It was the summer of 2024 when it all decisively started, with the horrific murders in Southport, countrywide violence and Elon Musk’s observation that a British civil war was somehow “inevitable”. A year later came a hot season of flags on lamp-posts, protests outside hotels used to accommodate asylum seekers, the ubiquitous use of the word “tinderbox” and constant predictions of widespread riots that never actually materialised. Now here we are again, in the aftermath of the awful murder and treatment by the police of Henry Nowak and frightening violence and arson in Belfast, and the civil war predictions seem to be increasing by the hour.

The archive of such material is already bulging. In August 2024, amid the riots, a YouGov poll found that 32% of people thought a UK civil war was either “very” or “somewhat” likely. A year later, Dominic Cummings said the UK was only “random viral posts away from riots and prairie fires getting out of control”. Even Labour’s Lisa Nandy offered the opinion that the north of England was so tense “it could go up in flames”.

But then as now, the king of civil war genre, even if he usually avoids directly using the term, remained Nigel Farage, whose lexicon of expressions for anarchy and general breakdown includes “societal collapse” and “civil disobedience on a vast scale”, as well as predictions that Britain is “not far from major civil disorder”, presumably fired by the “pure, cold rage” he so disgracefully incited last week. Unsurprisingly, such talk is an international phenomenon, as evidenced by similar predictions of civil conflict, strife and war – usually pinned on immigration and Islam – from just about all the key populist politicians of mainland Europe.

All of which, it seems, has left the Tory party feeling rather left........

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