Just when Nigel Farage and his tiny parliamentary party were beginning to be exposed as shrill and clueless, Peter Kyle, one of the most promising cabinet ministers, handed them a free gift.
By saying that the Reform leader is on the side of “people like Jimmy Savile”, Kyle destroys his own arguments for the Online Safety Act. The attempt to link Farage with a notorious child sex abuser is gratuitous and offensive. It makes Kyle seem desperate and allows Farage to pose as the wronged party. Farage’s criticisms of the act seem more credible after Kyle’s outburst than before.
It is surprising that Kyle has chosen to use this slur when Labour people were so indignant – and rightly so – when Boris Johnson used it against Keir Starmer. That was when Johnson was desperate: Sue Gray’s report on lockdown parties in Downing Street had just been published, and Johnson wanted some way of deflecting attention.
His attack on Starmer had nothing to do with Gray’s report. It was an aside referring to Starmer’s time as director of public prosecutions, during which, Johnson said, “he spent most of his time prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile, as far as I can make out”.
But it was more relevant than Kyle’s attack on Farage. It is factually correct that the Crown Prosecution Service failed to prosecute Savile when Starmer was in charge, and it is unclear whether it could have done more to bring Savile to justice at the time.
But Farage has nothing to do with Savile – at all. Kyle’s attempt to smear the Reform leader was phrased thus on Sky News: “If people like Jimmy Savile were alive today, he’d be perpetrating his crimes online, and Nigel Farage is saying that he’s on their side.”
Nothing could be better calculated to distract from the real issue, which is whether Farage’s pledge to repeal the Online Safety Act is a sensible one. The Reform rhetoric about “authoritarian” and “dystopian” legislation is overdone, and Farage admitted yesterday that he didn’t know how he would protect children online instead.
But rather than exposing the weakness of Farage’s arguments, Kyle allowed his opponent to protest on X that his comment was “disgusting” and to demand an apology. Kyle responded: “If you want to overturn the Online Safety Act, you are on the side of predators. It is as simple as that.”
This is a terrible way to conduct a public debate. There are well-founded concerns about the Online Safety Act, which seems to impose unworkable obligations on non-profit-making websites while doing little to ensure that the big tech companies behave more responsibly. A lot of well-informed people said it was badly drafted legislation even before it was passed by the Conservative government two years ago.
Kyle is now overseeing the coming into effect of provisions of the act relating to age-verification, and instead of addressing the concerns that have been expressed, he has ploughed ahead – in effect, accusing anyone who has doubts, including, for example, Ella Dorn of The New Statesman, of being aligned with Savile.
When Johnson gratuitously dragged Savile’s name into his attempt to save his disintegrating premiership, the disgust at his deliberate attempt to invoke conspiracy theories driven by fears of paedophilia was felt across the political spectrum. Munira Mirza, Johnson’s adviser who was consulted in advance, begged him not to do it, and resigned when he did.
Kyle should not be using the same disreputable tactic, which not only speaks volumes about this government’s self-confidence but also allows Reform off the hook.
Only this morning, Sarah Pochin, Reform’s newest MP, was struggling to explain what her party’s policy on small boats actually is. All she could propose was that Britain should “do something drastic”, by which she seemed to suggest that we should let migrants drown in the Channel.
If the next election really is a fight between Labour and Reform, Labour must fight it better than this.
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