The Southport killings were horrific, but should they have happened at all? We already know that the government’s counter-extremism programme, Prevent, failed to identify the risk Axel Rudakubana posed. That’s a key question which the Southport Inquiry, the first stage of which began on Monday, aims to answer.

The Home Office has said that the inquiry will ‘leave no stone unturned in uncovering how this attack happened and to not let any institution of the state deflect from their failure’.