The Southport inquiry into the murderous frenzy of Axel Rudakubana has broken for half term. Officials who have been already damned by their own evidence of incompetence and disarray must be thanking their lucky stars that the accidental release of Hadush Kebatu from HMP Chelmsford has stolen the media’s attention. But this is a slow-motion disaster that has far to go.

It’s almost impossible to list the mountain of professional failures across our protective agencies that led to that fateful day in August 2023 and the national riots that followed. And we are only in the foothills of this investigation. The findings will be explosive and yet entirely predictable. The failures will likely illustrate a profound and systemic collapse in the UK’s safeguarding network. Isolated errors across different threadbare agencies compounded into foreseeable tragedy. 

Before the attack, Rudakubana was referred three times to the Prevent counter-terrorism programme. Each referral was prematurely closed without proper escalation.........

© The Spectator