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This afternoon a wildcard was thrown into the election – the return of Nigel Farage. He will be standing for the Reform party at Clacton, the one parliamentary seat that Ukip had held. What will this mean for the Conservatives? James Heale talks to Fraser Nelson and Katy Balls. Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Cindy Yu.
The one thing that had gone right for Rishi Sunak in the election campaign to date has now gone wrong. Nigel Farage has been so energised by the first ten days of the election that he has taken back the leadership of the Reform party and decided to stand for parliament in Clacton after all. Tory staffers who had expected to be running a ‘Stop Farage’ operation but were then stood down will now have to be stood back up again. Farage has discerned that this time round, the Tories are truly there for the taking. They have drifted so far from their base on immigration, taxation, crime and net
Oh dear. It’s been another bad day for the Tories. Shortly after Nigel Farage announced his return as leader of Reform, the first YouGov MRP poll of 50,000 voters dropped, showing Sunak’s party down to just 140 seats. But for one Conservative, things were about to get even worse. As Sky’s Sam Coates discussed the MRP poll on air, his phone rang and his Apple Watch lit up. On it was emblazoned the name of Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary. At Sophy Ridge’s insistence, Coates took the call, as the camera kept on rolling. ‘Hello Grant Shapps’, he said. ‘You’re live on Sky News.’ Amid background muttering and laughing from
It never rains but it pours for Rishi Sunak. Less than an hour after Nigel Farage performed a shock U-turn, announcing he will not only stand for election but take over the leadership of the Reform party, YouGov has released its first MRP poll of the election campaign. It does not make pretty reading for the Tories. The MRP poll says that were an election held today, Labour would win back a whopping majority of 194 seats – a bigger landslide than 1997. YouGov estimate that in, an election held now, Labour would win 422 seats in total and the Tories would be left with just 140 seats. Ed Davey’s
Joe Biden’s introduction of the three-stage deal to end the war in Gaza was a clever rout to bypass Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden has lost confidence in Netanyahu’s readiness to present things to the Israeli public, and to his own cabinet, in an honest and truthful way. By presenting the terms of the deal clearly and independently from Netanyahu’s spins, Biden was in full control of the message, in the hope that the Israeli public will back the deal and make it impossible for Netanyahu to back out of it. Netanyahu’s already unstable coalition is on even shakier ground now Netanyahu has spent the past eight months manoeuvring between the demands
He’s back. After all the teasing and all the rhetoric, Nigel Farage has finally announced his return as Reform leader. Having initially pledged that he would not stand at this election, he told a 100-strong room in Westminster: ‘I’ve changed my mind.’ He will now stand as Reform’s candidate in Clacton – the only seat Ukip ever won in a general election, back in 2015. ‘I cannot turn my back on the people’s army’ he said to the room. ‘I cannot turn my back on all those people who voted for us… I can’t let those people down, I won’t let those people down.’ If this is to be a change
No wonder that Nigel Farage has decided that he would rather be leader of Reform UK than merely honorary president, and that he would like another shot at standing as an MP in Clacton. He looks as if he is the only politician – with the possible exception of Ed Davey – who is actually enjoying this campaign. Indeed, he seems to have engaged what used to be Boris Johnson’s secret political weapon: optimism. That could prove to be deadly for the Conservatives. Farage’s thin skin seems to have thickened markedly Farage hasn’t always been all smiles on the campaign trail. On the contrary, in 2015 Ukip’s then economics spokesman,
George Galloway would be happy if his Workers’ Party of Britain denied Labour the chance of an outright majority at the election because it would mean that whoever was in power would have to listen to the smaller parties. That was his message today when interviewed by Andrew Neil on Times Radio: the former Labour MP does not see a Labour government as being at all worthwhile over and above a Conservative one. He is standing in Rochdale, which he won in a by-election earlier this year after Labour messed up with its own candidate. ‘We are a threat to Labour in at least 100 places. We can either beat
Can anything go right on Rishi Sunak’s magical mystery tour? Nothing seems to be going right for the Prime Minister as he campaigns around the country, seeking to overturn Labour’s 20-point lead in the polls. Whether it’s attendees rolling their eyes on camera or an ill-advised trip to Belfast’s Titanic Quarter, the PM often seems to attract headlines for all the wrong reasons. So Mr S was not surprised to see the local Lib Dems making the most out of a visit by the PM to Leander rowing club in Henley-upon-Thames. As Sunak chatted away to locals, a Lib Dem vessel came motoring past behind him, with attendees on board
Today we are witnessing a significant failure of the UK state. This morning, the personal finance campaigner Martin Lewis reported that around 30 per cent of families had not received their latest child benefit payment. HMRC, which administers the payments, said it was ‘working to resolve the issue’ and advising claimants to ‘continue to check your bank account throughout the day’. This evening, HMRC said that 500,000 claimants had been affected. Child Benefit is worth £24 per week for the eldest child and £15.90 for every child thereafter. These sums will seem trivial to those with means but to poor and low-paid families they are a financial lifeline. The Daily
Nigel Farage continues to tease Westminster with his endless ‘will he, won’t he?’ dance. The former Ukip leader is hosting an ‘emergency press conference’ at 4pm amid speculation that he will announce he is standing as a candidate for Reform. It’s been a rollercoaster fortnight for Farage. His initial response to the election was to rule himself out from running, preferring instead to focus on the United States. In the days that followed, Farage expressed his ‘huge regrets’ about that decision. His commitments stateside seem less extensive than many first thought, with Farage expecting to only do one event for Donald Trump in Detroit. His two speeches for Reform last week, meanwhile,
Still haunted by the memory of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Keir Starmer has devoted today to reassuring the electorate that he is committed to maintaining nuclear weapons. The Labour leader is determined not to be seen as unreliable on defence and national security, so has announced that HIS government will introduce a ‘triple lock’ on the nuclear deterrent. A ‘triple lock’ is a tedious phrase, beloved by politicians who have been so careless with promises that they have to engage in a linguistic arms race. If they say they will do something, voters simply don’t believe them, so instead they must create the impression of an inviolable pledge, a measure that will be permanent and
Labour is out this morning insisting they can be trusted with national security – honest! Keir Starmer’s latest wheeze is a ‘nuclear deterrent triple lock’ aimed at giving a ‘total commitment to securing the UK’s future nuclear deterrent.’ Such a ground-breaking policy includes such prior commitments as, er, upgrading the current fleet, maintaining a continuous at-sea deterrent and the construction of four new nuclear submarines at Barrow-in-Furness. Indeed, the only thing that seems new about Labour’s big nuclear announcement is its sheer chutzpah. For at least a dozen members of Starmer’s own hand-picked shadow cabinet have previously voted against renewing Trident – including his chosen man to be Foreign Secretary,
The SNP will soon have more election campaign launch events than predicted Westminster seats if it continues at the rate it is going. The party’s latest launch — the third this year — was held in the luxury Radisson Blu hotel in Glasgow on Sunday afternoon, where party activists and political candidates gathered to hear a series of speeches ahead of the looming general election. Marketing itself as the party of ‘change’ (Mr S doesn’t have to look far to know where that’s been stolen from), the Nats slammed ‘continuity Keir’ as the ‘most right-wing Conservative Labour leader’ to date. But while the SNP is pledging to ‘eradicate’ child poverty
Elections aren’t just fights between the parties over policy. They also include conspiracies of silence where neither side will benefit from talking that much about an issue. Social care is one of those toxic problems: it is a key driver of inefficiency in the NHS, and should have been reformed three decades ago. It is also expensive, complicated and little-understood by voters, who resent any iteration of reform because all involve someone shelling out money when many people think it is free currently (it is not), or that it somehow should be. When Wes Streeting and Keir Starmer launched their big NHS plans last week, they failed to mention social
It is five years since Labour’s then equalities spokeswoman, Dawn Butler, told a BBC interviewer that babies aren’t born with a sex. It was the high point of transgender ideology, which captivated all the politician parties to some extent in the 2010s. Even the Tory minister, Penny Mordaunt, told MPs in 2018 that ‘trans women are women trans men are men’ – a genuflection to the quasi religious dogma that people can be born in the wrong body. They cannot of course, and this weird doctrine has been one of the most extreme examples of the flight from reason and scientific certainty on the left since the millennium. Badenoch’s intentions are honourable and many women will
If the country has not had enough sex by now, it may have by the election. Political sex, that is – Rishi Sunak has clearly spotted an opportunity for a fully frontal attack on one of Labour’s weak spots. This morning, the Prime Minister promised that if re-elected, his government would rewrite the Equality Act to make it clear that sex means biological sex. It would be a sensible move away from the current confusion where nobody is really certain what the law means. Perhaps in 2010 the outgoing Labour government never imagined that the definition of sex would be controversial? But the text of Labour’s Equality Act – ‘a reference
On Friday, the High Court in Northern Ireland deflected a serious threat to the right to free speech, not only in the province but also in the country as a whole. It was, however, a very close-run thing, and the affair is still highly worrying. A Northern Ireland Assembly law that came into effect last year, the Justice (Sexual Offences and Trafficking Victims) Act (Northern Ireland) 2022, made it an imprisonable crime to publish the fact that someone had come under police investigation for a sexual offence unless and until they were charged. If they were never charged the matter had to be hushed up until 25 years after their
The parties are gearing up for their first full week of campaigning since parliament was dissolved on Thursday. This means one-time MPs are now just candidates, and the spending limits are on. Both parties revealed their battle buses over the weekend – Labour’s is emblazoned with ‘Change’ while the Tories have gone for a three-point slogan: ‘Clear plan. Bold Action. Secure Future.’ This week, all eyes will be on the north-west – where Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer will go head-to-head in the first debate of the election. The duo will be appearing on ITV on Tuesday at 9 p.m. for their first televised showdown. So far there aren’t many
More than 30 years after the Berlin Wall came down, leaders of the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s long-time ruling party, still refer to each other as ‘comrade’. Unless, that is, you’re seen as a problem. ‘Comrade Cyril Ramaphosa will be here,’ ANC secretary general Fikile Mbabula told journalists on Sunday morning as he explained how, around 5 p.m., the President would receive the final election results at the main counting centre between Johannesburg and the capital, Pretoria. ‘There’s nothing to celebrate in terms of performance of the ANC,’ he said. Zuma has come away with 14.6 per cent of the vote but still claims it was rigged against
