Brazen opportunist Nigel Farage has seized on swelling anger and has been having a brilliant few months. And the PM needs to act fast and dirty when wrestling this particular pig
It would have been better had full-scale riots broken out at asylum hotels, but still, it’s been a great few months for Nigel Farage. His Reform UK party made big local election gains, welcomed defections from a Tory party that’s bombed to irrelevance and he’s now setting the political agenda, which is why opinion polls put him on course to be fogging up the Downing Street windows with B&H smoke.
The brazen opportunist has seized on swelling anger at the government’s perceived inability to cut crime, the cost of living and NHS and housing waiting lists, blamed it all on hordes of dark-skinned men arriving here unchecked, and moulded himself as the new Messiah.
His latest declaration, Operation Restoring Justice, aimed at stopping the small boats overnight and deporting 600,000 migrants by defying international laws, building mega detention camps and paying torturing despots is pure uncosted fantasyland garbage.
But so long as the disillusioned and the brainwashed believe him, it doesn’t matter. As he showed with Brexit, spew enough lies that play on people’s fears and you’ll win the mandate. Then blame someone else when that mandate proves impossible to implement and move on to another divisive issue.
READ MORE: BRIAN READE: ‘Robert Jenrick is morphing into Farage – his shameless posts are dangerous’
Meanwhile, as he makes the summer’s political weather, Labour ministers cower in the shade, unsure of what to say, apart from dismissing Farage as a dangerous bigot.
Which isn’t good enough. Because, as a glance across the pond shows, dangerous bigots are very much in vogue. Especially when the centrist alternative, both there and here, feels totally devoid of authenticity and ideas.
An Ipsos poll claims 38% of voters believe Reform has the best vision for the country, well ahead of Labour on 28%, and YouGov puts their popularity, a year after winning a 174-seat landslide, at a mere 20%.
The time has come for Keir Starmer to up his game or make way for someone who can. And rather than occasionally surfacing with Volodymyr Zelensky to imply he’s a global statesman, he needs to stand up at Labour’s coming conference and let us know how he plans to re-inspire a despairing base and an equally anxious electorate. Rather than give heartland supporters who are switching to Reform lectures about being seduced by bigotry, he needs to give them reasons not to switch.
He should begin by tackling Farage head-on about Brexit. He should drop his fear of right-wing media and spell out how the only policy Farage ever had, before the small boats, has shrunk Britain’s economy by 4%, with some economists claiming it’s costing us up to £100billion a year. Which is why ordinary people’s wages are low and our public services are crumbling.
On the small boats issue, no one is buying Starmer’s claims to be “smashing the gangs” or his “one-in-one-out” deal with a self-serving France. He needs bolder policies that translate to results.
He should double-down on a distinctive, forward-looking vision that addresses Britain’s many challenges with substance over spectacle. That means tackling inequality with a wealth tax, investing in green jobs to revitalise manufacturing, and overhauling the NHS with real funding. Policies that are anathema to the wealthy elite that runs Reform.
They say you should never wrestle with a pig because you get dirty, but Labour needs to make an exception with Farage. He needs to be called out and shamed. And if they want a name for it, how about Operation Exposing A Complete Bull Merchant?
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I heard a scream from my 21-year-old daughter’s room late Tuesday afternoon. Fearing a horrible accident I ran in, only to find her smiling as she stared at her phone.
“Oh my God, Taylor Swift’s got engaged,” she said breathlessly. “So what?” I replied. “So WHAT? This is massive. She only announced it on Insta ten minutes ago and she’s already got two million likes,” she answered triumphantly, as though millions of weepy young women who haven’t fully moved on from pubescence could possibly be wrong in thinking a 35-year-old, self-marketing junkie getting a rock on her finger from another celebrity was a bigger event than the Moon landing.
“Hasn’t she got a new album coming out?” I asked. “Yeah, in a few weeks,” was her answer. “Thought so,” I replied. Beckhams eat your heart out.
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A disgruntled online reader who perused last week’s column about Robert Jenrick got in touch to say, “What a vile man you are to call a senior politician a snivelling runt. Why do the Left always resort to personal insults? No-one on the Right does this. We win the arguments with logic.”
I told him that he must have been out of the country in 1997 when Tory leader William Hague wore a baseball cap to a theme park to chase the youth vote, only for veteran right-wing writer Simon Heffer to say he looked like “a child molester on day release”.
Mr Disgruntled didn’t get back to me.
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A sign for a road in Belper, called Knob Lane, keeps disappearing, leaving local politicians puzzled and annoyed.
Councillor David Taylor says: “It has gone walkies more times than I can remember.” Can I play amateur Poirot and guess that the sign is being transported near to where a well-known man lives?
And with Belper being a mere 14 miles from Sutton-in-Ashfield, is it too much of a stretch to deduce that Knob Lane now sits at the end of Lee Anderson’s road?
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This summer will go down as the Summer of the Flags. As in, some people putting up the St George Cross on lamp-posts to let foreigners know they are in England and others parading through streets flying the Palestinian flag.
Typically, the government doesn’t really know what to say, other than there’s nothing wrong with patriots flying the St George flag but everything wrong with holding the Palestinian one if it has the word “Action” on it.
How about a compromise? Seeing as St George is not just the patron saint of England and Palestine but also every nasty skin disease, including ones of a sexual nature, will I be okay to hold up a St George flag with the words “Syphilis Action”?
THE WEEK’S FIVE BIG QUESTIONS:
- The BBC’s drama King & Conqueror about 1066, starring James Norton, truly deserves a BAFTA. With the amount of blatant historical errors it’s surely nailed on for the comedy gong?
- The government to sack peers who fail to turn up for work in the Lords. Will the many who turn up to fall asleep there just get a swift prod in the head?
- Tory media attacking Angela Rayner for buying a holiday flat with her partner. Is that because they believe that with her being a working-class, Northern woman she should be spending any spare money on scratch-cards?
- How come the most disgusting and dishonourable act a father can do to his daughter is called an “honour” killing?
- Claims that within a decade many people will have a stronger bond with their AI pals than their real friends. Anyone else think the phrase “Siri, fancy going for a pint?” will never be heard?
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