When will Keir Starmer tell us everything about Southport?

This morning Keir Starmer implied but did not categorically say that Islamist ideology was not the motivation of the dreadful Axel Rudakubana. The Prime Minister referred several times to the 18-year-old’s heinous crimes as constituting an example of ‘a new threat’ from ‘loners and misfits’, and to Rudakubana having viewed ‘all kinds of material’ online. Much else was left unresolved. Was the man who murdered three little girls in Southport and maimed many others motivated in any way by an Islamist agenda? Are claims that he attended the mosque in Belmarsh prison while held on remand true or false? Whether the material Rudakubana viewed included ‘extreme jihadi videos,’ as Nigel Farage claimed on GB News last night, was also left unanswered.

Perhaps the hastily-convened inquiry into how the system handled Rudakubana will finally nail these matters. But as of today the public are still in the dark about whether a teenager with an Al-Qaeda manual on his computer who attacked a classic Islamist target – girls dancing to pop music – had fallen into jihadi ways or was just a common psychopath determined to commit mass murder.