Robert Jenrick was heckled at his own rally? At least it means someone cares

Robert Jenrick walked on stage to deliver his first speech in his Newark constituency as its Reform MP last night, and a protester started shouting at him. At least someone was bothered.

This being Reform, the event had been upgraded from a meeting to a rally, with hundreds of people in a huge hall, a big screen and a teleprompter. As a result, Jenrick couldn’t make out what the man was saying, so he just said, “Good to see you, my friend”, as his new “friend” was bundled away by security.

Not that it would have helped if Jenrick had been able to hear, because the man was, according to the Daily Mirror, shouting: “David Davis supports Lucy Letby.” This was a reference to Davis, the Conservative MP and former shadow home secretary, who has been campaigning to overturn Letby’s conviction for murdering seven babies. But, as the Mirror report commented, “It is unclear what point he was trying to make.”

As the man was being led away, many of the audience booed him for trying to disrupt their evening, which led to some reports on social media of Jenrick being booed, which would have been more interesting. Booing happens to most politicians if they are important enough. Robert Jenrick is not.

The next step up in the hierarchy of power-affirming dissent is to be booed by an assembly of the general public. That happened to Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, at the NBA basketball game at the O2 Arena on Sunday. When his face appeared on the big screen as one of the celebrities in the audience, some of the crowd booed.

Fortunately for him, his moment in the stocks was overshadowed by an earlier, more pointed audience reaction. During the US national anthem before the game, someone in the crowd shouted, “Leave Greenland alone!”, prompting cheers and applause.

Now that is what I call a heckle. The Lucy Letby man at Jenrick’s rally could take a lesson from this anonymous critic of Donald Trump’s foreign policy – his intervention was well timed, sharp and instantly understandable. I feel a bit sorry for singer Vanessa Williams, who was giving “The Star-Spangled Banner” her all, but heckling is a form of war and there are always going to be civilian casualties.

Being booed as a leader is like a skull on a stick in a medieval court, a reminder of mortality. It happened to Boris Johnson as he arrived at St Paul’s for the Queen’s jubilee service in June 2022, a month before his cabinet turned on him. It happened to David Cameron in the royal box at Wimbledon in 2016 – although that was after he had already announced his resignation.

It happened, in a more polite form, to Tony Blair, when he was slow-handclapped at the Women’s Institute in 2000, which was put down at the time to his speech being “too political”, although I have always thought it was because it was “too boring”. Still, he survived another seven years as prime minister after that, so a show of public dissent is not always a sign of imminent political mortality.

What we want more of, though, is the diminished art of heckling. Booing is easy and requires no thought whatever, as the audience of BBC’s Question Time used to demonstrate. But a good heckle is a rare delight, and a good riposte to a heckle even rarer.

Harold Wilson was the master of these, saying that people could afford to waste eggs to throw at him only under a Labour government, and, to someone who shouted “Rubbish!”: “I’ll come to your special interest in a minute, sir.”

Today’s politicians don’t often reach such heights of engagement with voters. Keir Starmer is still at the lone protester stage, being sprinkled with glitter at Labour’s post-election conference – a conference to celebrate a huge majority bestowed by the voting system – by someone demanding proportional representation.

Let us hope that citizen-dissenters learn something from the hero of the O2 Arena, and that Starmer and Jenrick learn from Wilson, Starmer’s prime ministerial hero, about how to bite back.