Earlier this month a young woman appears to have bumped her head after a night out in the Surrey town of Epsom. In a confused state, she told police she thought she had been raped. It turned out she hadn’t.
It took nine days for Surrey Police to come to the conclusion that the young woman was, not to put too fine a point on it, imagining things when she claimed she had been gang raped outside a Methodist church.
But those nine days were enough for far-right street thugs to galvanise hatred, fear and revolt. Nine days in which bloggers, influencers and second-rate journalists gleefully spread racist conspiracy slime. And nine days in which mainstream politicians and magazines, which should know better, happily joined in.
It was, in other words, a very modern story of information chaos and the way populists have learned to embrace and exploit it.
We have to go back to the Southport stabbings of 2024 to understand Epsom in 2026. In the immediate aftermath of the murders of three young children, there was a deluge of speculation and lies on social media, especially Elon Musk’s X platform.
False claims about the identity of the attacker—specifically that he was a Muslim migrant—were seen by hundreds of millions of people. There were riots on the streets and attempts to storm migrant hostels. It was ugly stuff.
Police forces put their heads together and decided that rather than have a vacuum of information which could be filled by bad actors, they should consider releasing the ethnicity and nationality of suspects. Only this week, we saw police break with previous convention by telling us about the nationality and migration status of the Somali-born suspect held over attacks in Golders Green.
The Tory peer and Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein was quick to condemn the post-Southport move as a “miserable path to go down.” He predicted that the police could never reveal enough information to satisfy social media or would-be rioters, “even assuming the truth would have done that.” And so it has turned out.
He ended: “Living in a multicultural society is hard enough without encouraging a simmering resentment that white people are hard done by and suppressed by a two-tier justice system. And no society is improved by telling people who advocate burning down hotels that perhaps they’ve got a bit of a point.”
Cut to this month. Surrey Police were in the uncomfortable position of investigating a crime that hadn’t happened, so you could forgive them for being a bit stuck when it came to releasing information about who they were looking for.
None of that mattered to one Danny Tommo (real name Daniel Thomas), an associate of former English Defence League leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson), who promoted the event online, and was once jailed for two years for the attempted armed kidnapping of a man in Hampshire.
Thomas successfully whipped up quite a degree of fury: there were angry protests organised online, including breaking into a hotel widely (but wrongly) suspected of hosting migrants. He promised on X that white Englishmen would soon be forced to do “very, very bad things.” The police turned out in force to keep the peace.
Well, you can guess what happened next. X became a hotbed of rage bait, with some individual posts reaching more than half a million users. On Talk TV a former Met detective, Peter Bleksley, was given a softball interview to rubbish the Surrey cops and to claim that it was the “epitome of two-tier policing... the police are simply being dishonest. They're lying, and they're the police.”
Inevitably, Reform candidate and GB News presenter Matt Goodwin couldn’t resist joining in, demanding to know why local people were being denied the truth about a “hideous local crime”. Goodwin, we are forced to remind ourselves, was once an academic.
Michael Gove’s Spectator gave 1,000 words to the libertarian gadfly Brendan O’Neill to write sympathetically about the anger of locals and strongly to imply that the perpetrators of the assault were brown migrants. He, too, complained about two-tier policing.
He claimed to have identified a “slow transformation of the police from a body charged with keeping the peace into a body whose prime role is to enforce the diktats of identity politics. Have our police forces become the armed wing of chattering-class ideology, the truncheon-wielding implementers of ‘progressive’ moralism?”
And then, right on cue, up popped Reform’s very own Robert Jenrick. While the Surrey police were still examining CCTV and conducting house-to-house inquiries, he lectured them on X to “communicate ASAP” about “the horrific rape.” Mr Jenrick, we are forced to remind ourselves, was once Secretary of State for Justice.
Even after the police announced that there had been no crime, former GB News star Dan Wootton devoted an episode of his podcast to the suggestion that a ”native woman” may have been raped by a gang of migrants.
He paid little credence to the police announcement refuting this, saying they were obsessed with “so-called community cohesion.”
“After years of establishment cover-up and missing evidence,” he ranted, “how on earth can we expect our authorities to tell us the truth?”
A more credible source, in his view, was Tommy Robinson, who was busy posting videos of protestors screaming outside a hotel supposedly hosting “invaders”. Wootton gleefully showed video of a hapless Surrey police officer attempting to brief a baying crowd before retreating in the face of howls of rage.
Robinson has rebranded himself as a “journalist” these days. Thomas says real journalists can “f*ck off. You are the enemy.” Dan Wootton says he agrees. We must remind ourselves that Wootton was once a prominent part of Paul Marshall’s GB News. Now he’s joined the anti-media media.
I’ve seen no attempt by any of the above players to update, clarify or correct their statements. For a brief period, the “Epsom gang rape” served a political purpose. The mundane truth was altogether less useful.
Pity the poor police. They have joined the mainstream media, the civil service, the academy, the church, scientists, NGOs and the law as populist whipping boys.
The Right once stood shoulder to shoulder with the cops. They were the custodians of law ’n’ order. But now the police have to suffer accusations that they’re simply part of the deep state and ideologically captured. In Dan Woottonland you can’t believe a word they say.
Populism starts by hollowing out trust: institutions are branded corrupt, biased, or “rigged” until the ground is cleared for one voice to stand in for the many. Epsom is just one step on that journey.
