Now do neo-Nazis

Within hours of five men being arrested near RAF Fairford, three of Reform's most prominent figures had pointed the public towards small boats. None of them offered a single fact about the suspects, because there are none in the public domain. Police have said nothing about their nationality or how they came to be in the UK. Reports say investigators are examining a possible Iran link, but that is a line of inquiry, with nothing yet confirmed about these five men. Nigel Farage went first, reminding followers that he has spent months warning about Iranian agents arriving on small boats, and demanding "the truth" about the suspects' identities. That warning began in April with a single unnamed source in the Iranian diaspora. In July the Telegraph did report that Iran was exploiting Channel crossings, but the same reporting quoted sources saying the greater threat came from radicalised Iranians already living in Britain, from people who entered legally, and from established proxy networks. In suspected Iran-linked cases in the UK this year, those arrested have included British nationals. Whatever the truth about Fairford turns out to be, a months-old claim is not evidence about five men arrested on Sunday morning. Robert Jenrick followed, suggesting "we may now be seeing the consequences" of Home Office complacency, in a post now approaching 200,000 views. His grievance deserves context. As reported by the Telegraph, the "threat" he describes was a letter from the then Permanent Secretary cautioning him against further disclosure of classified material from his time as a minister. His original claim about terror suspects crossing the Channel concerned the year before he became immigration minister, under a Conservative government. He then held that job himself, under Rishi Sunak, from October 2022 to December 2023. Small boat crossings reached a record of nearly 46,000 in 2022, on his party's watch, and Jenrick has admitted that "the last Government unquestionably did not do enough to fix this." He joined Reform in January, hours after Kemi Badenoch sacked him from the shadow cabinet. Changing parties does not change his record in office. Richard Tice then demanded that the government reveal the suspects' "identities, arrival times and provenance and residence status." Neither the government nor the police routinely release that information about people who have been arrested but not charged. Once someone is arrested, criminal proceedings are active, and putting those details into circulation risks prejudicing any trial. It is a demand no responsible government would meet at this stage. That may be the point: an unanswerable question lets the insinuation stand. After Southport, we saw what happens when false claims about a suspect's background spread faster than the facts: mosques and asylum hotels were attacked. Senior politicians, one of them a former immigration minister with access to sensitive security information, should know better than to point the public at a group of people before the police have.