These opening lines to AJP Taylor’s English History: 1914-1945 describe a vanished world. Even in 1965, Taylor was evoking a time that was already half a century distant. Today, it almost seems like fiction.

It was in this now long-vanished world that, on 8 October 1908, a children’s book was first published by a recently retired, Scottish-born clerk at the Bank of England. His name was Kenneth Grahame. The book was not, initially at least, a critical success. The review in The Times pompously decreed that “grown-up readers will find it monstruous and elusive, children will hope, in vain, for more fun.” This proved to be somewhat misjudged, as well as wholly unjust, as by 1951 a hundred editions of The Wind in the Willows had been printed and the book had earned its rightful status as a classic not just of children’s literature, but English literature as a whole.

Its setting is a winding river and its fertile banks; its characters are anthropomorphic animals. There is much controversy about the exact stretch of river that inspired the novel, with locations as distant as Argyll, Bute, and Cornwall all claiming the honour, but the most likely is Cookham Dean on the River Thames, where Grahame was living when the book was published. However, these debates about the exact setting are largely irrelevant; it is “Merry England”, and its characters are English.

Nevertheless, much of this England seems unfamiliar or even alien today. Steam trains, washerwomen, castle dungeons, and horse-drawn gipsy caravans are preserved in part, although predominantly as historical curiosities. Roving gangs of armed bandits, whether of weasels, ferrets, and stoats or humans, tend not to take over Tudor country houses by force, whatever may be occurring in some London postcodes today. Kindly demi-gods seldom, as far as I am aware, to lead rescuers to missing children. The Wind in the Willows is a vision of @MythoBritannia, not @MythoYookay. However, one much-changed aspect of England of the novel that deserves examination is the law.

Law and order, and the various characters’ relationships with it, are subjects at the heart of The Wind in the Willows. Mr Toad’s adventures stem from his entanglement with and subsequent evasion from the law; the novel climaxes with the four heroic animals taking the law into their own hands to evict the Wild Wooders from Toad Hall. However, both the laws and the legal system have changed greatly in the century since the novel was first published in 1908.[1] Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1973 and subsequent exit from the European Union in 2020, the Human Rights Act 1998, and the creation of the Supreme Court are among the many alterations to Britain’s common law. I should probably state here that I am not a lawyer, and that this essay is not intended as a treatise upon our evolving legal system.[2] Thomas C. Klein, writing in the Texas Wesleyan Law Review in 2005 has covered this subject before, but with tedious insistence upon referring endlessly to the portrayal of positive law. I will also say that if you have not read The Wind in the Willows then you should probably hold that fact against all those involved in your upbringing and rectify the issue immediately, as I will be spoiling many of the thrilling moments in one of the greatest English novels.

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While the characters in The Wind in the Willows may be animals, there is never any doubt about their being bound by the same laws as the many humans who also dwell along the river. When Mr Toad, Mole, and Ratty and their horsedrawn canary-coloured cart are driven into a ditch by a speeding motor-car, a bewitched Mr Toad murmurs “Poop-poop” but an enraged Ratty screams “You scoundrels, you highwaymen, you—you—roadhogs!—I’ll have the law on you! I’ll report you! I’ll take you through all the Courts!” Although the driver and passengers of the car may be human, this is the first indication of the relationship between the animals and the law. Ratty considers them equally entitled to call upon the law to pursue the dangerous drivers as well as to litigate against them himself. This is important as it establishes that the actions of the animals hereafter are either under or outside of English common law.

However, this is not the only code of conduct to which the animals are bound. There are three references in the novel to “animal-etiquette”, a code with which all animals are inferred to be implicitly familiar. The three actions stated to be forbidden by animal-etiquette are: “to dwell on possible trouble ahead, or even to allude to it”, to “comment on the sudden disappearance of one’s friends at any moment, for any reason or no reason whatever”, and to expect an animal “to do anything strenuous, or heroic, or even moderately active during the off-season of winter”. While these are not laws and are more likely to be recorded in an animal-Debrett’s than an animal-vellum scroll, they further indicate that the animals in the world of The Wind in the Willows are no strangers to having their behaviour bound by common agreement. This therefore makes the occasions on which they break the law all the more egregious.

While the narrative of The Wind in the Willows unfolds largely through Mole’s venturing out into the wider world, the plot is, if you will excuse the pun, driven by Mr Toad. While he certainly does not always act with due care and consideration, Mr Toad could hardly be called a hardened criminal. His arrogance, selfishness, and overall conceitedness are hardly admirable, but the well-known and popular Mr Toad is also very easy to forgive, perhaps because he is the first Anglofuturist. I shall not elaborate further on this, since it is such an obvious point of fact, but it is worth mentioning that in the 1996 film adaptation, the ending involves Mr Toad purchasing an aeroplane and flying it with all the finesse that might be anticipated. Almost a century after the publication of the book, a motor-car was no longer a sufficient totem of modernity to convey Mr Toad’s fleeting obsessions with different forms of technological and transportational innovation.

Mr Toad shows an ambivalence to the law from the offset. Following the crash of the gipsy caravan, while Ratty curses the drivers of the car and threatens the vanishing vehicle with the law and the Courts, Mr Toad merely faintly murmurs “Poop-poop!” Mr Toad does not mind the old being destroyed; he is ready to embrace the new. Such is his wholehearted but haphazard embrace of the new that Ratty later tells Mr Badger that Mr Toad’s coach-house is “piled up—literally piled up to the roof—with fragments of motor-cars” following six “smashes”. Mole adds that in addition to having been hospitalised three times, it is “simply awful to think of” how many “fines he’s had to pay”. This is the first indication of Mr Toad being, in Ratty’s own words, “quite regardless of law and order.”

This ambivalence extends to lawyers as well. While pretending to be dying in order to escape the house arrest imposed by his friends, Mr Toad calls for a lawyer, presumably to help write his will—another indication of how the animals are bound by English common law. However, it is only after his sentencing at the hands of the Chairman of the Bench of Magistrates that he thinks “of lawyers, and how they would have enjoyed his case, and what an ass he had been not to get in a few.”

The turning point with Mr Toad’s relationship with law and order is one entirely of his own making, although it is not so much a point of inversion as acceleration. Having been placed under house arrest by his friends, who quite rightly fear what might befall him as a consequence of his obsession with motoring, Mr Toad feigns dying as a ruse, and escapes from his Toad Hall bedroom on a rope of knotted bedsheets, having first stuffed his suit pockets full of cash. As he is finishing his lunch at the Red Lion—escaping from one’s friends is hungry work—Mr Toad hears a familiar “poop-poop” and is once again enraptured. Having first “paid his bill at the bar,” hardly the act of a committed criminal, Mr Toad is overtaken by baser instincts. What begins as merely “looking at it” becomes wondering if it “starts easily” and then “as if in a dream” Mr Toad finds himself speeding “he knew not whither, fulfilling his instincts, living his hour, reckless of what might come to him.”

Thus it is that Mr Toad finds himself in front of the Chairman of the Bench of Magistrates. As the well-known and popular Mr Stakeholder Consultant (@echetus) has observed, “the best portrayal of a jury trial in English literature is clearly the Old Bailey scene in Tale of Two Cities. The best portrayal of the magistrates court belongs to Wind in the Willows.”

The entire scene is set with just five pieces of dialogue between the Chairman of the Bench of Magistrates and the Clerk. This is enough. The Chairman is clearly arrogant, pompous, and unforgiving, fond of his own voice and the powers of his role. The Clerk is a perfect foil to this toxicity. Before he lists the harshest possible sentences, the Clerk “scratched his nose with his pen” like some unworthy rodent (it should be noted here that neither Mole nor Ratty, actually a water vole, are rodents). It is remarkable that in a book about anthropomorphic animals, the Clerk is a zoomorphic human. The guardians of the law are far less sympathetic characters than Mr Toad, even at his most incorrigible.

Mr Toad is found guilty “on the clearest evidence, first, of stealing a valuable motor-car; secondly, of driving to the public danger; and, thirdly, of gross impertinence to the rural police.” The “only difficulty”, according to the Chairman of the Bench of Magistrates, is how to “make it sufficiently hot for the incorrigible rogue and hardened ruffian… cowering in the dock”. To this end, the Chairman asks the Clerk what the “very stiffest penalty” he can impose for each offence, “without, of course, giving the prisoner the benefit of any doubt, because there isn’t any.” The rodential Clerk responds thus, reproduced in full lest I diminish his odiousness:

“Some people would consider that stealing the motor-car was the worst offence; and so it is. But cheeking the police undoubtedly carries the severest penalty; and so it ought. Supposing you were to say twelve months for the theft, which is mild; and three years for the furious driving, which is lenient; and fifteen years for the cheek, which was pretty bad sort of cheek, judging by what we’ve heard from the witness-box, even if you only believe one-tenth part of what you heard, and I never believe more myself—those figures, if added together correctly, tot up to nineteen years——”

In response to the Chairman’s exclamation of “First-rate!” the Clerk proposes making it “a round twenty years and be on the safe side”. This “excellent suggestion” is met with approval by the Chairman of the Bench of Magistrates, but not by Mr Toad, to whom he says:

“Prisoner! Pull yourself together and try and stand up straight. It’s going to be twenty years for you this time. And mind, if you appear before us again, upon any charge whatever, we shall have to deal with you very seriously!”

Magistrates do still exist today as unpaid volunteers, and the bar to entry is phenomenally low. A combination of criminal and family cases are heard by a board of usually three magistrates with one of them serving as, in the parlance of the day, chairperson. All criminal cases today begin in a magistrate’s court, although serious offences like murder and robbery are quickly passed to the Crown Court to be dealt with by fulltime professionals. The crimes that magistrates deal with still include motoring offences such as those of Mr Toad, as well as more recent legal inventions such as TV licence evasion. Magistrates can then hand out punishments including fines, unpaid community service, and prison sentences of up to 12 months for one crime.

Almost anyone can become a magistrate, and I really do mean anyone. There are no formal qualifications or legal training requirements, as volunteers receive ten days of training in their first two years of service, and no more than a couple of days each year thereafter. This training includes online learning modules—that frightful scourge of the Information Compliance Complex—as well as time with appointed mentors and meetings with “stakeholders” across the criminal justice system. Undesirable traits include criminal convictions, bankruptcy, and recent driving bans; desirable traits include an awareness of social issues and a commitment to serving the community. There are a few bars to becoming a magistrate in a criminal court—in essence anyone otherwise employed in the “justice sector”—but even Members of Parliament and serving members of His Majesty’s Armed Forces are eligible. You do not even need to be British, and as such the Ministry of Justice does not even bother recording the nationality of magistrates. If you would like to become a magistrate, you can find all the information you need here: https://www.gov.uk/become-magistrate

Today’s magistrates are, it would seem, no less officious in their official duties than the Chairman in The Wind in the Willows. In a recent motoring case, perhaps even more trivial than that of borrowing a motor-car while the owners were at lunch and thus had no need of it at the time, a magistrate imposed a criminal conviction on an 18-year-old girl for keeping a vehicle without a valid vehicle licence. The teenager had been bought the car by her parents as a surprise birthday present, but not told about it until she had passed her driving test. Even though the vehicle was insured and taxed on the day the girl passed her test, for a few weeks the car was officially owned by the girl, who remained unaware even of its existence, but untaxed. The DVLA chose to prosecute her, and Magistrate Francine Beckett gave the teenager a six-month conditional discharge from the court and ordered her to settle the £1.67 (one pound and sixty-seven pence) bill. This case was dealt with under the Single Justice Procedure, a system by which court sittings are behind closed doors, intended to speed up the process of administering justice. While it certainly appears to be speedy, I respectfully challenge anyone to defend it as “justice”. Mr Toad complains later in the novel that magistrates “take such harsh views of thoughtless and high-spirited actions.” Today’s magistrates appear to take similar views of even those actions of which the alleged offenders are completely unaware.

Having sat in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock, Mr Toad is then taken to a pestilential prison with a (nearly) life-long lock.[3] Immediately after he has been sentenced to twenty years, the “brutal minions of the law” take hold of Mr Toad and “loaded him with chains”. There is a sense of public drama and ritual humiliation to what follows. Mr Toad is “shrieking, praying, protesting” as he encounters the duality of the “playful populace”. Whereas Grahame describes the mob as “sympathetic and helpful when one is merely ‘wanted,’” they are “always as severe” once a criminal has been found guilty. This cruel streak in the English character is something upon which others have remarked, so I will leave further examination of “normie sadism” to them. As part of his public humiliation, Mr Toad is pelted with “jeers, carrots, and popular catch-words” and school children hoot at him as “their innocent faces lit up with the pleasure they ever derive from the sight of a gentleman in difficulties”.

Eventually, Mr Toad reaches the “grim old castle” which was to be his prison for two whole decade. Off-duty soldiers grin at him and sentries cough in “a horrid, sarcastic way” to subtly indicate their “contempt and abhorrence of crime”. The scene has become increasingly archaic, even for more than a hundred years ago, with a “hollow-sounding drawbridge”, a “spiky portcullis”, “ancient towers”, “time-worn winding stairs”, “men-at-arms in casquet and corselet of steel, darting threatening looks through their vizards”, “mastiffs [straining] at their leash”, “ancient warders”, relics from an earlier and decidedly more gruesome era of justice: “the rack-chamber and the thumbscrew-room” as well as “the private scaffold”. Even the “winding stairs” are “time-worn” as they reach “the grimmest dungeon that lay in the heart of the innermost keep.” All of this is covered in a single 231-word sentence, with the paragraph finally ending with a second, short sentence: “There at last they paused, where an ancient gaoler sat fingering a bunch of mighty keys.”

The police sergeant who places Mr Toad in the care of the gaoler is also notably old fashioned. “Oddsbodikins!” he says, a notably archaic exclamation even a hundred years ago. The sergeant then calls the gaoler both an “old loon” and a “greybeard”, which under the Equality Act 2010 would be grounds for a discrimination complaint. He describes his unfortunate charge as a “vile Toad”, which seems a little harsh, and a “criminal of deepest guilt and matchless artfulness and resource”, which proves to be slightly more accurate. Finally, the sergeant issues a warning that “should aught untoward befall, thy old head shall answer for his—and a murrain on both of them!” It is made exceeding clear that responsibility for ensuring Mr Toad serves his full sentence lies with the goaler, who will face repercussions alongside his prisoner if anything goes wrong. No such murrain, a plague afflicting livestock, is threatened against today’s prison officers, for better or worse.

Thus, Mr Toad faced twenty years of imprisonment in “the remotest dungeon of the best-guarded keep of the stoutest castle in all the length and breadth of Merry England.” In evidence to a House of Commons Select Committee in 1930, Prison Commissioner Sir Alexander Paterson said that it “requires a superman to survive 20 years of imprisonment with character and soul intact… I gravely doubt whether an average man can serve more than ten continuous years in prison without deterioration.” This would have been just two years after Mr Toad’s release, but his incarceration was not to last that long…

Mr Toad’s thrilling escape is made possible by an act of female kindness. Mr Toad had not, as might perhaps have been expected, been enjoying his prison sentence. He had even accepted that he had been “imprisoned so justly for stealing so handsome a motor-car in such an audacious manner, and for such lurid and imaginative cheek, bestowed upon such a number of fat, red-faced policemen!” However, the ancient gaoler was assisted in his duties by his daughter, described as “a pleasant wench and good-hearted”. Crucially, she was “particularly fond of animals”. When she asked her father to be given responsibility for looking after Mr Toad, he readily agreed. Over time, as she fed him and slowly restored his joie de vivre, she developed a great sympathy for him. She broached the subject thus:

“Toad,” she said presently, “just listen, please. I have an aunt who is a washerwoman.”

“There, there,” said Toad, graciously and affably, “never mind; think no more about it. I have several aunts who ought to be washerwomen.”

With some difficulty in persuading him to listen, and little difficult in causing him to take offence by comparing his figure to that of her washerwoman aunt, the gaoler’s daughter proposed that for a suitable payment, Mr Toad could dress up as her and simply walk out of the prison. Having tied up the old lady to give some vague plausibility to her denial of complicity, Mr Toad received his escape clothes: “a cotton print gown, an apron, a shawl, and a rusty black bonnet”. Thus attired, he made his way back out through the ancient castle, believed and assisted by all the warders charged with preventing his escape. With great difficulty, he even avoided responding to the “chaff and the humourous sallies” of the warders according to his usual “sense of his own dignity”. To Mr Toad, it “seemed hours before he crossed the last courtyard”, but dodging the “outspread arms of the last warder, pleading with simulated passion for just one farewell embrace” he was free. The washerwoman disguise had worked, and Mr Toad had escaped his prison.

This ruse has been proven to work elsewhere. One of Britain’s most famous escapers was Pat Reid, although he was escaping from Nazi German prisoner of war camps as was his duty as a British officer, not a convicted criminal fleeing his lawful sentence. As a schoolboy, Reid had “read with avidity three of the greatest escape books of the First World War.” It is likely that he had also read The Wind in the Willows, but he does not mention Grahame among the authors whose real escapes so inspired his escape attempts in the Second World War. Nevertheless, he too escaped dressed as a woman. Having been unable to procure the clothes of any washerwomen aunts in Oflag VII C, Reid had fashioned for himself “a large red spotted handkerchief for [his] head, a white sports-shirt as blouse, and a skirt made of an old grey window-curtain, which [he] had also picked up during the trek into Germany.” To complete the look, he had shaved his legs and dyed them with iodine, and wore his oatmeal rations in two small sacks of canvas, hung around his neck to “form a buxom bust”. So it was that he left the wooden shed which concealed their tunnel exit and walked into the streets of a German town. He “walked with short steps imitating what [he] thought to be the gait of a middle-aged peasant woman” and was largely noticed but ignored by those he passed. As their tunnel brought them out of the camp, Reid did not have to worry about the chaff, sallies, and amorous advances of the guards. However, he was spotted by a little girl, who stared at him with “astonishment” before running off “no doubt to tell her parents to come and look at the extraordinary man dressed up as a woman”, but no parents appeared. Although his female disguise had held up for the crucial first forty minutes of his escape, Reid and his fellow escapers were soon recaptured, and they were then transferred to the remotest dungeon of the best-guarded keep of the stoutest castle in all the length and breadth of Nazi Germany—Colditz. However, not even Oflag IV C could keep Pat Reid from escaping again, but that is another story.

The most famous case of a prison escape in recent years is that of Daniel Khalife. Shortly after joining the British Army in 2018, the half British-Iranian, half British-Lebanese Khalife attempted first to sell secrets to Iran, collecting £1,500 in a dog poo bag from a dead drop in London’s Mill Hill Park, and then to offer his services as a double agent to MI6 via a form on the intelligence service’s website and MI5 by telephone. Two months later, he was arrested, but he was neither charged with any offences nor discharged from the Army. Instead, he was merely assigned to less sensitive work before, an entire year later, apparently calling in a bomb threat to his barracks and escaping to live in a van seven miles away. 24 days later, he was finally arrested again and charged with terrorism offences. While being held in the vulnerable prisoners unit at HMP Wandsworth ahead of his trial, Khalife escaped from the prison using an improvised harness to strap himself to the underside of a delivery lorry. It is worth mentioning that on the day that he escaped, 80 prison officers, nearly 40% of expected staff, had not turned up for their shift, and at least 75 of them were unauthorised absences. Once again, Khalife was on the run. After 75 hours meandering around West London, during which he was caught on CCTV walking along the Thames by the legendary Richmond upon Thames Slug & Lettuce, Khalife was arrested after being spotted cycling along the Grand Union Canal tow path. He had never been more than 11 miles from HMP Wandsworth. Even his own lawyer described his plot as more “Scooby-Doo” than “007”, although it is unclear if this was a reference to the chosen dead drop tradecraft, and he was eventually sentenced to four years and three months for espionage and terrorism offences, as well as his prison escape. Whether or not he had ever read The Wind in the Willows is unknown.

Not all prison escapes today are deliberate. Hadush Kebatu, an Ethiopian, arrived illegally in Britain on 29 June 2025 in a small boat and subsequently claimed asylum. He was accommodated at public expense at The Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex. On 7 and 8 July, he sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl, sparking protests against the use of the hotel to house illegal immigrants that continue to this day. This was just eight days after he allegedly paid €2,500 for his “rubber dinghy” ride across the Channel. Kebatu had been sentenced on 23 September to 12 months in prison, backdated to his arrest, for attempted sexual assault on a child aged 14, incite or causing a child aged 13 to 15 to engage in sexual activity, sexual assault on a female (aged 14), harassment without violence, and sexual assault on a female. Under the UK Borders Act 2007, a foreign national convicted of an offence and sentenced to more than 12 months in prison must be deported, and this was intended for Kebatu too. Therefore, on 24 October he was due to be sent from HMP Chelmsford, where he was serving his sentence, to an immigration detention centre to be deported. Instead, due apparently to “human error”, Kebatu was released from the prison. This came as something of a blow to Kebatu, who apparently returned to the prison four or five times asking to be deported instead. Eventually he gave up and made his way to London by train. Only after this did prison officers at HMP Chelmsford realise their mistake.

The manhunt for Kebatu had begun. Far from being disguised as a woman, on 25 October the Metropolitan Police distributed CCTV images of Kebatu still dressed in his prison uniform, although he had acquired a striking avocado tote bag. Kebatu later claimed that he had attempted to hand himself in to the police, but that he was ignored by them too. Eventually, Kebatu was spotted by a member of the public and detained by police on 26 October. The commander of the manhunt called it “a diligent and fast paced investigation led by specialist officers”. Finally, on 28 October Kebatu was given a £500 discretionary payment to ensure he did not suddenly resist his deportation, was loaded onto a plane, and is, for the moment, safely back in Ethiopia. There were 262 such “releases in error” in the year ending March 2025, which represents 0.5% of the 57,000 correct releases. This was more than double the total of 115 the previous year, itself a record high. However, it seems unlikely that Mr Toad would have been able to escape from prison unaided, nor that he would have been accidentally released, and thus it was thanks to the gaoler’s daughter and her washerwoman aunt that he began his break for freedom.

The world of The Wind in the Willows is almost entirely masculine, with only a handful of female characters largely limited to mothers, washerwomen, and barge women. This is not entirely unrepresentative of society in 1908, nor the justice system in particular. With the passing of the Gaols Act 1823, female wardens were introduced to guard female prisoners, and prisons were mandated to be segregated by sex; both prisoners and staff. However, as a result of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and a number of employment tribunals, prisons have become mixed sex “by stealth”. As of March 2025, 55% of HM Prison and Probation Service staff are women. One phenomenon that has emerged from this, perhaps predictably, is that of female prison officers sleeping with male prisoners. So apparently prolific is this in our prisons that I have abandoned my efforts to count either the total number of such cases, or indeed even the number of cases since I started writing this essay almost a year ago. One never wants to appear judgemental, but it does seem in most of these cases that the end result could have been predicted upon an immediate visual inspection of the offending prison officer. Few of them appear to be subtle, in some cases appearing on the social media of the prisoners in media res. A recent offender had apparently tattooed the nickname of her convicted robber lover on the back of her neck, which does seem a little ill-advised in the grand scheme of things. At least the goaler’s daughter had no such intentions towards Mr Toad.

However, women were otherwise largely absent from official roles in upholding the law in 1908. The Women Police Volunteers was founded as a voluntary organisation in 1914, later renamed the Women’s Police Service and then given powers of arrest in 1915. Only from 1919 could women join the Metropolitan Police as full police officers, although it was 1923 before they were given the power of arrest. In 1999 the prefix “Woman” was dropped from their ranks. As of March 2025, 36% of full-time police officers in England and Wales were women. Women were not allowed to become magistrates until 1919, with the first sworn in just a week after the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 came into force. Today, 57% of magistrates in England and Wales are women, as are 40% of barristers, 53% of solicitors, 77% of Chartered Legal Executives, and 43% of all judges. In an essay titled ‘The Great Feminization’, American author Helen Andrews (@herandrews) has claimed that “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.” I will let others decide whether or not she is justified in this fear, escaping from judgement on this issue myself by returning to the story of Mr Toad’s.

Mr Toad’s escape from prison is merely the first hurdle—he must then make it home to Toad Hall. Unfortunately, he accidentally left all his money in his waistcoat pocket and his waistcoat in his prison cell. Even less fortunately for Mr Toad, the clerk at the booking-office was not one of the passive urban scarecrows employed by Transport for London, who even with the aid of mechanical barriers have been rightly criticised for their uselessness. However, Mr Toad’s luck changes as he earns the pity of an engine-driver who offers him a ride in the cab of his steam engine. Although this is “against the Company’s regulations,” the engine-driver admits that “we’re not so very particular in these out-of-the-way parts.” Mr Toad was once again on his way home.

Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) has described this stage of Mr Toad’s escape as “one of the most thrilling passages in English story-telling, especially the moment when they realise they are being pursued.” Suddenly, the engine-driver notices behind them another engine catching up on their line. “It looks as if we were being pursued!” he says, and so they were. Fearing the worst, Mr Toad reveals to the train driver that he has just escaped from “a loathsome dungeon into which [his] enemies had flung [him]”, claiming that this was thanks to his “great daring and cleverness”. He explains that his incarceration was because he “only borrowed a motorcar” and “didn’t mean to steal it, really.” The engine-driver responded that he had been “indeed a wicked toad, and by rights I ought to give you up to offended justice.” However, he took pity on him and did not “hold with motor-cars, for one thing”, nor “hold with being ordered about by policemen when [he’s] on [his] own engine, for another.” This is another demonstration of ambivalence of the otherwise law-abiding public to the agents of the law. Together, they heaped more coal into the engine and the chase was on.

While the response of Mr Toad and the engine-driver was flight, there was a danger of having to fight. The “unmistakable plain-clothes detectives” among their pursuers on the train wave revolvers; the “ancient warders” their halberds, a sort of axe-like spear. Although these had leant against a wall while their would-be wielders were instead “dozing over a pasty and a flagon of brown ale” as Mr Toad entered the caste, the warders had since been roused from their relaxation to join the chase. Thankfully, neither group were in a position to use their weapons against the escaping toad. The police rarely carried weapons in those days, although officer from the rank of inspector up were allowed to carry pistols or revolvers, and occasionally policemen were even allowed to carry swords in emergencies or when patrolling particularly dangerous beats. Thus, the use of lethal force in the upholding of the law was comparatively rare.

However, in the years immediately after The Wind in the Willows was published, there were two notable police shootouts. The Tottenham Outrage on 23 January 1909 was a two-hour chase across North London as police pursued two Latvian robbers. What began as a wages job in which a police officer and a 10-year-old boy were shot dead became a six-mile chase. Police had to borrow weapons and commandeer bicycles to pursue the two criminals, who fired a total of 400 rounds of ammunition back at them. One of the Latvians, unable to climb over a six-foot fence along a riverbank, chose to shoot himself in the head rather than be captured. He died three weeks later of meningitis. As the chase continued, one policeman borrowed a pistol from a bystander, but as he did not know how to use the safety catch, he was unable to fire it. The chase ended when police officers blew down a door with a double-barrelled shotgun and burst into the room where the second Latvian was hiding. He also shot himself, dying minutes later. In addition to the two killed by the Latvians, another 21 people were wounded. It was suggested afterwards that the police revolvers should be replaced with automatic pistols, but two years later this still had not been done.

At the Siege of Sidney Street on 3 January 1911, two Latvian immigrants were surrounded by 200 police officers. The Latvians were part of a gang that had murdered three police officers two weeks prior in a botched jewellery theft. However, the gang had automatic pistols and a large stockpile of ammunition, making them once again better armed than the police with their issued revolvers. The police requested support from the British Army, and on the authorisation of then Home Secretary Winston Churchill, who later turned up on the scene himself, 21 volunteers from the Scots Guards joined the shootout with their rifles. Later, the Scots Guards brought up a Maxim gun and the Royal Horse Artillery two 13-pounder field artillery guns, although these were never used. The siege ended when the building caught fire, and the flames were allowed to consume both it and the Latvians. In the aftermath, the police finally procured automatic pistols.

Today, armed police are a common sight, for better or worse. The shooting of Stephen Waldorf in 1983, mistaken for escaped criminal David Martin, by a police officer who emptied his revolver into the innocent man before repeatedly beating him with it, caused something of a stink. Although Waldorf somehow survived and the police officers involved were clear of attempted murder, the incident led to standardisation and professionalisation with the introduction of the authorised firearms officer (AFO). An authorised firearms officer can specialise and become an armed response vehicle officer (ARVO), trained to drive around, a specialist firearms officer (SFO), trained to deal with more complex situations such as building assaults, or a counter terrorist specialist firearms officer (CTSFO), introduced ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games and trained to the highest standards alongside the Special Forces.

This has not been without tragedy and challenge. Two weeks after the 7 July 2005 London bombings, in which 52 people were killed by Islamist terrorists, armed police shot Jean Charles de Menezes seven times in the head and once in the shoulder, having mistaken the innocent Brazilian man for a failed suicide bomber suspect. After a four-year legal battle with his family, the police apologised to his family, paid them more than £100,000 in compensation, and admitted that he was “a totally innocent victim and in no way to blame for his untimely death.” In 2022, London-based gangster Chris Kaba was stopped by armed police while driving a car believed to be linked to an attempted murder a few days earlier. After ramming two police cars, Kaba was shot once through the windscreen, dying hours later in hospital. A few weeks later, the Crown Prosecution Service charged the police officer who had fired the shot with murder. It was more than a year before the trial began, during which time Judge Mark Lucraft decided to publicly name the police officer, despite Kaba’s gang offering a £10,000 reward to anyone who killed him in revenge. It took a jury less than three hours to find the police officer not guilty. An armed policeman’s lot is not a happy one.

Although pursued by armed police, Mr Toad once again evaded them, only to commit further crimes. As the engine with the police in was gaining on them, when they exited a tunnel the engine-driver slowed it to a walking pace and Mr Toad leapt out and rolled down the railway embankment into the shelter of the wood below. After a cold night in the wood, Mr Toad, still disguised as a washerwoman, set off anew and soon came to a canal. Here, a passing barge-woman being towed by a horse offered him a lift, in exchange for him doing her washing. Suffice it to say that this did not go well, and after a slight disagreement about whether he was a “very well-known, respected, distinguished Toad” or a “horrid, nasty, crawly Toad”, the barge-woman tossed him into the canal. Preferring “solid revenge” to cheap, windy, verbal triumphs”, Mr Toad “overtook the horse, unfastened the towrope and cast off, jumped lightly on the horse’s back, and urged it to a gallop by kicking it vigorously in the sides.” Having stolen the barge-woman’s horse, and covered some miles of his journey, Mr Toad then comes across “a dingy gipsy caravan” and the smells of the breakfast its occupant was preparing. “Want to sell that there horse of yours?” was not the greeting that Mr Toad had expected, but he was immediately taken by the idea. After some haggling with the gipsy, the price was agreed at six shillings and sixpence, as well as a breakfast of as much as Mr Toad could eat of “the most beautiful stew in the world, being made of partridges, and pheasants, and chickens, and hares, and rabbits, and pea-hens, and guinea-fowls, and one or two other things.” Mr Toad knew full well what he had done, saying to himself as he marched away “I seize her horse, I ride off in triumph, and I sell the horse for a whole pocketful of money and an excellent breakfast! Ho, ho! I am The Toad, the handsome, the popular, the successful Toad!” He later told Mole that this was “horse-dealing”, but boasted to Ratty that he “stole a horse—sold him for a large sum of money!” His time in prison had clearly not been sufficiently long to rehabilitate him entirely.

Mr Toad’s thrilling escape comes to its end as, having finally dropped his disguise behind the wheel of the very car he was imprisoned for stealing, and crashed it, and been chased by the police across open fields, and fallen into the river, and been swept along by the raging torrent, he is pulled out of the water by his old friend Ratty. At last, Mr Toad’s escape was complete, and he was safe. Quite why, even within the book’s internal logic, the police should apparently call off their pursuit and declare Mr Toad “missing, presumed dead” or some such when toads are after all aquatic creatures is never explained.

Today, “the scale of Britain’s public safety crisis” means that this would be entirely plausible. In the year ending March 2025, 42.1% of victim-based offences were closed with “no suspect identified”, while only 6.3% ended in a charge or summons. As of November 2025, there were 736 Foreign National Offenders who had been released from prison but absconded before their deportation. Apparently there were also 53,298 in the “total absconder pool”, that is to say illegal migrants, once in the system, whose current whereabouts were unknown. In a frankly bizarre post-Christmas #Comms moment, the Home Office has recently admitted that “there are thousands of illegal migrants or foreign criminals already in the UK from Angola, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo” alone. There was no justice to be had in the land nowadays. Nevertheless, with that fatal plunge and outstretched arm, the swashbuckling escape of Mr Toad culminated, and the law had been successful evaded.

Please allow me two minutes’ digression on the subject of Christianity. Given how intertwined Christian worship is with English identity, it is hardly a surprise that it features in The Wind in the Willows. Mr Toad boasts that Toad Hall, in addition to having “up-to-date sanitation”, is only “five minutes from church”, although when Ratty and Mole are making their way home from Mr Badger’s it is said that animals “[do] not hold with villages… regardless of church, post office, or public-house.” Mr Toad even prays, amid also “shrieking” and “protesting”, while being dragged from the Court House, although the extent of his sincerity in this regard is left as an exercise for the reader. However, the most prominent portrayal of Christianity is the visit of the field-mice carol singers to Mole End, “quite an institution in these parts” as they sing the “old-time carols that their forefathers composed in fields that were fallow and held by frost, or when snow-bound in chimney corners, and handed down to be sung in the miry street to lamp-lit windows at Yule-time”. The carol sung by the field-mice is about an English winter, but culminates by observing that “Goodman Joseph”, Mary, and the angels heard the first cry of “Nowell” from the animals in “the stable where they did dwell”. Although I will not dwell on it myself, Jude Russo (@juderusso94) has presented the compelling case that Mr Badger “comes from a very old Catholic recusant family” while “Mole is clearly a Methodist”. Regardless of individual denomination, the animals, all good Englishmen, are good Christians too.

However, it is the pagan gods of Nature that truly watch over the animals. When Mr Toad, towards the end of his thrilling escape, stumbles across a gipsy’s camp, the smells from the cooking on the campfire “seemed like the very soul of Nature taking form and appearing to her children, a true Goddess, a mother of solace and comfort.” While this is a figurative goddess, the novel does feature a very real demi-god. Tom Rowsell (@Tom_Rowsell), the Heathen historian, has called this scene “one of the best descriptions of the transition to liminal sacred spaces”. Otter’s son Portly, known for “straying off and getting lost”, had still not returned, so Ratty and Mole, thinking they have worked out where he might have gone, set off on the river in search of him in the early hours of the morning. Nothing I can write will capture the beauty of the scene as Mole and Ratty encounter the horned piper, the Friend and Helper that had watched over Portly until their arrival that dawn, so I urge you to reread it yourselves. I am sure it will bring you the same “mirth and pleasure” it brought the two animal heroes.

The dramatic climax of The Wind in the Willows is of course the retaking of Toad Hall. In Mr Toad’s absence, the Wild Wooders made their move, despite Mole and Mr Badger arguing that his incarceration was only temporary, given that “no criminal laws had ever been known to prevail against cheek and plausibility such as [Mr Toad’s], combined with the power of a long purse.” Nevertheless, the Wild Wooders succeeded in ejecting Mr Toad’s friends by force and thus occupying the elegant ancestral pile themselves. Exactly how they treated any oak doors is not mentioned, but the presence of such savages in the stately and serene setting of Toad Hall is seen as an abomination, as well as unjust. For this task the question of reclaiming the house, there is never any suggestion of a legal process. The police are not summoned to evict the illegal occupants, nor is there a suggestion of a challenge through the courts. In this absence of state intervention, Toad’s friends decide to take the law into their own hands through both guile and force of arms.

Perhaps the most striking difference between 1908 and today is that the animals are armed. Indeed, it is not just the Wild Wooders who are armed, but the heroes too. When Ratty readies himself to venture into the Wild Wood in pursuit of Mole, he shoves into his belt “a brace of pistols” and “a stout cudgel that stood in a corner of the hall”. Once Ratty finds the apologetic Mole, he rests beside him “with a pistol in his paw.” Even as they leave the sanctuary of Mr Badger’s home, Ratty “had his overcoat on, and his pistols thrust into his belt again.” Indeed, Ratty seems to own so many weapons that as he divvies them out for the final assault on Toad Hall, “four little heaps gradually grew and grew” with the number of swords and pistols. In the end, they are equipped with “a belt to go round each animal, and then a sword to be stuck into each belt, and then a cutlass on the other side to balance it” as well as “a pair of pistols, a policeman’s truncheon, several sets of handcuffs, some bandages and sticking-plaster, and a flask and a sandwich-case.” In contrast with Ratty’s fondness for handguns, the Wild Wooders are armed with rifles, although after the battle Mole collects them, unfired, by the armful. Mr Badger complains about the stoats and their “detestable guns” while one ferret sentry even fires a warning shot over Mr Toad’s head. Not all of this was entirely legal in 1908.

Laws restricting gun ownership did exist in the century preceding The Wind in the Willows. The Bill of Rights 1689 reaffirmed that “the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law”. However, the Papists (No. 2) Act 1688 made it clear that this indeed only applied to Protestants, not Catholics. Following the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819, in which 18 radicals were killed and more than 400 injured by a combined force of Yeomanry and Hussars, the Seizure of Arms Act 1820 allowed the state to confiscate “arms which might be used by revolutionaries”. Intent to use “any gun, pistol, hanger, cutlass, bludgeon or other offensive weapon” to commit a felony was made illegal by the Vagrancy Act of 1824, although owning the weapon was not. The Gun Licence Act 1870 required anyone carrying a gun outside his own property for any reason to purchase a licence first. Intended to raise revenue rather than control guns, the annual licences cost 10 shillings and were sold at post offices. There was then a succession of bills introduced in Parliament but rejected. The Regulation of Carrying of Arms Bill of 1881 demanded that licences be issued by a magistrate, but was rejected. The Firearms Bill of 1883 would have banned the carrying of a loaded firearm in a public place, but was rejected. The Felonious Use of Firearms Bill 1887 proposed minimum ten-year sentences for burglars armed with a gun, but was rejected. The Pistols Bill of 1893 would have licenced the sale of firearms no longer than fifteen inches, banned under-eighteens and violent criminals release from prison within five years from buying them, and required chief constables to authorise the carrying of a loaded pistol. After a speech in which one MP declared “Why should Englishmen not arm themselves? It is natural and Parliament should not interfere with such a right” the bill was rejected, as it was again in 1895. Eventually, the bill was passed as the Pistols Act 1903, albeit in a much weaker form, and it led directly to an increase in sales of pistols with barrels longer than the nine-inch minimum.

Ultimately, as AJP Taylor observed, the First World War was to change everything. The Firearms Acts 1920 and 1937 greatly restricted gun ownership, and in that second year the Home Secretary ordered police to refuse applications on the grounds of self-defence as “firearms cannot be regarded as a suitable means of protection and may be a source of danger”. The foundation of gun laws today is the Firearms Act 1968, subsequently amended following the massacres in Hungerford and then a Dunblane school. The list of prohibited weapons and ammunition is both too long and too depressing to reproduce in full, so interested parties may peruse it at their leisure, but suffice it to say that neither Ratty nor anyone else today would be able to tuck a brace of pistols into their belt before leaving home.

While Ratty was ready for a proper shootout, Mr Badger had other ideas. As a recusant Catholic, as previously suggested, Mr Badger had been told by Mr Toad’s father about a secret passage he had discovered and covertly repaired, should his wayward son ever find himself “in a real fix, and it would be of use to him.” This passage is clearly a priest hole, a hiding place built in many English houses from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I for Catholic priests to be concealed from priest hunters. Although such measures are no longer required amid the threat of Catholic sedition, such priest holes and secret tunnels remain a staple of murder mysteries and other thrilling literature. As such, Mr Badger proposed a less lethal, although by no mean non-violent, plan of attack:

“No guns, no swords, no sticks, no arms of any sort whatever!”

“But the sentinels will be posted as usual,” remarked the Rat.

“Exactly,” said the Badger; “that is my point. The weasels will trust entirely to their excellent sentinels. And that is where the passage comes in. That very useful tunnel leads right up under the butler’s pantry, next to the dining-hall!”

“Aha! That squeaky board in the butler’s pantry!” said Toad. “Now I understand it!”

“We shall creep out quietly into the butler’s pantry—” cried the Mole.

“—with our pistols and swords and sticks—” shouted the Rat.

“—and rush in upon them,” said the Badger.

“—and whack ’em, and whack ’em, and whack ’em!” cried the Toad in ecstasy, running round and round the room, and jumping over the chairs.”

The next day, as Ratty was heaping up weapons for each of the four animals, Mr Badger reiterated his intent:

“But just let us once get past the stoats, with those detestable guns of theirs, and I assure you we shan’t want any swords or pistols. We four, with our sticks, once we’re inside the dining-hall, why, we shall clear the floor of all the lot of them in five minutes.”

“It’s as well to be on the safe side,” said the Rat reflectively, polishing a pistol-barrel on his sleeve and looking along it.

Acting on his own initiative, Mole adopted the disguise of a washerwoman, approached the gates of Toad Hall, and fed disinformation to one of the stoat sergeants about an attack due that night by “a hundred bloodthirsty badgers, armed with rifles”, “six boatloads of Rats, with pistols and cutlasses”, and “a picked body of Toads, known at the Die-hards, or the Death-or-Glory Toads”. Everything was set for the return of Ulysses, and the four animals set off for the entrance to the secret passage. At one point, for all his objections to the need to bring pistols, Mr Badger was “on the point of putting a bullet into Toad” as he rushed to catch up with the others in the passage, startling them. Eventually they emerged from the secret passage into the pantry and burst in on the banqueting weasels with a cry from Mr Badger of “The hour is come! Follow me!”

Having successfully regained control of Toad Hall, the conquering heroes set about mopping up. Prisoners were handcuffed, although many weasels had fled, leaping through the unopen windows to escape. The stoats had abandoned both their sentry posts and many of their rifles, which were dutifully collected by Mole. What followed was very nearly shameful. According to Article 6 of Convention (II) with respect to the Laws and Customs of War on Land, agreed at the First Hague Conference in 1899, and later confirmed at the Second Hague Conference in 1907:

The State may utilize the labour of prisoners of war according to their rank and aptitude. Their tasks shall not be excessive, and shall have nothing to do with the military operations.

Prisoners may be authorized to work for the public service, for private persons, or on their own account.

According to Article 4:

They must be humanely treated.

The band of Wild Wooders could be considered a militia fulfilling the conditions outlined in Article 1:

To be commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;

To have a fixed distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance;

To carry arms openly; and

To conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

That final one is up for debate, but the Chief Weasel was clearly their commander, the stoats wore enough of a uniform that Mole could recognise a sergeant, and they certainly carried arms openly. Mr Badger thus issues an unlawful order to Mole: “you can give them a licking a-piece, if it’s any satisfaction to you, and put them out by the back-door”. This could be considered false imprisonment, aggravated assault, assault with a weapon, grievous bodily harm, and other equally unpleasant-sounding offences, which would be at odds with the requirement to treat prisoners humanely. All may be fair in love and war, but thankfully for all concerned the “goodnatured Mole” decided that he “didn’t have to lick them, either” as the prisoners “had had licking enough for one night” and “were very penitent”. One, a “small and rather bedraggled weasel”, later returns to Toad Hall to offer his services, and is given banquet invitations to deliver. The Wild Wood had been tamed, and in the long summer evenings that followed mother-weasels would warn their children about Mr Badger to keep them from misbehaving.

Despite the dramatic and violent recapture of Toad Hall, and his continued status as an escaped prisoner, there is no indication at the end of the book that the law will pursue Mr Toad any further. Various wrongs are then righted. Much to Mr Toad’s displeasure, payment is made to the barge-woman for the theft of her horse, although not a terribly excessive sum as “the gipsy’s valuation being admitted by local assessors to be approximately correct.” The engine-driver is “properly thanked and compensated” for his part in Toad’s thrilling escape. Mr Toad also sends the gaoler’s daughter “a handsome gold chain and locket set with pearls” and a letter of thanks. Having been imprisoned, escaped, and joined his friends in retaking Toad Hall, “Our Prison System” and “Property, its rights and its duties” were two of the topics Mr Toad had intended to cover in his address as part of the entertainment at his triumphant Banquet. However, this address and any further entanglement with the law were not to be. Mr Toad was at last an altered Toad.

The law of the land looks very different today, and the manner in which it is upheld differs greatly too. The Wind in the Willows is well over a hundred years old, and many deign to flatter themselves about the great progress we have made in the years since. While animals, and in some cases even trees, may occasionally be the subject of legal affairs, neither are bound by them in England today. Honest yeomen can no longer tuck two pistols into their belt when venturing out in search of their friends. New, but no less spurious, offences have superseded cheeking a policeman as the yardstick to which other prison sentences are compared. Prisons prove no more immune to escapes, but they are no longer dank and dark dungeons in ancient castles. While there is disquiet about illegal residents occupying luxury accommodation, there are not, or at least not yet, armed adventurers ejecting them by force. Mere anarchy is not yet fully loosed upon the world, but there are still many who declare that there is no justice to be had in the land nowadays, and are themselves increasingly willing to take matters into their own hands to rectify that.

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Suggested Further Reading

Hitchens, Peter (2004). The Abolition of Liberty. London: Atlantic Books.

Klein, Thomas C. (2005). ‘Imperfect Order: Reflections of the Law in Two Classic Children Classic Children’s Novels’, Texas Wesleyan Law Review, Volume 12, Issue 1, pp. 303-318. Available at: https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1218&context=txwes-lr

Reid, P. R. (1954). The Colditz Story. London: Pan Books Ltd. Available at: https://archive.org/details/colditzstory0000prre_e2f1

[1] Readers of this article who detect upon it certain influences of a well-known and popular British journalist may be interested to learn that 1908 was also the year in which the first Daylight Saving Bill was laid before the House of Commons, although it was not implemented until 1916—another wartime imposition on the rights of freeborn Englishmen.

[2] Nor is it intended as an academic article—I have had enough issues with them in recent years—so there are no page numbers attached to quotations. If you wish to check any of them for yourself, you can find a searchable copy of the full novel here: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/289/pg289-images.html

[3] Mr Toad is at least spared awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block. Fans of Gilbert and Sullivan will meet with mixed emotion the revelation that more on this is to follow in a future essay, with any luck to be published this side of the heat death of the universe.

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Lenin never actually said that. In fact, its first recorded use seems to have been by, of all people, George Galloway, writing in The Guardian five and a half weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attack. In those two months — nay, not so much, not two — after the September 11 attacks, it seemed as though the world had changed; the peace dividend after the Cold War was over, the illusion of American invincibility had been shattered, history had indeed not ended, the Free World was under attack.

However, while a heinous act of terrorism, the attack was not entirely without precedent. Al-Qaeda had existed for over a decade and in 1998 had killed 224 in simultaneous truck bomb attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. A year later Al-Qaeda killed 17 American sailors when it bombed the destroyer USS Cole in Aden harbour. What was new was the scale and the extent of the horror. Watching the collapse of the Twin Towers live on television, the world changed.

History is like that; every now and then there comes a moment so horrific that people can no longer avert their eyes and are forced to confront reality. The last few days seem to have been one of those moments. The mass rape, torture, and even murder of tens of thousands of girls and young women across Britain has now achieved global infamy. However much some would like us to, we can no longer avert our eyes. However, while the crimes committed by the grooming gangs were themselves violent and repellent, the process by which they have come to dominate headlines and Parliamentary debates was not. Indeed, far from being physically violent it was not even conducted in physical space. Instead, it was posting online that led inexorably to influencing politics and policy. This is just one example of the “Posting to Policy Pipeline” whereby discussion that begins on social media, often among anonymous accounts, leads eventually to changes in policy. A few posts can change history.

What follows is as accurate a timeline of events as I have been able to recreate of this particular pipeline. It is by no means complete, as the branching nature of social media, and particularly Twitter, leads conversations to go down through comments and threads, up through quote tweets, and along through retweets, standalone tweets, and screenshots. I must also confess at this stage that while I may now pay for X Premium, I insist upon using the old nomenclature of Twitter and tweets. This is not the first attempt to do so either, with the Financial Times, Guardian, New Yorker, and openDemocracy among those offering their own spin on events. I should also add that I make no moral judgement on any of the people directly or indirectly involved in this pipeline, except perhaps those convicted in a court of law. This is simply my best possible explanation of what happened.

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Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson)

The story began on 27 December with an article in The Telegraph by Fraser Nelson. Written a few days after a Saudi Arabian asylum seeker drove a car through a Christmas market in Magdeburg, injuring 300 and killing 6, the piece was titled ‘Britain’s integration miracle is a beacon of hope amid instability’. It opened with a reference to Barack Obama and proceeded in an equally predictable manner, claiming that the Magdeburg attack had shaken Germany because violent crime in the country is “surging to a 15-year high”. This is, according to Nelson, one of the “problems we don’t have”. He has clearly forgotten the terror attacks on Westminster and London Bridges in 2017, conducted in a similar manner. Having watched the latter of these from the safety of the student union bar, albeit blissfully ignorant of what was occurring, I have not. Remarkably, this was not the claim that proved most controversial. Nelson, who clearly believes this sincerely, argued the following:

“But we seem to have attracted immigrants who, by and large, are prone to integrate and strengthen the social fabric. The secret sauce is our concept of Britishness, which is not about ethnicity or religion but a way of life with global appeal. It’s a set of values that anyone can adopt.”

Having been replaced by Michael Gove as editor of The Spectator following its recent purchase, it had been announced a week earlier that Nelson would join The Times as a weekly columnist. There is, therefore, a degree of irony in Nelson’s very last article after 13 years writing for The Telegraph being his most consequential, but only due to the extent of the reaction against it.

Sam Bidwell (@sam_bidwell)

Sam Bidwell, Director of the Next Generation Centre at the Adam Smith Institute, responded to Nelson’s column with a piece in The Critic titled ‘Fraser Nelson’s immigration holdout’, tweeting a link to it on 29 December. Perhaps generously, Bidwell stated that “I don’t think that Nelson is stupid.” Nevertheless, this “Bidwellian dragging” as it has been dubbed, was a savage rebuttal that focused on Nelson’s claim’s about Britain’s “secret sauce”.

“Nelson’s most offensive claim was on the subject of national identity — “our concept of Britishness”, as he puts it, “a set of values that anyone can adopt”. His mistake is not in assuming that Britons are united by common threads, but in assuming that these common threads are what make us Britons. Rather, they are the observed habits of an organic national community, accrued over centuries like sediment at the bottom of a river.”

It is fair to say that Nelson took this response reasonably well, commenting under Bidwell’s tweet to say “My argument is that Britain, overall, has handled demographic change well - not that there are zero problems. We have huge problems: but outnumbered by even bigger successes.” This precipitated a series of lengthy comments backwards and forward, which I shall certainly not quote in full. Bidwell commented thanking Nelson for responding before rebutting the argument that “Britain handled demographic change well”. The next day Nelson responded at length, making some insinuations about Bidwell’s followers and finishing with the lines “No one disputes that immigration figures are way too high. No one is in denial about big integration challenges or the jihadist menace. But there is plenty of denial about the UK’s record of integration success - surprising, as it really is all around us. Maybe even at the ASI.” At this point the pipeline split, to converge again two days later. Bidwell responded at even greater length in a quote tweet that quoted both a number of statistics and Jurassic Park, and made a reference to “dozens of towns which bear the scars of Pakistani grooming gangs, who targeted young girls because they were white.”

Harold Lacey (@Chandernagore2)

Originally due to a source code error, “Anonymous” is the default username for all posters on 4chan, ubiquitously shortened to “Anon”. Although the social activists and hackers of Anonymous, with all their ‘V For Vendetta’ iconography and a name drawn from the imageboard website, have long since ceased to be relevant, the title of “Anon” is still applied to anonymous and pseudonymous accounts on Twitter and beyond. Posting and poasting, a more ironic and provocative form akin to shitposting, are the staple of Anons who seldom have anything to sell or seek any personal gain, but rather post for its own sake. Harold Lacey is the first Anon in this pipeline. Quote tweeting Nelson’s wall of text, Lacey remarked simply that “Rotherham is the unanswerable reply to any of this”. This was not the first mention of Rotherham or the grooming gangs, as Bidwell had asked rhetorically about both in his piece in The Critic and his own quote tweet of Nelson. Nor indeed was it particularly descriptive; the name of Rotherham has become evocative enough. Nevertheless, it was Lacey’s tweet that led to the next stage of the pipeline.

Char (@WolfOfClapham)

At this point the story reaches perhaps its only moment of levity. Char (@WolfOfClapham), a 2:1 International Relations graduate from the University of Portsmouth who has written for the Pimlico Journal, had failed to get tickets for Luke Litter’s match at the evening session of the World Darts Championship. Instead, his tickets were for the afternoon session so he set off for Ally Pally dressed in a St George’s cross shirt and accompanying Willy Wonka. There much revelry at the darts, and perhaps a pint or two in the pub afterwards. On the way home after all this merriment, Char first retweeted Harold Lacey’s Rotherham tweet, and then at 20:37 sent one of his own, simply saying “People should have hung for Rotherham”. I make no legal or ethical judgement; this tweet speaks for itself. An hour later, he commented “Hanged” below, thereby correcting the grammar of one of 2024’s more consequential tweets. However, the pipeline had already moved on.

Max Tempers (@maxtempers)

Describing himself as an independent journalist and making ample use of the 🚨 “slop siren” emoji, Max Tempers has had a number of dramatic scoops, including the revelation that “hundreds of Labour Party staff” were going to campaign for Kamala Harris, an apparent act of foreign election interference funded by a governing party. Recently, Tempers had made more than a few enemies for his investigation into the Motability Scheme. Anonymous tipoffs were another feature of his reporting, on subjects including Transpennine “badger tunnels” and, in this case, grooming gangs. A few days before, Tempers had been sent some sentencing remarks for a grooming gang from Oxford, not Rotherham.

This case was not recent and was not unknown. On 27 June 2013, Mohammed Karrar, Bassam Karrar, Akhtar Doghar, Anjum Doghar, and Kamar Jamil were sentenced at the Old Bailey by Peter Rook QC for “the exploitation and abuse of young, highly vulnerable girls in the Oxford area over a long period.” That day, BBC News, Sky News, and The Independent all published stories about the sentencing. The next day the Oxford Mail published lengthy extracts from the sentencing remarks document, which appears to be the day the PDF was created and uploaded to judiciary.uk. However, the gut-wrenching description of the crimes had been left out, perhaps because it was too graphic to print, perhaps out of delicacy to the victims, perhaps for another reason. Tempers had no such qualms or constraints, and at 20:55 on 30 December quote tweeted Char’s tweet about Rotherham with these words and the screenshot below: “The grooming gangs trial summary transcripts are utterly grotesque. It’s incredible we haven’t had mass civil unrest. Media reporting guidelines helped bottle it up. Some of these people are going to walk free soon.”

It was this tweet, with its irrefutable description of crimes so graphic as to be almost impossible to ignore or downplay, which caused a document that had languished online for over a decade, freely accessible but apparently overlooked, to finally detonate like a delayed-action bomb. From this point onwards, the exact pipeline becomes much harder to follow, such was the volume of posting that Tempers’s tweet incited.

Joshua Neicho (@JoshNeicho)

Although it would be unfair to characterise him as an antagonist, it would be fair to say that Joshua Neicho did not intend to help spread information about the grooming gangs. A freelance journalist based in Birmingham, Neicho took exception to something halfway down one of Bidwell’s tweets, quote tweeting and saying “There may indeed be “dozens”. Can Bidwell name 24+ British towns where grooming gangs operated and in every case justify it is accurate to label them as “Pakistani” gangs?” Bidwell responded with a list of twenty: Rotherham, Rochdale, Aylesbury, Banbury, Bristol, Derby, Halifax, Keighley, Newcastle, Oxford, Peterborough, Telford, Huddersfield, Burton-on-Trent, Ramsgate, Coventry, Chelmsford, Dewsbury, Middlesborough, and Bradford. Unbeknownst to either of them, this tweet was to prove a key part of the pipeline. However, the spat did not end there, with Neicho demanding “4 more please” and then entering into a lengthy argument with Bidwell as to whether his “aim was to minimise the extent of these crimes” or merely be “a stickler for facts”. To his credit, Neicho did eventually “apologise unreservedly”, retweet Bidwell’s slightly self-satisfied quote tweet of the apology, and has entirely abstained from tweeting since.

Charlie Peters (@CDP1882)

Although his tweets did not directly feature in this pipeline’s onward route, it would be entirely remiss to not mention Charlie Peters. Not only one of the best investigative journalists at GB News, Peters is perhaps one of the best in Britain, known primarily for his work in exposing the grooming gangs and helping the victims tell their stories. Together with Guy Dampier (@dampierguy), now a Senior Researcher on Nationhood at the Legatum Institute, the pair set out in 2021 to cohere the reporting about grooming gangs. While they had been “turned down by almost everyone”, GB News saw promise in them and their project and commissioned a documentary. Now working full-time at GB News, Peters responded to Neicho’s demand for the names of “24+ British towns” with “I’ve found over 50.” To this, and very much not to his credit, Neicho churlishly responded “Are you called Sam Bidwell?” This was something of an odd response and received an overwhelmingly negative reception, although Peters simply replied “No but I know that he’s read and watched the requisite materials to know as I do. All best”. This needlessly petty interaction further amplified the issue of the grooming gangs, as well as the issues of attitudes that contributed to the various cover-ups.

Elon Musk (@elonmusk)

Against a backdrop of heated debate in America about H-1B visas and mass immigration, Elon Musk was posting as much as ever. Adored and reviled in equal measure for his electric cars, re-usable spacecraft, and purchase of Twitter, the richest man in the world thrives on controversy. His appearance in the pipeline was unexpected, but not entirely unpredictable. Nor was information about the grooming gangs new to him. Back in August, Musk had quoted tweeted a photo of a Daily Mirror headline about Rotherham from 27 August 2014 that read “Horrific betrayal of 1,400 children”.

Musk, as far as I can tell, first entered this particular pipeline at 05:48 UK time on 31 December when he quote tweeted a i/o (@eyeslasho) post about Rotherham grooming gangs with “The government officials responsible, including those in the judiciary, need to fired in shame over this”. i/o’s tweet was quoting one from William Meijer (@DataMeijer) that was itself quoting a now deleted tweet from i/o. Meijer’s tweet included a further cropped version of the sentencing remarks screenshot posted by Max Tempers, of which he said “most disturbing things I have ever read.” At 05:50, Musk commented “!!” below Bidwell’s list of twenty towns “scarred by migrant sex abuse gangs”.

There is then a gap in Musk’s tweeting about the grooming gangs. That evening he attended a New Year’s Eve party where he was filmed dancing to Village People’s ‘Y.M.C.A.’ with incoming President Donald Trump. Online, Musk had changed his name on Twitter to “Kekius Maximus”, urged people to “Vote Reform”, called actor Mark Ruffalo “Just another Hollywood subtard”, reposted a video of Starship uploaded by Adrian Dittmann, and tweeted a picture of his son with the caption “I have a good feeling about 2025”. Having seen in the New Year in this inimitable style, Musk returned to tweeting about the grooming gangs.

At 07:16, Musk commented “Who in the government and judiciary allowed this to happen and which of the legacy media covered it up?” under a tweet by Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) about three examples of rape, torture, and murder the grooming gangs that included a different screenshot of the sentencing remarks brought to the world’s attention by Tempers. At 11:28, Musk simply wrote “…” in a quote tweet of Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) who had posted a short video of Andrew Norfolk talking about Rotherham. In the full video, filmed at Shift North 2015 and available on YouTube, Norfolk talks about the horrors he uncovered in his investigations into grooming gangs that were published in The Times in 2011, starting with this frontpage splash almost exactly fourteen years ago. At 11:33, Musk commented “Unconscionable and unforgivable” under a quote tweet of Temper’s viral post by John Carter @martianwyrdlord in which he had listed various groups he believed “should hang” and added that “Cities should burn. Governments should topple.” At around 11:50, he finally retweeted Tempers’s screenshot of the sentencing remarks.

Musk was incensed.

Hereafter, the story has become mainstream but remains far from predictable. Elon Musk has declared support for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, denounced Farage himself, and then agreed with him again. He has shouted “Free Tommy Robinson”, about whom the less said the better as this piece from the Pimlico Journal addresses, but also declared support for Rupert Lowe, Kemi Badenoch, Liz Truss, and even Andrew Tate. He has also staked his own claim to being British. Efforts to chart who supports whom in this “YooKay Civil War” have been humorous but reflect the chaotic and inconstant nature of both social media and Musk himself. Following the success thus far of a fundraiser to obtain court transcripts, a vote in Parliament on an amendment tabled by the Tories to secure a national inquiry which was whipped against and defeated by Labour, and an ongoing clash of narratives on both social and mainstream media it is difficult to predict where the pipeline leads next.

The Posting to Policy Pipeline

This has been a case study into the Posting to Policy Pipeline, rather than an attempt to define it in abstract terms. However, I will attempt to characterise it. Acronyms are the bane of my existence, but I adore alliteration, so I offer the four Us of the Posting to Policy Pipeline: universal reach, uncoordinated efforts, unpredictable virality, and unintended consequences.

The near universal reach of social media is increasingly evident. From the very poorest who can access the internet to the richest man in the world, everyone and anyone can both read, listen, and watch conversations unfold and participate in discussions themselves, adding their voices to the growing chorus. The advent of the printing press in Europe transformed societies and civilisation, enabling instant mass communication from the few to the many; the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and eventually nationalism developed in consequence. The internet, but especially social media, has enabled mass communication from the many to the many, across international borders, cultures, languages, and time zones; its consequences both positive and negative are keenly felt, whether knowingly or not. Anyone can be part of the pipeline.

Like much that happens on social media, and often in human affairs more broadly, the posting is not centrally directed or commanded; it is the sum of the uncoordinated efforts of any number of accounts, each with their own agenda and approach. While some might collaborate, amplifying and boosting particular posts, phrases, or hashtags, much of the posting remains organic and unorganised. Each post may build on what has come before, but there is not necessarily a plan, and certainly not a universal one. Those in the pipeline may indeed neither intend to be, nor recognise that they are, part of a larger process that can alter public opinion and, in cases such as this one, national and international politics. Each person posts according to their own conscience, in their own style, and in pursuit of their own aims, which may be benevolent, malevolent, or entirely whimsical. The pipeline is not laid according to a single plan, and although some may attempt to guide it for their own ends there is no guarantee of their success.

The unpredictable virality was certainly evident in this case. How else could the typo of a slightly inebriated 2:1 IR grad and darts fan be so widely amplified by the world’s richest man? Had he known how far his post was going to spread, would Max Tempers have cropped his screenshot slightly more neatly? Neither knew that they were soon to be the epicentre of a global Twitter storm that would lead a week later to debates in the House of Commons. Social media algorithms have long been a topic of debate, with many suspecting dark and conspiratorial intent behind them. In this case outrage appears to have played a greater role than algorithms, particularly due to the deeply emotive nature of the crimes at the heart of it all. Chance, the third element of Clausewitz’s trinity with reason and passion, also plays a role. It is often luck, whether good or bad, that determines which posts are seen at the right time by the right people, and thus go viral. The combination of the three elements makes it impossible to predict which posts will or will not go viral or form the next part of the pipeline.

Finally, there are the unintended consequences. Fraser Nelson set out to defend immigration but instead set in motion events which led to mass deportations and remigration being debated in Parliament. Joshua Neicho intended to refute the number of Pakistani grooming gangs but his tweets led directly to global amplification of the large number of the towns in which their existence has been confirmed Char just wanted to watch the darts and go to the pub and his use of “hung” has been seen more than five million times, while his correction to “hanged” only seventy-three thousand. Max Tempers posted a screenshot of a document that had been freely available online and so brought the extent of the grooming gangs’ inhumanity to the attention of the richest man in the world, thereby driving a public wedge between the two partners of the Special Relationship for the second time in three months. His account was also “temporarily restricted” for almost four days for reasons that are not entirely clear, although he has now returned with a vengeance. There are even rumours that Anglo-American intelligence and defence cooperation may be curtailed if incoming President Donald Trump, no stranger to controversy himself, allows Elon Musk to remain part of his administration. At each stage of the pipeline, no participant knew what would come next, let alone how it would end.

In the last week or so, it feels as though a decade’s worth of political discourse and changes in public opinion have occurred. The “vibe shift” that began with the re-election of President Donald Trump has accelerated, perhaps beyond reversal. What began with a Telegraph column, turned into a Twitter spat, inspired some drunken posting, and caught the eye of the world’s richest poster has already transformed the boundaries of political debate and possibly altered the course of Anglo-American relations for the next few years. The conclusion to this case study of the Posting to Policy Pipeline is yet to be revealed, which leaves my own summing up at risk of becoming quickly outdated. I do not know what the next major twist will be, but I am reasonably confident there will be some posting in the pipeline.

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Timeline

This is the most accurate timeline I can reproduce of the events on Twitter. It is by no means complete as it does not include either deleted tweets or retweet. For brevity, I have only included times, names, and links.

27 December

14:17 @FraserNelson

29 December

10:11 @sam_bidwell

17:54 @FraserNelson

20:17 @sam_bidwell

30 December

13:29 @FraserNelson

14:46 @Chandernagore2

18:15 @JoshNeicho

20:37 @WolfOfClapham

20:55 @maxtempers

21:44 @sam_bidwell

22:24 @CDP1882

31 December

00:29 @stillgray

05:22 @DataMeijer

05:32 @eyeslasho

05:48 @elonmusk

05:50 @elonmusk

16:44 @jonatanpallesen

22:40 @martianwyrdlord

1 January

07:16 @elonmusk

11:28 @elonmusk

11:33 @elonmusk

11:50 @elonmusk retweets @maxtempers

Return to Twitter

In the beginning there was the word, and the word was “afwa”

When I was as a baby, still in the earliest stages of developing rational thought and speech, I invented a word: “afwa”. I have no idea from what it was derived but its meaning was a mix between “uh oh” and “broken”. I might drop some food on the floor: “Afwa.” An unloved toy might break: “Afwa.” Things might fall apart: “Afwa.”

Shortly before my second birthday, we moved to Africa. The details are a matter for another occasion but in short, I had a fantastic time growing up all over the continent, and later in Papua New Guinea, and learned an awful lot about the world that has stood me in good stead since, but perhaps the most insightful lesson was my first.

Arriving in Tanzania in the late nineties, sat in the car on my very first drive in Africa, I was astonished. A dilapidated shack: “Afwa.” A burned-out car: “Afwa.” Another burned-out car: “Afwa.” Indistinct abandoned machinery: “Afwa.” A crashed lorry in danger of going off a cliff: “Afwa.” This continued for the entire journey.

In fact, it continued for much of the rest of our time traipsing round the tropics. It was not just the poverty; it was the lack of concern for their surroundings. These were people making the most of what they had, building what they could, and trading their way towards relative prosperity.

Returning to Tanzania after a decade and a half, the country had been transformed. A middle class had emerged, and with them so too had all the trappings of a comfortable and consumerist life, from shopping malls to swimming pools. Nevertheless, there was in the vast urban sprawl of Dar es Salaam much that was broken, much that was squalid, much that was afwa.

Returning to England was always a mixed blessing. The invariably appalling weather at Heathrow was a deeply unpleasant shock to the system, but the first brimmed glass of fresh full-fat milk an excellent restorative treatment. Running around outside in shorts was very much confined to the summer months but the electricity supply seldom if ever faltered. It might have been cold in England, but few things seemed afwa.

I should at this point make a slight disclaimer and reveal that in truth I have no recollection of using the word myself, having soon developed more erudite ways of describing the world I perceived around me, let alone that first car journey, but I have always remembered the lesson of afwa.

Change and decay in all around I see

In the closing minutes of his thirteen-part documentary epic ‘Civilisation’, Kenneth Clark quotes some lines from WB Yeats, whom he said was “more like a man of genius than anyone I’ve ever known,” something I might say of them both.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Those lines from ‘The Second Coming’ were written by Yeats not merely in the aftermath of the First World War, but against the backdrop of ongoing war in Britain itself, as much of Ireland fought to break away. War, violence, and conflict are seen today as being far away from Britain, the curse of less happy lands. Yet terrorism, both Irish and Islamic, and riots have blighted this country on and off for decades. This precious stone set in the silver sea has seen almost 37,000 illegal immigrants cross the Channel in small boats in the last year, almost half the regular strength of the British Army. We are not so far from the blood-dimmed tide as we might like to think.

Over the course of thirteen episodes, without alas a fourteen on Palladian architecture that he himself admitted might have been the best of them all, Clark charted the evolution of Western civilisation from the fall of Rome to the rise of space exploration, but throughout there is a sense of how fragile civilisation can be. Descent into war, poverty, misery, and anarchy is an ever-present danger, no matter how civilised any given people may consider themselves to be.

In the first episode, after his initial statement about being unable to define civilisation in abstract terms but recognising it when he sees it, Clark attempted to summarise why Roman civilisation fell. Suited and perched on some rocks on the riverbank, Clark addressed the camera in front of the Pont du Gard aqueduct, which he praised as “materially beyond the destructive powers of the barbarians” and could certainly not be described as afwa. But Rome itself was, at least in the west. Its rule over the continent was at an end. Nevertheless, the survival, partially or wholly intact, of so much of what the Romans built is testament to their remarkable talent as engineers, building structures that have outlasted them by well over a thousand years.

For centuries after the collapse of the Roman Empire, people who continued to live in its ruins, both physically and metaphorically. Many of the finest buildings of Rome itself, including the Colosseum, were both cannibalised for raw materials and used as makeshift campsites. In Britain, and particularly Wales, people endeavoured to preserve Roman law and order long after the distant metropole had fallen. The survival of so much of classical literature and history is thanks to those monks and scholars, many clinging to the rocks that line Britain’s Atlantic coast, who painstakingly copied them out and ensured their survival as barbarism ravaged the continent. Everything seemed afwa in the afterglow of Rome.

Thankfully, all was not lost. 1066 and all that was followed by the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and much else that led to the flourishing of Western civilisation and Britain’s own stint as top nation. This path was not a direct line of inevitable progress; nor was it without wars, setbacks, and suffering. Its culmination in two world wars may have included the British Empire’s finest hour, but also some of its worst. Within a few years almost all its colonial possessions had gained independence. Nevertheless, the sun is yet to formally set on the British Empire, unless the strategically suicidal Chagos Islands deal goes ahead. We too are living in an afterglow.

At this point I could draw all sorts of parallels, make further classical allusions, and point out the extent to which the post-1997 regime inhabits the ruins of what came before but instead seeks to replace its law and order. I will certainly omit any references to any barbarians, at gates or otherwise. Instead, I have a question. When you look at Britain today, from Parliament to the potholes, from Rochester to the roadside rubbish, do things look afwa to you?

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