My father-in-law came face-to-face with evil at Heaton Park, Grant Shapps tells JC

“You sort of start to narrow it down. ‘Well, wait, it's in Crumpsall… there's still a lot of synagogues there. Is it this one?’”, he recalled thinking, but the couple soon realised that it was Heaton Park that had been attacked and rapidly tried to reach his wife’s parents.

“They actually don't carry their phones and so there wasn't really an easy way to get in touch,” he said.

“Eventually, a friend of theirs that we called went round and found that my mother-in-law was home”, she had started the journey to shul but had come back. That still left my father-in-law, and we didn't know the situation.”

But it was only through seeing images of Goldstone on the TV that they knew he was safe, at which point they jumped into the car and went up north to be with him.

After a debriefing by the police, he then shared the details with Shapps and his family: “He just recounted the whole event in minute-by-minute detail. To say harrowing is an underestimation of the word. Just horrific.

“He came face to face with this terrorist – whose name, unbelievably, is Jihad.

“He was actually on security at the time and helped with the rabbi and many other heroes inside to kind of barricade those doors."

Goldstone saw “the eyes of this evil man who wanted to murder him and everyone else inside. And every Jew on the on the planet, if he could have his way, and he was trying to smash through the glass with my father-in-law, said, a seven-inch knife,” recounted the former minister.

“When that wasn't working, the windows, luckily, were reinforced. He's tried to kick down the doors … And then he even picked up the plant pots … and tried to start smashing the windows with those, which luckily didn't give in.”

“It's too close to home. You know, in your own community, in that synagogue, affecting my family directly. It's been a tough week”, Shapps reflected.

But what has sustained his father-in-law has been the “wall of messages that have come in from all manner of people, many of whom has not happened to have spoken to for years, from every community. It's been very wholesome,” he added.

For Shapps, Heaton Park wasn’t just an antisemitic terror attack but an assault on the idea of a tolerant and welcoming Britain.

He described feeling “a huge feeling of sadness for the victims, the two who died, and for the injured families, but actually also just for the country…I think, probably the most tolerant country in the world”.

And, despite some calls to leave the UK, he says he’d “rather live here as a British Jew than anywhere else in the world”.

A few months ago, he fulfilled the promise he made to congregants at Heaton Park and came and spoke to them, joking to those present that, out of office, he had a lot more time on his hands.

“I actually did go for that long-promised dinner … and talked to them about just about everything. Rabbi Walker told me at the time that they have brilliant relations with all communities in Manchester, with mosques, with synagogues … And actually, that is one of the really good things for the most part, about our society. People get on with their lives that respect each other. That's the British way.”

But what angered him most was the JC’s revelation that Jihad al-Shamie’s father, an NHS surgeon, had posted messages in support of Hamas on October 7, “their son, strangely named Jihad, which should have been a clue”, he said.

Shapps echoes the views of Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp who, the night before at a Conservative Friends of Israel reception, called for the deportation of foreign antisemites.

“[Antisemitism] is not the British way”, Shapps said. “I absolutely support the idea that if you come here and you do not share our values of tolerance, of freedom, of liberty of communities integrating, you should have no right to be here You should be deported.”