In The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s great satirical look at 1980s New York, a white Wall Street trader accidentally ends up in a hit and run involving a black teenager. The cause is taken up by a succession of activists, led by the corrupt race-baiter ‘Reverend Bacon’, all determined to make political capital of the incident.

Much of the satire is easily recognisable from real-life cases, including the way in which the biography of the black victim is turned into a hagiography, and the menacing implication that the streets might erupt in violence if the protesters don’t get what they want. This kind of politics was once distinctively American, but in recent years we’ve become used to it in London, too, and there was something distinctively Wolfian about the death of Chris Kaba.

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On 5 September 2022, Kaba, a 24-year-old black man, was shot dead by sergeant Martyn Blake, an officer of the specialist firearms unit MO19. Police in unmarked cars had been following Kaba in his Audi Q8, which they knew to have been used in a gangland shooting the previous day. One vehicle, a Volvo, had been following the Audi, while another, a BMW, blocked its path. Kaba was ordered to stop, but instead drove at the armed officers in his SUV. Sgt Blake fired a single shot to the head, killing Kaba.

Just two years after the entire English-speaking world had been brought to the point of hysteria by the death of George Floyd, this was just the kind of event which police leaders dread and activists relish. Long before the full details of the case emerged, the Critic’s Ben Sixsmith noted, a succession of tributes poured in to Kaba, whose winning smile peered out from newspaper reports.

MP Zara Sultana posted on 14 September that ‘Chris Kaba was 24 years old. He was about to become a father. But last week he was pulled over by police officers, shot and killed. He was unarmed. This evening I attended a vigil to remember Chris, demanding justice for him and his family.’

‘No justice, no peace’, demanded her colleague Dawn Butler, while another Labour MP, Bell Ribeiro-Addy wrote: ‘The press have said he was a drill artist, as if that’s a way of justifying why he may have found himself in that situation, or that he’d been arrested before. But we have to realise that with our justice system, if you’re Black, from a working-class background, you’re more likely to go to jail.’

Writer Michael Morgan declared in the Metro: ‘God save the king; the young king. His name was Chris Kaba.’ Trade unionist Howard Beckett said: ‘His chief crime in the eyes of the British police was the colour of his skin.’ A prominent legal academic lamented that ‘Suella Braverman has not once condemned the killing of Chris Kaba. I find that shameful.’ As Sixsmith noted, it would be very odd for a Home Secretary to comment on an ongoing investigation, and bizarre that a legal academic would think otherwise.

On 14 September, a writer for the Guardian had described Kata as an ‘aspiring architect’ and soon-to-be father, a Woolfian touch reminiscent of how the black teen in the novel is described as an ‘honours student’. The difference, however, is that the teenager in Wolfe’s story wasn’t a bad guy. Kaba was a really bad guy, an ‘aspiring architect’ who just happened to shoot up nightclubs in his spare time.

Indeed, much of the reporting described Kaba sympathetically as a ‘father to be’, while failing to mention that he had received a domestic violence protection order relating to the mother of his child, whom he had beaten up.

Many others joined in the chorus, and in March 2023 London Mayor Sadiq Khan tweeted: ‘My thoughts are with Chris Kaba’s loved ones today. His death has had a huge impact on Londoners, and in particular Black Londoners. Anger, pain and fear has been felt across communities, along with a desire for change and justice.’

In September 2023, Blake – referred to only as NX121 – was charged with murder, and would wait more than a year for the trial to come to court. Then, in March 2024, a judge lifted his right to anonymity, and the policeman had to flee his home. A bounty was placed on the officer’s life, and Charlie Peters of GB News wondered whether Sgt Martyn Blake would ‘become the policing equivalent of the Batley schoolteacher… Two public servants forced into hiding for fears of violent revenge.’ The Labour government later called for the right to anonymity for armed police officers facing charges, but it was too late for him.

The trial heard that while Blake did not know the identity of the Audi driver, he was aware that it had been used as a getaway car in the shooting the previous day. Blake stated that he’d fired in self-defence in order to........

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