Max Jeffery

Joe/Jeff Marsh wants to make it clear that he did not, like people keep saying, start the riots in Southport. He wasn’t at the riots. He doesn’t like riots. He’s a white nationalist, fine, but he’s also a busy, self-employed builder from Swansea. And Swansea is nowhere near Southport. All he did was share a picture of a poster about a protest to 2,000 people who subscribe to his channel on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app. A few people reposted the poster, shared his share elsewhere, then the protest just… became a riot. Joe’s trying to explain this on the phone, and I’m getting him up on Google Images while he talks. (Joe is his real name. Jeff is a decoy to give him anonymity.) In the pictures he has a big bald head and wears a camouflage cagoule.

Nigel Farage says that Britain is ready for a ‘revolt’, and he’s not the only candidate in this election committed to an uprising. The biggest threat to Keir Starmer is coming not from the Tories or the Lib Dems… but from left-wing insurgents. In Bristol Central, Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow culture secretary, could lose to the Greens. In Ashton-under-Lyne, Angela Rayner’s seat, George Galloway’s Workers party is trying to cause trouble. In the last election, Rayner had the lowest vote share of any Labour candidate there since 1931, but was still re-elected with a majority of more than 4,000. Galloway wants this apathetic town to finally unseat Labour’s deputy leader.

It’s fighting season in Afghanistan again. When the Americans were in charge, after the poppy fields had been harvested in late spring, and the madrassas in Pakistan that supplied the Taliban with fanatical soldiers had finished for the term, the Islamists kicked off the fighting. Between 2001 and 2021, around 200,000 people died, including 453 Britons. Now an insurgent group called the National Resistance Front (NRF) are starting the annual springtime assaults, this time against the Taliban government. ‘The Taliban do not possess the support of the mass of the people. We do’ ‘In the past 31 days, we have staged 31 attacks on Taliban, only in Kabul,’ Ahmad Massoud, the NRF leader, cheerily tells me from Tajikistan, where he directs his troops in exile.

Is that Monty Panesar? The old England spin bowler is stood in a crowd in Parliament Square, with a vacant, million-mile smile. George Galloway is standing in front, talking to the press. Galloway is meant to be revealing the 200 candidates that his new ‘Workers Party’ is putting up at the next election (Panesar is one of them) but instead he’s just laying into Angela Rayner, the House of Lords and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. ‘…Angela Runner, as you might come to call her! ...Two cheeks of the same backside! ...The largest war machine in the world today!’ Galloway likes talking to the media; these days he is more celebrity than politician.