's been convicted by a jury, in a fair trial, which he won't get if people like the leader of his local council just casually call him 'a criminal' on telly.
It's quite a long time since I took my media law exam for journalists, indeed I would have been about Finch's age, but I'm pretty sure you can't just refer to people who are in the criminal justice system and currently progressing toward trial as 'the criminal'.
Fortunately for Finch, despite standing in front of a whole row of TV cameras, he wasn't actually on live television at this point, because they'd all very wisely cut away, fearing he might say exactly the sort of thing he just had.
Ninety-nine per cent of Finch's speech is simply untranscribable. It felt like an offence just to listen to it. Thankfully, I'm confident I'll have forgotten it all within 48 hours. If not, I'm worried I could be arrested for brain libel.
Where do you go from here? There's still half of Farage's six-week Summer of Crime to go. They have their own crime commissioner now, too. What crimes will he commission next?