Farage terror charge: Whitehall automates the line it always said

"…and if you press the green button twice, it adds 'our thoughts are with the family', which saves a junior minister most of an afternoon," said Gerald Pockley. He is deputy head of the Cabinet Office's new Unit for Rhetorical Continuity.

He was showing off the Condemnation Engine, a machine the size of a filing cabinet, unveiled on Wednesday. On demand, it prints the sentence "There is no place for this in our democracy." It prints nothing else.

The machine arrives at the end of a grim week. Counter-terrorism police say the man accused of murdering Ann Widdecombe has now been charged with preparing acts of terrorism, including against Nigel Farage. The charge, reported by the Guardian and the BBC, covers activity alleged to have taken place between May 2024 and July this year.

The case is before the courts. The machine, to its credit, has no opinion on it.

Westminster does. It is the same opinion it always has.

The same script, now with a plug

I have watched this sequence more times than I care to count. First the violence, then the shock and the cross-party statement. Then the promise of a review, then the long silence in which a reshuffle eats the review.

The cast changes. The script has apparently passed out of copyright.

Mr Pockley said the Engine would end the "inefficiency" of ministers drafting condemnations by hand. "We found three hundred near-identical statements in the archive," he said. "Each one needed a special adviser, a press officer and someone to check how to spell 'democracy'. That's three salaries to say one sentence."

The Engine has three settings. "Sombre" adds a pause. "Statesmanlike" adds the words "whatever our differences". "Leadership contest" adds both, followed by a link to a donations page.

Asked whether the device would also make anyone safer, Mr Pockley looked at it for some time. "It will make them feel spoken for," he said. "That is a form of safety. Possibly the cheapest one."

"It is the first piece of government technology ever delivered on time and on budget, to a specification nobody is proud of."

That was Dr Harriet Mulvane, who studies parliamentary security at a university she asked me not to name because it is "embarrassed enough already". She was not impressed.

"The statements were never the problem," she said. "The problem is that the statement is where the work stops. Now it will stop sooner, and use less paper."

Cellars, searched annually

Parliament has had a plan for this sort of thing since 1605. It searches the cellars once a year, in ceremonial dress, before the State Opening. Nobody has found anything for some centuries, and the tradition is considered a great success.

In 1812 a prime minister was shot dead in the lobby of the House of Commons. The response, broadly, was to carry on. It remains the most honest one on record.

Watching the Engine whir into life, I thought of the Millennium Dome. I shall not be explaining why.

Priya Dunmore, convenor of the cross-party Backbench Committee on Actually Doing Something, said her members had requested a second machine. "Ours would print the recommendations from the last three reviews," she said. "We asked for it in writing. We received, in writing, a statement that there is no place for this in our democracy."

The Treasury has declined to fund the second machine. A spokesman said it would "set a precedent".

A feature, not a fault

By Wednesday evening the Engine had broken down. A Cabinet Office source said it had been asked, as a test, to condemn its own existence. It replied that there was no place for this in our democracy, then jammed for an hour.

Mr Pockley called this "a feature". He said the machine was "doing exactly what the system does, only faster, and with fewer people pretending otherwise".

A review into the fault is expected to report within three months. The Engine, once repaired, has already printed the statement welcoming it.