Tom Harwood: Is it really credible to suggest Keir Starmer would have been ignored by these Covid-radicalised anti-vax nutjobs?

Now as we have all seen, opposition Leader Sir Keir Starmer faced a horrific mob outside Parliament yesterday, having to be bundled into a police car to escape the baying crowd of great unwashed anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, and troublemakers.

This troubling scene just months after an MP was brutally killed. There are no words to describe how gut wrenching it is to think that any human beings think that sort of behaviour is in any way acceptable.

It was the kind of spectacle that no politician or indeed journalist should have to endure.

That, I hope, is a fact upon which we are all agreed.

Yet bizarrely this morning, much of the media – in a state of inexplicable groupthink - is running with the idea that it might have been the Prime Minister who is to blame, That it is Boris Johnson who incited this hateful mob.

Really?

Let’s check the facts on this one.

The people behind this were the same pathetic mob often seen traipsing around Westminster, which yesterday spawned from a rabble that first gathered outside Downing Street. It then moved to Parliament Square in order to - in the words of the protest organisers:

End all Jab Programs In the UK And the World.

End Covid Regulations & Police Bill Attacks On Rights.

And TAKE DOWN the Government and the Fake Opposition

Yes, 'take down the government and the opposition.' With not one mention of Jimmy Savile. That was their avert. These were troublemakers who organised a loopy gathering primarily to protest vaccinations, and to in their words “take down” those in positions of authority.

This was an anti-vax protest.

Yet not to much of the media. One of the most read newspapers in the country, The Metro, led this morning with “BORIS JOHNSON was last night accused of endangering Sir Keir Starmer's life after the Labour leader was surrounded by a mob shouting that he protected paedophiles such as Jimmy Savile.”

And the Independent went with “Boris Johnson was last night urged to apologise after Sir Keir Starmer was targeted by an abusive mob repeating last week's Jimmy Savile smear.”

Almost all of the coverage talks of this as if it is a protest exercised by Savile, not vaccines.

But I have scoured the various videos of this incident. And it appears to me that just one member of the mob shouted anything at all about Jimmy Savile. On many of the videos that slur can’t even be heard.

Most of the big cries were of “traitor”, some nonsense about the Magna Carta, Julian Assange, and what they called the New World Order.

This was a rabble of lunatics. Sure, one of the screams they hurled was about Savile, but most were about a vast array of other things. Is anyone genuinely, seriously suggesting that had the Savile row not taken place last week that this collection Covid-radicalised anti-vax nutjobs would have simply ignored the leader of the opposition? Would have quietly and politely nodded as he went by?

What planet are these journalists on?

The organisational poster for this protest spoke not about Jimmy Savile but about quote taking down the government and the opposition. Over Covid. That’s why they were there.

And anyone who has spent any time at all in Westminster will know that these are precisely the same people who have hounded any journalist or politician they are vaguely able to recognise, for months on end now.

The BBC’s Nick Watt was hounded by exactly the same people in June, with the same screams of “traitor” and “scum”.

And a month later I was on the receiving end of those same screams too – including the attack these QANON conspiracy inspired lunatics throw at anyone they deem to be of the establishment – as a “paedo protector”.

Yes that jibe has been in their limited vocabulary for quite some time now.

So is it really credible to suggest that had the row over Jimmy Savile not taken place last week, that this unruly mob would have simply ignored the Leader of the Opposition, would have stood back politely, would have hurled no abuse?

In my view, to suggest anything of the sort would give these low lives far too much credit.

Again, most of the screams from this crowd of cretins were of traitor, magna carta, and Julian Assange. The idea that these morons amassed because of a comment about the CPS prosecution record made at the Dispatch Box of the House of Commons last week is to stretch credibility beyond the bounds of reasonable logic.

And to say the blame lies with the Prime Minister, not with those hurling the wide array of abusive screams, is to let that mob off far too lightly.

These anti-vax protesters loathe nothing more than Boris Johnson’s government in general and its successful vaccination programme in particular.

In my view this is an issue where sense and rationality have been thrown out of the window. And where a narrative that suits some politically, but in reality is entirely light on logic, has been allowed to take hold among most of the media.

Groupthink is never edifying. Especially when it is so evident.

Stop. Think. Do better.