Richard Manning Bowes who died after being assaulted during riots in London. (AP)

London, Aug. 16: New evidence of the ferocity of the English riots emerged today as the police charged a 16-year-old boy with murder following the death of a 68-year-old retiree attacked during the turmoil as British leaders across the political spectrum manoeuvred for position.

The boy’s 31-year-old mother, arrested at the same crime scene, was charged with seeking to pervert the course of justice, according to state prosecutors. Under British judicial rules, the boy’s identity was kept secret.

He was charged with murdering Richard Manning Bowes, who died on Thursday after being assaulted during unrest that swept through the west London district of Ealing on August 8. A post-mortem examination showed that he died of head injuries. He was the fifth person reported killed during the convulsion of arson and looting that left many Britons stunned and challenged the country’s leaders to explain why it happened and what should be done to avert more violence.

With neighbourhoods across a wide array of English cities and towns still resounding with the clamour of clean-up crews and with police reinforcements cautiously drawing down yesterday, politicians found a political landscape profoundly altered by last week’s rioting and offered competing prescriptions that seemed to rupture an uneasy consensus that has prevailed in British politics for a generation.

Radically different speeches by Prime Minister David Cameron and Ed Miliband, the leaders of the Conservative and Labour Parties, appeared to set the stage for the kind of gloves-off, Left-versus-Right politics Britain has not seen since Margaret Thatcher’s heyday in the 1980s. Both in their early 40s and both previously characterised by cautious efforts to command the centre, the two men signalled that the riots had girded each of them for a new battle that could determine Britain’s future for years.

Today, Cameron toured the north London neighbourhood of Tottenham, where the four days of rioting started after a peaceful protest about the death of Mark Duggan.