Nigel farage

Ukip’s leadership race has barely begun but the contest has already delivered plenty of drama. The frontrunner Steven Woolfe missed out on entering his nomination in time after a ‘Computer says no’ moment, and it’s also emerged that Woolfe failed to declare a drink-driving conviction when he ran for office in 2012 – potentially breaching electoral rules. But whilst we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out whether Woolfe actually makes it on to the ballot paper, a number of other candidates are also vying to take over from Nigel Farage: Ukip MEPs Jonathan Arnott and Bill Etheridge and Diane James amongst them. So who will come out on top? In this edition

After the verdict of the referendum had been announced, the most interesting comment was delivered by Nigel Farage. The vote had represented not only a victory against an undemocratic and faceless bureaucracy in Brussels but ‘against the big merchant banks and big businesses’. Worryingly, neither the majority of the Brexiteers nor their Remainer counterparts – at least among the political and journalistic classes – have grasped what the former Ukip leader understood instinctively; that Brexit is in fact a sub-plot in a much larger, overarching narrative: the battle between international finance and the one force that can realistically check its relentless and apocalyptic march – the nation state. Understand this and

Nigel Farage is here in Cleveland at the Republican Convention. He’s enjoying himself, and why not? Britain has voted for Brexit, and he doesn’t have a party to run. He can bask. Today he had lunch and a Q&A session with some fellow-minded conservatives on the Old River Road. They were all pleased as punch about Brexit, the Donald Trump thing, and the rise of anti-elite populism everywhere. ‘It looks like the perfect storm,’ Farage said, just before he sat down to eat. He was speaking to Steven King, a Republican congressman who recently got into hot water after he questioned the contribution non-white people had made to American history. The two men discussed the beauty of

Andrea Leadsom’s decision to drop out of the leadership race — and by default make Theresa May the party’s new leader — has been met with a collective sigh of relief by the majority of Conservative MPs. However, for the same reason that many were worried by Leadsom’s appeal to grassroots Tories, they ought too to be worried about the opportunity her departure presents to their opponents. In the course of the — short-lived — leadership contest, Leadsom established herself as the Brexit purist, winning nominations from MPs on the right of the party. She also won the backing of leading figures in Ukip with both Arron Banks’s Leave.EU and Nigel Farage endorsing her. Over the weekend,

On the morning of the Referendum vote, I texted Nigel Farage – as the Heritage and Tourism spokesman of his party –  to say he ‘had fought a hard battle and deserved to win’. He texted back: ‘One dares to hope’. Like most of the best English people I know Nigel has a strong sense of loyalty and decency and also loves a drink. He doesn’t take himself – or politics –  that seriously. Like Jimmy Goldsmith he gave up a business career to fight his cause. He only pursued his convictions so hard because he believed in leaving the autocratic and anti-sovereign EU  – and risking the opprobrium of

Thankfully, many in Europe – not least the European Parliament – will have stopped listening to Nigel Farage a long time ago. The Ukip leader, no stranger to attempting to infuriate his MEP colleagues, has been winding them up again. In this morning’s session, he gloated: ‘You all laughed at me. Well, I have to say, you’re not laughing now, are you?’ But Farage didn’t stop there, telling those around him: ‘I know that virtually none of you have ever done a proper job in your lives, or worked in business, or worked in trade, or ever created a job, but listen’ It was clear from the huge smile across Farage’s face during