Nigel farage

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

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

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

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

Nigel Farage and I don’t have too much in common beyond liking a pint and a cigar. Yet I now discover a link: we are both PEPs, or ‘politically exposed persons’. Such a handle may not be a total surprise to Nigel. (He may not have been surprised, either, when Coutts said that it had closed his bank account simply because he didn’t have enough funds.) But it certainly was to me – especially as I found out from an official at the bureau de change in the baggage hall of Mexico City airport. As I proffered a couple of grubby $100 bills to change to pesos, I filled in