Andrew Watts

Was my friend murdered for being a Tory?

Six months ago an old friend of mine was murdered on his doorstep. This week his killer was sentenced to life imprisonment. In both cases, the first I heard of it was when someone I follow on Twitter posted a joke with a link to a news story. Both jokes were whimsical rather than callous — both were, in fact, musing on which Sunday evening television detective would most likely solve the crime — but whimsy in these circumstances feels like callousness. The tweets made me very angry.

I read the reports of the trial. The murderer had made a spreadsheet of his potential victims, for robbery or kidnap, with their names in one column, planned modus in another and ‘reason’ in a third. The reasons varied — often it was ‘Tory’, at other times ‘scum Tory’. But while many reports noted that his only other attack was against a well-known Conservative donor whose wife raised the alarm before he was able to force entry, this detail, that the murderer considered being ‘scum Tory’ a reason for premeditated violence, was only mentioned in one report. This, too, made me angry.


Andrew Watts discusses the murder of his friend on the podcast


Just imagine that someone had been killed by a right-winger. A murderer who thought that socialists — or Remainers, perhaps — were scum, or that being on the other side of a divisive political issue made them a legitimate target for violence, and had put this in writing. It does not take much imagination, actually, because this is exactly what has happened in this country.

I was at a dinner party last week, and one of the other guests announced that he was so fed up with the toxic political climate after Brexit, and racism becoming mainstream within political discourse, that he was moving to France.

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