14 min listen
The election campaign was going well for Nigel Farage’s Reform… until it wasn’t. A series of controversies have been difficult for the party to shake off. Will the distractions cost them votes and MPs? How will it affect their momentum – and who’s to blame? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Heale.
44 min listen
This week: Downfall. Our cover piece examines Nigel Farage’s role in the UK general election. Spectator editor Fraser Nelson argues that Farage has become the left’s greatest weapon, but why? How has becoming leader of Reform UK impacted the campaign and could this lead to a fundamental realignment of British politics? Fraser joined the podcast to talk through his theory, with former UKIP MEP Patrick O’Flynn (02:10). Next: Spectator writer Svitlana Morenets has returned to Ukraine to report on the war, which is now well into its third year. How are Ukrainians coping and what is daily life like? Svitlana joined the podcast from Kyiv with Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov (21:53). And finally: has
When Rishi Sunak stunned his cabinet colleagues by calling a snap election, they feared the worst. Fast forward a month and what they originally saw as the worst-case scenario now looks like quite a good result. At the time, losing the election but retaining 200 MPs seemed plausible. While the polls vary, the consistent theme now is that the Conservatives are on course for their worst defeat in history – and could end up with as few as 50 MPs. The campaign has been dominated by gaffes, from Sunak’s rain-drenched election announcement to the D-Day debacle. And this week, most damaging of all, the gambling scandal. Five Tory figures (two
Lots and lots and lots of fuss about betting on the general election. Less attention is paid to the biggest bet of all – Rishi Sunak’s frightening flutter in opting for 4 July. At Tuesday lunchtime, I was held up crossing the Mall by the procession for the state visit of the Emperor of Japan. I fumed a bit, but the modest crowd’s modest interest was soothing. How success is taken for granted. The recovery of Japan from disgrace, hunger and ruin was a miracle, the triumph of western, especially American, nation-building – such a miracle that everyone has forgotten it. When I was a boy, Hirohito, the wartime emperor,
Nine days of campaigning to go and I haven’t been milkshaked yet. I’ve hung out near McDonald’s in the hope – anything to get ten seconds on the evening news. It seems that in my constituency, the rank, sanctimonious, narcissistic and dim-witted monomaniacs of the new, kind and gentle left are somewhat thin on the ground. Nigel Farage copped a milkshake early on, and members of rival political parties and the BBC tried to pretend they were concerned. It didn’t work with theBBC because when the side-splitting but fabulously unfunny comedienne Jo Brand suggested it would be better to throw battery acid at Farage, she was not sacked or even
12 min listen
In a speech this afternoon, Nigel Farage doubled down on controversial comments he made about the West provoking the war in Ukraine. Is the Reform leader taking inspiration from Trump? And could this be a small win for the Tories who are seeking to claw back Reform votes? Also on the podcast, James Heale speaks to Katy Balls and Fraser Nelson about the latest in the election date betting scandal.
The opposite of attraction is repulsion. Political commentary gives too little attention to a party’s (or leader’s) capacity to repel. Attractiveness to some may itself inspire disgust in others, simultaneously lifting support yet imposing a ceiling upon how high. Here’s a quiz. Our last five elections have seen Labour and the Conservatives slugging it out for primacy, each election leaving one of them the loser. It is upon the losers that I wish to focus. Here, from those five results, are the raw (rounded) totals of votes cast, nationwide, for the loser in each case. I want you to guess which party leader lost which election, so I’ve ranked the
During the 1983 general election, I campaigned every single day with great zeal and avidity. I knocked on quite literally thousands of doors enquiring of people if we, the Labour party, could count on their support on 9 June. I would start at 9 o’clock and finish 12 hours later, taking a break at about 7 p.m. because interrupting Coronation Street was considered a vote loser. The closest the party has to a geographical base are the poorer parts of our eastern seaboard I did all this with my hair spiked up in jagged tufts held in place by gallons of hairspray, and with a little bit of eyeliner and maybe
10 min listen
Nigel Farage has unveiled Reform UK’s manifesto. Except, it’s not a manifesto, because he says the word is synonymous in voters’ minds with ‘lies’. It promises a freeze on non-essential immigration, a patriotic curriculum, leaving the European Court on Human Rights, and cutting taxes by £88 billion. Is this contract more of a wish list? How much damage can Nigel Farage do to the Conservatives? Katy Balls speaks to Fraser Nelson and James Heale.
12 min listen
Last night, leaders and senior representatives from seven political parties went head to head in the latest TV debate. But who came out on top? Katy Balls speaks to James Heale and Fraser Nelson.
There was a very excitable young man on Sky News last week, talking about the Sky/YouGov MRP poll which suggested that the vast majority of Conservative MPs would lose their seats on 4 July and that those who didn’t would be stung to death by invasive killer Asian hornets which, reputedly, can eat up to 50 Tories in a single day. This would leave the Labour party and the unimaginably ghastly Ed Davey with the sort of majority reminiscent of those regularly recorded in the USSR or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. They are looking for their pound of flesh from a party they believe has gone awry and reneged on principle
13 min listen
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.
30 min listen
On this special edition of Coffee House Shots, Kate Andrews interviews broadcaster, and honorary president of the Reform Party, Nigel Farage. They discuss Lee Anderson’s defection to the Reform party, how Nigel won the Red Wall for Boris Johnson, and whether he will return to front line politics. This was taken from The Week in 60 minutes on SpectatorTV. For the full episode, and more, click here.
In Chekhov’s The Seagull Dr Dorn is asked which is his favourite foreign city. Genoa, he replies: in the evening the streets are full of strolling people and you became part of the crowd, body and soul. ‘You start to think there really might be a universal spirit,’ he says. I remembered Dr Dorn when I was discovering Genoa in October. Then it suddenly came to me that I had been to the city before. Genoa was where my family embarked for the Far East, when I was 18 months old, fleeing the Nazis. I don’t know about the universal spirit, though. I’m reading Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews
Much heartened by the barrage of criticism I’ve been receiving from both Spectator and Times readers, I’m returning to the subject of Coutts’s customer selection. I’ve learned over the years how to spot the emergence of a herd opinion, not just by the volume of shouts but also by how members of the herd begin copying and repeating – often word for word – each others’ phrases; and what we now call ‘memes’ take shape. My experience is that when public sentiment begins to attract these characteristics, it is almost always wrong. I never forget the advice of my late grandfather, Squadron Leader Leonard Littler: ‘Whenever I hear of a
That Coutts dossier on Nigel Farage said in passing: ‘He is considered by many to be a disingenuous grifter.’ I didn’t quite know what grifter here meant. According to the Telegraph, a podcast host at Spotify called the Duke and Duchess of Sussex ‘grifters’. That does not limit the semantic field. It feels to me like a synonym for chancer, which in an 1889 dictionary of slang was defined as ‘one who attempts anything and is incompetent’. Stephen Frears’s film The Grifters (1990), not to be recommended to anyone of a nervous disposition, deals with fixing racecourse odds, running confidence tricks, and even faking one’s own death. Get the Grift
We now have a reluctant apology from Dame Alison Rose, followed by her even more reluctant resignation. Her departure is a major achievement, but the reluctance is a symptom of the problem. How could she possibly have thought she could stay after she was caught breaking a client’s confidentiality and spreading untruths about him (untruths which the BBC checked with her before publishing)? How could her chairman, Sir Howard Davies, have possibly thought that she could? And still we have nothing from Coutts, the bank that tried to trash Nigel Farage in the first place. Coutts is a B Corp, meaning a corporation which signs up to the commandments of
When I asked my husband if he knew what PEP meant he said: ‘It’s an emergency combination of HIV drugs that can stop the virus if you’ve been putting your todger where you shouldn’t.’ Trust him to get hold of the wrong end of the stick. To him as a doctor, PEP meant Post-Exposure Prophylaxis. But I was talking about Politically Exposed Persons – a concept abused by banks to deny people accounts, as happened to Nigel Farage. Dominic Lawson, once editor of The Spectator, wrote in the Daily Mail about his wife being refused a bank account because her brother is a Viscount – but one without a seat
Dame Alison Rose should not have resigned as head of NatWest over the Nigel Farage affair – and ministers who forced this by flinching in the face of a silly media storm should be ashamed of themselves. In the great Coutts debate this columnist finds himself in a minority. I express no opinion on the wisdom or otherwise of the private bank’s decision to drop Farage as a client, believing this to be a private matter between himself and Coutts. I’ll pose a number of questions, but first there’s something we must get out of the way. Whether or not Coutts was wise to exclude Farage, a bank like this
When Dame Alison Rose was a frontrunner for chief executive of NatWest in 2019, I described her as ‘sensible’ and ‘unspun’ and said I hoped she’d get the job. That view was based partly on personal impression and partly on a prejudice of mine, expressed consistently since the 2008 crisis, that women often make better senior bankers than men, being less prone to macho risk-taking. Rose has now yielded to political pressure and resigned over her role in the false reporting of the decision to ‘exit’ Nigel Farage as a customer of NatWest’s subsidiary, Coutts. But this column has never been in the business of following the baying crowd in
