Remember Andrew Graystone? He is the chap in the flat cap who stood outside his local mosque in Manchester on the day of the Christchurch terrorist attacks with a placard bearing the beautiful handwritten message: “You are my friends. I will keep watch while you pray.” A man on the way in to the mosque took a picture and posted it online: it went viral, generating thousands of supportive messages.
Graystone, 57, is now going into politics, standing for Change UK in north-west England, but insists his reasons have nothing to do with ambition and everything to do with the sense of Christian fellowship that led him to stand outside a mosque on the day of the massacre.
“This sounds cheesy,” he says, “but we need to do politics in a different way. I had an enormous response when I stood outside the mosque and, overwhelmingly, what I was hearing was: ‘We want to build positive relationships and friendships.’ It feels like our old politics hasn’t managed to deliver that.”
He used to be a member of the Labour party but quit two years ago. “We were losing the sense of the party being a uniting force that worked to draw people together,” he says. “People were using it as a means of pursuing their own political agendas. It’s the politics of the clenched fist rather than the open hand. I think it’s time for the politics of the open hand.”
Graystone’s main target is Tommy Robinson – real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – the former leader of the English Defence League, who is standing as an independent in north-west England. “There are few people [in the north-west] who actively want Robinson to represent them in Europe,” he says, “but people of goodwill – and that includes people in the Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities – could allow that to happen simply by staying at home.”
The Daily Mail has interpreted Graystone’s appeal as him “telling” Muslims to come out and vote, but he prefers the gentler, less condescending word “encourage”. “I’m not in a position to tell people what to do,” he says. But he does want people of faith to get involved in politics, and dislikes the argument that religion should be above the fray. “The time for standing back, if it was ever there, has passed,” he says. “Standing back allows extreme and destructive forces to step into the gap.”
As someone who believes above all in dialogue, he says he would like to engage with Robinson: “I would love to sit down with him and talk about what his hopes are for the communities of the north-west.” Graystone’s missionary zeal should not be underestimated.
Does he fear for his own safety when he seeks to take on the far right? “If we are going to live in fear of each other, that’s a choice we can make,” he says, “but I would want to choose friendship over fear.” He says he’s had a few abusive tweets and letters, but “absolutely nothing to what women politicians on Twitter get”.
How is Graystone, who used to produce religious programmes at the BBC but gave it up to work with disadvantaged local communities in Manchester, coping with celebrity? “I’m not taking myself too seriously,” he says. “My children help with that. I’m just a bloke in a flat cap with a piece of cardboard.”
