Patrick O’Flynn is a former MEP and political editor of the Daily Express
Nigel Farage’s tail is up. The Reform party election campaign has gone better than he dared hope and its poll rating is up by several percentage points since he re-entered the fray. Today he went to South Wales to launch what he insisted was not a manifesto, but a ‘contract’ with the electorate over its
The great British public seems to have got over its feelings of anger and disillusionment towards the Conservative party. It is mainly just laughing at the Tories now. The descent into outright ridiculousness brought about by the centrist ‘sensibles’ who currently run the Tory show came across loud and clear in last night’s seven-way ITV
Keir Starmer and the Labour party today launched a manifesto that’s good enough to win this election and presented it in a commensurate manner. If that comes across as damning with faint praise then this is what your author intended. After all, there was – as Beth Rigby of Sky News noted in her question
Rishi Sunak today launched a manifesto that might suffice for a governing party polling at level pegging with the opposition in a country where things have been going well. You will no doubt have spotted the problems with this: he’s more than 20 points behind in the polls largely thanks to losing most of his
Everyone is finally noticing that Rishi Sunak is rubbish at politics. Given the scale of his faux pas in bailing out of D-Day commemorations early to get back on the campaign trail, it is hard not to. As a longstanding member of the ‘Rishi is Rubbish’ club, I find it difficult not to feel the
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.
To turn Keir Starmer, of all people, into someone who can credibly promise to bring immigration down is an act of perverse genius by the Tory party that is unparalleled in the modern political era. Presented with an open goal, the Labour leader has today stuck the ball in the net by telling readers of
In the classic comedy Blackadder II the late, great Rik Mayall was responsible for one of the most memorable cameo appearances in television history. As the swashbuckling adventurer Lord Flasheart, he gatecrashed Blackadder’s wedding, declaring himself ‘flash by name and flash by nature’. Leaving female guests giddy and male ones open-mouthed in admiration, he then
The idea of bringing back national service to knock into shape teenage tearaways and long-haired layabouts was a staple of my youth. Peppery comment articles along those lines in the old, broadsheet Sunday Express or News of the World would crop up intermittently through the ill-disciplined 1970s. Typically they would then be countered by the response that ‘the army
Rwanda removals policy, for so long an anticipated cornerstone of the Tory re-election effort, has today officially become an ‘over the rainbow’ idea wide open to mockery from opposition parties. Not only will the deterrent impact on small boat crossings of the ‘regular drumbeat’ of flights that the Prime Minister promised us not have had
What happens when a resistible force collides with a moveable object? Such is the nature of the imminent battle between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak for the keys to No. 10. Given the underwhelming appeal of both men and the extent of public disillusionment with politics in general, it is hardly likely to be a
For Rishi Sunak, today amounts to another instalment of the fantastic success story of his premiership: that ‘the plan is working’. A new key statistic about the rate of inflation shows that consumer prices are rising much less quickly. Taming inflation is the singular success among the five key targets he set out at the
Talk to almost any right-wing Tory MP these days and one of the first things they raise – with me anyway – is whether or not the Reform party is going to cost them their seats. ‘It makes no sense getting rid of people like me. The way we are going, we will only send
Labour’s new ‘stop the boats’ policy is a risible exercise in deception that will only ever fool the truly gullible. The centrepiece, announced by Keir Starmer today, is to set up a new ‘Border Security Command’, which will be an elite force empowered to use anti-terror laws to ‘smash the people-trafficking gangs’. Funding for the
With the best will in the world, it is hard to see the defection of Natalie Elphicke MP to the Labour party as a noble deed. You could paper the walls with disobliging observations that Ms Elphicke has made about Sir Keir Starmer’s party, especially when it comes to her supposed driving mission to restore
Tory supporters went to bed on Friday night believing that their man Andy Street would hold on handily in the West Midlands Metro Mayor contest, while also daring to dream that Susan Hall might just pull off a sensational win over Sadiq Khan in London. It has not played out like that. Not only did
Given the universal forecasts of the Tories taking a proper pasting in yesterday’s elections, it is quite something for Rishi Sunak’s party to have done worse than expected. But a truly dismal result in the Blackpool South parliamentary by-election, coupled with early council results indicating the party could end up losing half of the thousand
There is an old Rowan Atkinson joke about the secret to good comedy timing in which Atkinson says the word ‘timing’ at just the wrong moment. Timing is important in politics too. As Harold Macmillan observed of Anthony Eden’s brief and unhappy premiership: ‘He was trained to win the Derby in 1938. Unfortunately, he was
If you have been doing as badly as Rishi Sunak has as prime minister, then it doesn’t take much to register a notable improvement. Yet there is no point in his detractors denying that over the past week he has done just that. First, he got stuck into the issue of Britain’s burgeoning ‘sick note
Like a cowboy builder sucking his teeth about unanticipated complications on the job, Rishi Sunak has just pushed back another deadline. The Prime Minister was meant to get flights off to Rwanda this spring but has now given himself until July. And this isn’t even the main job. The actual grand design he is supposed
