# The Truth Under Siege: How Conspiracy Theories Are Poisoning Democracy
It begins with tragedy—a woman vanishes without a trace, a teenage boy attacks children at a dance class, a politician is brutally murdered in the sanctuary of her own home. The first hours of public response are natural, human, even mundane: people share dates, times, and places, trying to process the shock of what has happened. Collective grief and confusion find outlets in neighbourhood Facebook groups and X posts. But something shifts almost immediately. Within hours, the factual discussions dissolve into something darker and more sinister. Wild theories spread like wildfire through community pages, prominent accounts suggest elaborate cover-ups, and hard right politicians climb onto the bandwagon, vowing to “get to the bottom of it.” Before the truth can even catch its breath, it finds itself gasping beneath a tsunami of misinformation that leaves the public struggling to distinguish reality from fabrication. What was once the territory of fringe eccentrics has become a mainstream phenomenon with devastating consequences for policing, democracy, and the families caught in the crossfire.
Nowhere was this pattern more starkly demonstrated than in the curious case surrounding the death of Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe. When reports emerged on July 9th that Widdecombe had died at the age of seventy-eight, the coverage was straightforward, listing the accomplishments of her political career with no suggestion of foul play. The following day, everything changed. The death was suddenly being investigated as a murder, and a twenty-six-year-old man had been arrested and released without charge. The rapid shift, combined with police suggesting there was no political motivation, ignited comment sections across multiple platforms. When another suspect—twenty-eight-year-old Joshua Kerry—was arrested and charged with murder twelve days later, the conspiracy machine kicked into high gear. Four newspapers published images of Kerry taken from social media, alongside court sketches and a paparazzi photograph of him in the back of a police van. These images became the raw material for a cascade of speculation. Known conspiracists claimed Kerry wasn’t a real person. Tommy Robinson incorrectly identified him as a man speaking at a Communist Party conference in 2023. Nigel Farage wrote an article in the Sun claiming to have it “on good authority” that Kerry was a “hard Left activist.” All of this unfolded while the police investigation was ongoing, creating a void of official information that conspiracy theorists rushed to fill with increasingly bizarre and unevidenced explanations.
The psychology behind this phenomenon is complex, but it follows patterns that Dr Daniel Jolley, a social psychologist at Nottingham University who specialises in conspiracy theories, has spent years studying. Those who deliberately spread conspiracies are very different from those who genuinely believe every word of them. For the believers, conspiracy theories offer something profoundly appealing: a sense that they possess important knowledge that others have missed, that they can see what is “really” going on beneath the surface. This is particularly seductive for people who desire to feel unique, especially within communities where uncovering supposed hidden truths is celebrated. There is also a powerful sense of purpose and belonging that comes from being part of a community working together to expose perceived wrongdoing. The connection to like-minded individuals can be intoxicating, particularly for those who feel marginalised or disconnected from mainstream society. But for those whose entire careers depend on keeping these communities engaged and angry, it is vital that people continue questioning official narratives around traumatic events.
Jacqui Deevoy represents the archetype of the modern conspiracy entrepreneur. A former journalist for UK national newspapers, she now writes for her own Substack publication, The Light, as well as the far right website Unity News Network. She first gained traction during the Covid pandemic with unevidenced claims that it was a hoax. But her profile was truly boosted in 2023 during the disappearance and death of Nicola Bulley. Adopting the “just asking questions” technique—a conspiracy-seeding strategy that allows maximum reach with minimal personal accountability—Deevoy wrote multiple posts questioning whether Nicola Bulley was even a real person. She suggested that Nicola’s death was a false flag operation invented by the government to usher in the digital ID and microchipping system. When friends of Nicola’s family responded, she dismissed their statements because they only knew Nicola “third hand.” Deevoy has now turned her attention to Joshua Kerry, questioning his existence because a picture from 2022 looks different to one taken in a police van last month, and neither match the court sketches perfectly. When questioned about her claims, Deevoy defended herself by citing the difficulty of distinguishing what’s fake, what’s true, and what’s a psy-op or false flag operation in the age of AI and social media. She insisted she had personally seen “zero proof” of Nicola Bulley’s existence and had “merely dared to ask the question,” conveniently ignoring the real-world harm this causes to already-grieving families.
The political exploitation of this ecosystem has been equally systematic and cynical. Hard and Far Right politicians have spent years cultivating public mistrust in much the same way as conspiracy theorists, relying on constituents’ limited knowledge of the law and policing to present a lack of public information as the “Establishment” deliberately seeking to mislead them. In the wake of the Southport murders, as conspiracists claimed the attack was a psy-op, Nigel Farage publicly questioned whether the attacker was being monitored by security services, seemingly echoing false claims that had been circling social media that the suspect was an asylum seeker on an MI6 watch list. Following the “just asking questions” model, he said: “police say it was a non–terror incident … I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us?” What makes this particularly insidious is that Farage, a senior political figure, would be expected to know that the attacker was seventeen years old and protected from public identification by the Children and Young People’s Act. He employed the same technique with Widdecombe’s death, using it to publicly speculate about Kerry’s political leanings and claim the “Westminster establishment” wanted to cover things up. This deliberate conflation of lack of information with official concealment has a corrosive effect on democratic institutions. As Dr Jolley noted, when elections, journalists, courts, scientists or public bodies are routinely interpreted as part of some hidden plot, it becomes increasingly difficult to establish a shared understanding of events, leading to political disengagement, prejudice and, in some circumstances, greater willingness to endorse political violence.
The burden of combating this crisis has fallen heavily on police forces, who find themselves navigating an increasingly hostile information environment. Assistant Chief Constable Arman Mathieson, the NPCC lead for information disorder, acknowledged the scale of the challenge. He pointed to events such as Southport, which demonstrated the real-world risks that can arise when false information spreads rapidly online, undermining investigations, damaging community cohesion and contributing to public disorder and harm. In response, policing has made substantial changes to how it communicates with the public and media. Forces are now providing clearer and faster updates during major incidents, supported by new national guidance on the release of information, including suspect ethnicity and nationality where certain criteria are met. The establishment of a national Information Disorder Portfolio, supported by policing, Government and partner agencies, aims to strengthen prevention, response and ethical decision making across forces. But there are limits to what policing can achieve on its own. Despite a public warning from the CPS Chief Prosecutor in the Widdecombe case that proceedings against the defendant are active and that no reporting or commentary should prejudice these proceedings, neither Farage nor anyone else sharing misinformation has been censured under Contempt of Court law. As one observer noted, political figures continue to feed the misinformation ecosystem largely without consequence, and it remains to be seen whether the gap between law and enforcement will narrow before the truth is permanently suffocated under the weight of our own collective suspicion.