In November 2019, a video popped up on Vicky Foster’s social media. It looked like a scene from an action movie, but it was real. One man was being chased on London Bridge by three others, who were armed with a narwhal tusk and a fire extinguisher. The man they wrestled to the ground was a terrorist, Usman Khan, who seemed to be wearing a suicide vest, and had just stabbed and killed two people at a prisoner rehabilitation conference. Foster shared the video, which was all over Facebook and Twitter. It told a short, striking story of exceptional bravery, of heroes and villain, of good over evil.
Foster thought little more about it until the following January, when it was reported that one of those heroes was a man called Steven Gallant, who was serving a life sentence for murdering her former partner and father of her children, Barrie Jackson. (Gallant had attended the conference on day release.) When his name was made public, he was widely celebrated, hailed a hero on TV and radio chatshows, by MPs, by the PM, Boris Johnson, who declared himself “lost in admiration”, and even by the Queen, who granted Gallant a royal pardon, which released him from the remaining 10 months of his sentence. The extensive coverage retold the details of Jackson’s murder. The swift reaction on social media and especially through Foster’s local press in Hull was devastating. “He was a sick beast, he deserved death,” was one comment about Jackson. “I would rather have Gallant … walking the streets of Hull than Jackson,” said another. “Well, I say he has done the world two favours and should be let out.”
