Wales goes to the polls on 7 May but 58% of Welsh voters don’t know how their votes will be counted. In the hugely important Senedd election that could topple Welsh Labour’s 27-year grip on devolved power, there will be a new voting system – but that’s news to all but 7% of the electorate, according to polling by YouGov/Cardiff University.

Labour has “topped” elections in Wales for years, said Politico, but now looks headed for defeat. Some even predict a rout so heavy, the party could be “fighting for a reason to exist”.

How will Senedd voting work now?

The elections to the Welsh parliament – which can raise local taxes and has the power to make laws on healthcare, education, local transport, social services and culture – will be held under a new closed list proportional system.

From 1999 until now, the Senedd was elected using the additional member system that is also used in Scotland. Voters would cast two votes: one for a constituency candidate, and one for a party. The constituency votes were counted on a first-past-the-post basis, and a special formula was applied to the count of party votes to select 20 additional members of the Senedd, each representing one of five regions.

But this year, voters will cast one vote only – and for a party (or an independent), rather than an individual. Each political party will prepare a list of up to eight candidates for each constituency, and MS seats will be allocated on the share of votes that each party (or independent) receives. The number of MSs will increase from 60 to 96, and the number of constituencies will decrease from 40 to 16.

One of the advantages of the new system is the end of by-elections: if an MS seat becomes vacant during a Senedd term, it will be filled by the next candidate on their party’s list. Or, if the departing MS is an independent, it will be left vacant until the next election.

But as well as potentially confusing voters, as the YouGov/Cardiff University polling suggests, the closed list system also “reduces voter choice”, said the Institute for Government think tank. Voters can no longer “express a preference” for a particular candidate, which could be said “to reduce the direct accountability between voters and MSs”.

The new system may also “benefit emergent parties in Wales, to the detriment of more established parties, whose candidates are more likely to have a strong personal profile”. Many think this will help Reform, “who are recognisable at a national level but lack a well-established local party presence or well-known candidates across Wales”.

Who will win and which issues will decide it?

Three key issues will decide the outcome of this election, according to a Savanta poll for the BBC: the cost of living; the performance of health and social care services, and the level of immigration. There is some demographic variation: health and social care is “particularly important” to older voters and women, while immigration is the key issue for those who voted Reform at the 2024 general election. Younger voters also singled out “a fourth issue: housing”.

Reform and Plaid Cymru are currently neck and neck, said Wales Online, and projected to be tied on 28 seats each”, with Labour “just behind on 26”. The Greens and the Conservatives are each projected to get 10% of the vote – meaning the Greens could win MS seats for the first time – with the Liberal Democrats on 7%. The most common prediction is a Plaid minority government propped up by Labour, “blowing a hole in Labour’s status as the default governing party”, said Politico.

What does it all mean for Keir Starmer? 

Nigel Farage said yesterday that the Senedd vote “doubles up as a referendum on Keir Starmer’s premiership”. He claimed Labour’s “dominance in Wales and, in particular, the Valleys” would end on 7 May, and, if we get this right, “we will get rid of the worst prime minister any of us have seen in our lifetime”.

Labour’s Eluned Morgan, First Minister of Wales, has said this is not a time for a protest vote against the prime minister, and voters should “wake up” to the prospect of two pro-independence parties – Plaid Cymru and the Greens – ending up in power when so much is at stake for the economy and public services.

Nigel Farage has called for police to patrol polling stations on election days to crack down on family voting.

It would be “very easy” to address the issue, said the Reform UK leader – councils and returning officers in polling stations must enforce “the very specific legislation” banning the practice, with police officers making sure “the law is being obeyed”.

What is family voting?

Family voting is where one person fills out or influences the ballot paper for other family members, instead of each voter making an independent choice. The male head of a household is commonly the family member who directs or completes the vote for others.

This is different to Demeny voting, named after Hungarian demographer Paul Demeny, which is sometimes referred to as family voting. It is a form of proxy voting that allows parents or guardians to vote on behalf of their children.

Why is it controversial?

Electoral observers consider family voting a violation of democratic standards because it breaks the secret ballot principle, limits individual political freedom and often disproportionately affects women and younger voters.

When a husband enters a voting booth with his wife or children and marks their ballots for them or tells them exactly how to vote, even if they agree with the choice, the practice still breaks election rules, which usually require each person to vote privately.

In 2023, the United Kingdom passed the Ballot Secrecy Act, which made it an offence for a person to “accompany an elector into a polling booth; or position near an elector inside a polling station with the intention of influencing how they cast their vote”.

Being “coerced” by a relative to vote a particular way is “ugly” and “anathema to British values of open democracy and individual liberty”, said Khadija Khan in the Daily Mail. But Farage’s complaints are “all part of a well-practiced strategy of screaming foul whenever he is defeated in a democratic election”, said Byline Times.

Where does it happen?

Family voting has been documented by electoral observers in parts of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Balkans, and some Middle Eastern and African countries.

Democracy Volunteers, a non-profit group of election observers, said it had witnessed 32 incidents of family voting in the Gorton and Denton by-election last week, in 15 of the 22 polling stations it observed. This was an “extremely high” number, it said.

But the organisation “did not provide any information about the people involved”, said Full Fact. In response, a spokesperson for the acting returning officer in the by-election said: “Polling station staff are trained to look out for any evidence of undue influence on voters. No such issues have been reported today.”

And when David Bull, chair of Reform UK, was asked by the BBC if alleged “unprecedented levels of illegal family voting” had changed the result in Gorton and Denton, he replied: “If I’m being candid, probably not”, said Byline Times.

Democracy Volunteers said that postal votes are being undermined by family voting. It recommended either allowing “advanced in-person voting to take place in some locations” or for home voting to be supervised, to avoid disenfranchising voters who cannot reach polling stations.

“The struggle for control of the British right” has taken a “dramatic turn”, said The Economist.

Robert Jenrick’s switch from the Conservative Party to Reform UK is “by far the most significant in a string of recent defections”, coming just 72 hours after Nadhim Zahawi made the same move.

“I am proud to be Reform’s 270,000th member,” said Jenrick in The Telegraph. “Both main parties broke Britain” and “the truth is Britain has been in decline for decades”.

But what does it mean for the party he left behind, the party he has now joined, and all political parties at the next election?

What does it mean for the Tories?

The Conservatives, often called the “most successful political party in the democratic world”, have a genuine fear of being “usurped by Reform UK”, said Henry Zeffman on the BBC. It is “inarguable” that the party is in a “massive mess”, but it will take time to tell whether its leader “triggering this mess was preferable to the alternative”.

Kemi Badenoch’s “swift manoeuvre” to oust Jenrick showed strength of leadership, sending out a message that the “embattled Tory leader is still up for the fight”, said The Economist. “If you squint” you can see her emerging well from this: “unencumbered by a troublesome rival” and with a “freer hand” to shape the party in her own image. Arguably, Jenrick could have been the victim of Badenoch’s growing stock in the party. “Or she might preside over the death of the world’s oldest and most successful political party.”

The Tory leader undoubtedly “projected strength”, but Nigel Farage “had the last laugh”, said Patrick Maguire in The Times. Jenrick’s defection once again raises existential questions for Britain’s oldest political party: should individual MPs “stick or twist”, and should the party “resist or reconcile?”

What does it mean for Reform?

Though bringing a sense of credibility, Jenrick also brings a “different dynamic” to the Reform/Farage “one-man band”, said Stephen Pollard in The Spectator. Not all members of the party will be “offering a welcome mat” to the former shadow justice secretary.

Jenrick’s move could lead to more defections and Farage has set a deadline of 7 May for those considering the move. “Reform has welcomed into its arms a politician who thinks nothing of changing his views overnight and stabbing his colleagues in the back and front,” said Pollard.

We may need to brace for infighting. “To say there is no love lost between Zia Yusuf, Sarah Pochin and others in the upper echelons of Reform and Jenrick” does a disservice to “the levels of pure hate displayed”. Given that representatives in the nascent party are jostling for positions of authority, “is Robert Jenrick really welcome in Reform?”

Reform could now have a leadership pairing similar to that in Washington, said Tom McTague in The New Statesman. “Reform’s latest recruit could be Nigel Farage’s answer to J.D. Vance.” Farage, like Trump, is a “formidable” politician who has captured the attention of the right, guided by “instinctive reactionary populism” rather than ideology. What Jenrick brings is a “project”, or a more “coherent plan” to reinvent the British state, because at the moment “there isn’t one”. Farage, much the same as Trump, may have “found an ideological foil”.

Farage was quick to thank the Tories for handing their “most popular figure” to him “on a plate”, but the jury is out on whether Jenrick will be a “help or a hindrance to Farage”, said the Financial Times.

The image of Reform may change. It could lose its cutting-edge or momentum, and instead become a “receptacle for disillusioned Tories” who are “relics of failed Conservative governments”. Farage will have to sacrifice some of his “decision-making” authority, now having to work “side by side” with a figure who has “made no secret of his desire to one day run the country”.

What does it mean for the right’s electoral prospects?

My defection will help “unite the right”, Jenrick told the BBC, attempting to quash the rumours that the move was motivated by personal ambition.

“In switching allegiances, Jenrick is helping to reshape British politics”, especially for the right, said the FT. Most significantly, he is “redrawing the battle lines over who will lead the right into the next general election”.

Jenrick’s defection “all-but ended the chances of any deal to unite the British right”, said Bloomberg. In all likelihood, this will lead to the “most widely contested” general election in years, as the traditional two-party system falls away. It is now increasingly unlikely that the Tories could “forge a pact with the insurgent Reform Party”, which has since “rapidly eclipsed” them in opinion polls.

Nigel Farage could barely contain his glee on Monday when he unveiled former Tory chancellor Nadhim Zahawi as his latest high-profile recruit to Reform UK.

Things were not always so collegiate between the two men. Farage once described Zahawi as having no principles and only being interested “in climbing the greasy pole”. And, in a now-deleted series of tweets from 2015, Zahawi called Farage’s words “offensive and racist” and said he would be “frightened to live in a country run by” him. And, even as they buried their differences, the defection of yet another senior Tory to the Reform ranks (bringing the total to 22) “is not without risk” for the populist party, said BBC political correspondent Nick Eardley.

‘Creating Conservatives 2.0’

Lack of experience is one of Reform’s “biggest hurdles in looking like a credible party of government”, said The Guardian’s political editor, Pippa Crerar. Farage’s solution clearly is to enlist former Tory ministers but this presents the would-be PM with a quandary: “pack the ranks with too many former Tories and you end up creating Conservative party 2.0, not long after the original version was booted out of office”.

“One of the key reasons people back Reform is because they consider them different to the other parties,” said Charlotte Henry in The Spectator. By welcoming figures so closely associated with the failed governments of the recent past, the “danger” is that Reform “increasingly risks” looking like “a receptacle of Tory rejects, not the upstart movement they try to portray themselves as”.

Tory party faithfuls “point out privately” that adding Zahawi to a list of defectors that includes Nadine Dorries and Jake Berry is making Reform “look awfully like Boris Johnson’s version of the Conservative Party”, said Sam Coates, political editor of Sky News. Or, as one former Tory cabinet minister put it: “same team, new badge”.

‘Outsider appeal’

Farage, in his many incarnations over the years, has carefully cultivated “a brand built on being outside the system”, said Loic Fremond in UnHerd. “But as he inches closer to power, it seems that he has become what he once denounced.” If Reform is to ride its anti-establishment credentials to No. 10, “it cannot rely on Tory defections” to fill its upper echelons or it will lose its “outsider appeal”.

Reform could resolve instead to fill ministerial posts from outside the Commons, forming a US-style Cabinet – an idea that Zia Yusuf, the party’s head of policy, has already suggested. That “would allow Reform to appoint figures from a much wider experience pool, but also provokes questions about parliamentary accountability and democratic norms”, said Ben Riley-Smith, The Telegraph’s political editor.

There are “obviously downsides to this approach”, said Fremond, but “to maintain any credibility as an alternative,” Reform “must demonstrate that it can stand apart from the same failures it claims to oppose”. If it cannot maintain that separation, Farage’s party “risks becoming little more than a repackaged version of the establishment it criticises”.

It was the year that Donald Trump caused chaos with tariffs, Elon Musk took a chainsaw to the US government, Angela Rayner was forced to resign, and Gary Lineker left the BBC. Here we take a look at some of the people who made the headlines in 2025.

January

Justin Trudeau bows to pressure to resign as Canadian PM, ending his nine-year stint in power. Tens of thousands of people flee their homes to escape surging wildfires in Pacific Palisades, in Los Angeles. Among the celebrities to lose their houses are Anthony Hopkins, Jeff Bridges and Paris Hilton. Seventeen-year-old Luke Littler becomes the youngest darts world champion in the history of the sport.

In an effort to drum up trade, Chancellor Rachel Reeves visits Beijing for the first high-level economic meeting between Britain and China since 2019: critics dub it “operation kowtow”. Tulip Siddiq resigns as a Treasury Minister over her links to her aunt’s ousted government in Bangladesh. A court in Dhaka later convicts her of corruption, in absentia. Two months after being criticised in an independent report for his handling of abuse allegations, Justin Welby steps down as Archbishop of Canterbury.

“The golden age of America begins right now,” declares Donald Trump as he is sworn in as the 47th US president in a ceremony attended by the Silicon Valley elite. He announces moves to boost fossil fuel production and close the US-Mexico border, and declares an ambition to “take back” the Panama Canal. In a frenetic first week, he signs a mass of executive orders and offers millions of federal employees eight months’ worth of pay to resign, as part of his efforts to shrink the state. Israel’s cabinet approves a ceasefire deal in Gaza, leading to the release of 33 Israeli hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.

A previously obscure Chinese startup releases DeepSeek-R1, an AI chatbot that seemingly costs a fraction of the price of US rivals and can be downloaded for free. It shoots to the top of Apple’s charts and wipes $1 trillion (£742 billion) off the value of US tech stocks.

February

Keir Starmer launches a charm offensive in Brussels as he seeks to “reset” Britain’s relations with the EU. A panel of international medical experts claims that Lucy Letby, the nurse convicted of murdering seven babies, is a victim of a miscarriage of justice: her case is under assessment by the Criminal Cases Review Commission.

As head of America’s new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), Elon Musk starts purging the federal workforce. He dismantles the country’s main aid agency, USAID, and boasts of having fed it “into the woodchipper”. Days later, he wields a chainsaw on stage at an event in Washington DC. Germany turns to the right in its federal election, delivering victory to the conservative CDU and setting up its leader, Friedrich Merz, to become the nation’s next chancellor.

Scotland’s First Minister, John Swinney, is forced to deny that his government is planning to ban pet cats: a report had merely advised that cats might be contained in areas that are home to red-listed bird species. The Broccoli family yields creative control over the 007 franchise to Amazon MGM Studios. Beyoncé wins her first album-of-the-year Grammy for her country-inspired album, “Cowboy Carter”.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy heads to Washington to sign a minerals deal, only for his Oval Office meeting to end in an undignified, televised row. Vice president J.D. Vance accuses him of disrespecting America, by seeking to “litigate” disagreements in front of the media, and suggests that he show gratitude to the president. “You don’t have the cards,” yells Trump.

March

Ukraine agrees in principle to a US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire – if Russia follows suit – prompting Washington to announce that it’s restoring the flow of military aid and intelligence to Kyiv that was cut off after the Oval Office row. But Russia does not agree to US proposal.

The Duchess of Sussex’s lifestyle series, “With Love, Meghan”, debuts on Netflix, to dire reviews. At the age of 69, Donatella Versace steps down as creative director of the Versace fashion empire. Uncollected rubbish starts piling up in Birmingham after the city’s refuse collectors embark on an indefinite strike.

Marine Le Pen (pictured, above) sees her hopes of becoming France’s next president dealt a major blow when she is convicted of embezzlement and banned from running for office for five years. Israel launches air strikes on Gaza, ending the ceasefire. It says that Hamas had breached its terms by failing to release hostages and had rejected proposals to extend the truce. Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting, Friedrich Merz, announces plans to splurge on defence spending to help with Europe’s rearmament.

Rupert Lowe, the Reform UK MP for Great Yarmouth, is suspended by the party, amid claims that he’d made threats towards the party’s chairman, Zia Yusuf. Lowe, who had earlier described Nigel Farage as the “messianic” leader of a “protest party”, claims to be the victim of a smear campaign; the Crown Prosecution Service opts not to bring charges against him. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch formally abandons the net zero target set by Theresa May in 2019. A fire at an old substation near Heathrow brings Britain’s busiest airport to a shuddering halt for 24 hours.

April

On what he dubs “Liberation Day”, Donald Trump announces a slew of tariffs on countries and territories around the world, including two uninhabited islands near Antarctica. The price of US government bonds plummets, and he is forced to suspend most of the tariffs for 90 days.

An all-female crew, including the pop star Katy Perry and Lauren Sánchez, the fiancée of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, fly to the edge of outer space in one of Bezos’ Blue Origin rockets. After the 11-minute flight, Perry, who had boasted of putting “the ass in astronaut”, kisses the Earth and declares that she’d not realised “how much love there was inside of you … how loved you are”. Tributes pour in from around the globe following the death of Pope Francis, at the age of 88.

Britain’s Supreme Court confers clear legal protection on single-sex services by ruling that the terms “woman” and “man” in the Equality Act 2010 refer only to a “biological woman” and a “biological man”. The government seizes control of the day-to-day running of British Steel following a breakdown in talks with the Chinese owner, Jingye, over the future of its Scunthorpe steelworks.

Former Bank of England boss Mark Carney leads his Liberal Party to a fourth consecutive election victory, less than two months after succeeding Justin Trudeau as Canada’s PM. The family of Virginia Giuffre, a survivor of sexual abuse at the hands of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, announces that she has taken her own life, at the age of 41.

May

Nigel Farage declares “the end of two-party politics” after Reform UK makes sweeping gains in local elections in England. The Tories lose control of every local authority they were defending. A sustained cyberattack cripples the digital operations of Marks & Spencer. The retailer later estimates the direct costs of the attack at roughly £136 million.

The Court of Appeal rules that the decision to downgrade Prince Harry’s police protection after he stepped back from royal life in 2020 was legally justified. Harry responds angrily, describing the decision as a “good old-fashioned establishment stitch-up”. (The Home Office is now reviewing the situation.) The Belfast rappers Kneecap have gigs cancelled and are dropped by their US booking agent after videos emerge of them shouting “Up Hamas! Up Hezbollah!” at one gig, and telling fans at another: “Kill your local MP. The only good Tory is a dead Tory.” They say their words were taken out of context.

Unveiling measures to strengthen Britain’s borders, Keir Starmer says the country risks becoming “an island of strangers”. His critics say this phrase echoes words used by Enoch Powell; he later apologises. On the second day of the conclave in Rome, Robert Prevost is elected pope. Pope Leo XIV is the first US-born leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.

A jury in Newcastle finds Daniel Graham, 39, and Adam Carruthers, 32, guilty of criminal damage – for cutting down the Sycamore Gap tree by Hadrian’s Wall. Gary Lineker leaves the BBC without a payoff, days after apologising for reposting an anti-Zionist video that included an emoji of a rat. Keir Starmer signs a controversial treaty that officially hands control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. The Shadow Justice Secretary, Robert Jenrick, releases a video of himself confronting fare dodgers at Stratford Tube station in east London.

June

In its most audacious operation of the war so far, Ukraine launches a series of remotely triggered drone attacks on airfields deep inside Russia. Operation Spiderweb is said to have caused $7 billion (£5.2 billion) of damage to Russia’s long-range strike fleet.

The bromance between Trump and Musk ends in bitter recriminations after Musk describes the president’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill as a “disgusting”, “pork-filled” abomination, and urges senators not to vote for it.

Israel mounts a surprise strike on Iran, launching a wave of bombing raids that eviscerate the top ranks of its armed forces and kill some of its leading nuclear experts. Iran responds by firing ballistic missiles at Israel, a few of which penetrate its Iron Dome defences, killing dozens of people. Blaise Metreweli (pictured, above) becomes the first woman to be appointed head of MI6. An Air India flight bound for London Gatwick crashes in Ahmedabad: the sole survivor is named as Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, from Leicester, who’d been sitting in seat 11A, and who escaped with relatively minor injuries.

Riots break out in parts of Northern Ireland after two Romanian-speaking teenagers are charged with raping a teenage girl in Ballymena, County Antrim. The charges are later dropped. Tanks roll through Washington as Donald Trump hosts a military parade on his 79th birthday. He goes on to launch the largest-ever strike by B-2 stealth bombers: seven are sent to drop bunker-buster bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump claims the bombs “totally obliterated” the sites.

After an emotional debate in the Commons, Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill passes by 314 to 291 votes. Another antisemitism row erupts after the BBC broadcasts footage of the punk-rap duo Bob Vylan leading the crowd in chants of “Death, death to the IDF” at the Glastonbury Festival. Jeff Bezos marries Lauren Sánchez during a three-day multimillion-dollar shindig in Venice. Locals complain about the disruption; Greenpeace unveils a banner in St Mark’s Square reading: “If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax.”

July

On the first anniversary of his premiership, Keir Starmer is forced to gut his flagship welfare reform bill to stave off a full-scale Labour revolt. Government borrowing costs rise after Rachel Reeves is seen crying during a session of Prime Minister’s Questions, during which Starmer initially fails to guarantee that the Chancellor will keep her job. The PM subsequently insists that he is “in lockstep” with her; she explains that she had had a “tough day” and had been dealing with “a personal issue”. Firebrand Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana announces that she is quitting Labour to co-lead a new left-wing party with Jeremy Corbyn, a project that quickly descends into factional infighting.

Gregg Wallace is sacked as a “MasterChef” presenter over multiple claims of inappropriate behaviour. He is later criticised for seeming to blame his misconduct on his late-diagnosed autism – a condition that, he says, has left him unable to wear underpants owing to his hypersensitivity to labels and tight clothing. The reunion many fans feared would never happen finally comes to pass when, 16 years after last performing together, Noel and Liam Gallagher stride onto the stage at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium – and bring the house down.

An Observer article blows the whistle on Raynor Winn’s popular 2018 memoir, “The Salt Path”, picking holes in its claim to be the true story of a wronged couple’s triumph against the odds. Owing to drought conditions, eight million people in England face restrictions on water use. Britain joins 27 other countries in condemning the “drip-feeding of aid” to Gaza by Israel, amid warnings that “mass starvation” is spreading across the Strip. Six people are arrested during violent protests outside The Bell Hotel in Epping, a hotel housing asylum seekers.

US tech boss Andy Byron and his head of HR, Kristin Cabot, are caught in a romantic embrace by a kiss cam at a Coldplay concert. Their guilty reaction goes viral; Byron, a married father of two, resigns from his job. Cheering fans line the streets of London to salute England’s women’s football team as it parades through the city to celebrate its victory in the Euro 2025 championship. Hollywood star Sydney Sweeney is caught up in a political row over an American Eagle advert that praises her “great jeans”; critics claim the ad has overtones of eugenics. Sacha Baron Cohen unveils his muscular new physique on the cover of Men’s Fitness. “This is not AI,” insists the “Ali G” star. “I really am egotistical enough to do this.”

August

After President Emmanuel Macron declares that France will formally recognise Palestinian statehood at the UN General Assembly in September, Keir Starmer says that Britain will do the same unless Israel allows more aid into Gaza, commits not to annex the West Bank and agrees to a ceasefire. Channel 4 causes a stir with its documentary about Bonnie Blue, a 26-year-old who has won a huge following by posting clips of her extreme pornographic stunts. The documentary focuses on one such stunt, in which she supposedly had sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours.

In one of the largest mass arrests in modern British history, more than 500 people are arrested in Parliament Square for holding up placards declaring their support for the proscribed group Palestine Action. Parts of the Cotswolds are brought to a near standstill by the arrival of J.D. Vance for his summer holiday – along with his family and a huge security detail. Vance had earlier visited Foreign Secretary David Lammy at Chevening, where the pair went fishing (illegally, it turned out: Lammy had failed to get a rod licence).

Donald Trump hosts Vladimir Putin at a summit in Anchorage, Alaska, and offers the Russian leader a lift from the airport in his own presidential limousine. The three hours of talks fail to produce any breakthrough. In the year David Beckham celebrated turning 50 and was finally awarded a knighthood, there is gossip about a major rift in his family. The Beckhams’ eldest son, Brooklyn, and his wife the billionaire heiress Nicola Peltz, appear to confirm this when they post pictures of a “vow renewal” party to which his parents had seemingly not been invited.

Lucy Connolly, the childminder who became a right-wing cause célèbre after being jailed for posting inflammatory comments on social media during last year’s Southport riots, is released from HMP Peterborough. She strikes a defiant tone, promising to “continue to fight” for free speech. The pop star Taylor Swift lights up the internet when she posts a photo of boyfriend Travis Kelce on bended knee, in a garden bursting with roses, along with the caption: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.”

September

Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un flank China’s Xi Jinping at a huge military parade in Tiananmen Square. “Phase two of my government starts today,” declares Keir Starmer as he unveils another Downing Street mini-reshuffle, appointing Darren Jones to be the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister. In an immediate setback for the reset, Angela Rayner quits as deputy PM, housing secretary and deputy Labour leader after an investigation finds that she breached the ministerial code, by failing to get proper legal advice about the stamp duty due on the purchase of her flat in Hove. As a result, she had underpaid £40,000 in tax. Yvette Cooper is moved from the Home Office to the Foreign Office, and replaced in her old job by Shabana Mahmood, the former justice secretary.

After a summer of flag-waving, more than 100,000 people join Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom demonstration in central London; by video-link, Elon Musk urges the crowd to “fight back or die”. Israeli jets fire missiles into a compound in a residential district of Doha, the capital of Qatar, in a failed bid to eliminate the Hamas negotiating team. Zack Polanski is elected leader of the Green Party, with 85% of member votes. Melvyn Bragg bows out of presenting Radio 4’s “In Our Time”, the show he has hosted since its launch in 1998. Misha Glenny is later named as his successor.

“Folks, it’s happening,” declares a triumphant Nigel Farage at Reform UK’s conference. “We are all ships rising on a turquoise tide headed ever-closer towards winning the next general election.” Danny Kruger subsequently becomes the first sitting Tory MP to join Farage’s party. America reels in response to the assassination of the 31-year-old political influencer and free speech champion Charlie Kirk, shot dead while answering a question about mass shootings at a public event at Utah Valley University. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, hints at his leadership ambitions ahead of the Labour Party conference, sparking a backlash from MPs, closely followed by a backtrack.

The publication of a “birthday book” given to Jeffrey Epstein leads to the resignation of Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to Washington: it included a tribute from the Labour peer to his “best pal”, describing how much he looked forward to visiting Epstein at “one of his glorious homes he likes to share with his friends (yum yum)”. Sarah Ferguson is also caught up in the scandal when it emerges that she had described Epstein as her “supreme friend” in an email to him in April 2011, after she had publicly disowned him. Donald Trump is treated to the full array of pomp and pageantry on his second state visit to the UK.

October

An attack on the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur leaves two people dead and three more seriously injured, prompting police to step up patrols in areas with large Jewish populations. President Macron faces growing pressure to step down following the resignation of Sébastien Lecornu, France’s fifth PM in two years, after just 28 days in post; Lecornu is reappointed four days later. Sarah Mullally is appointed as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury – the first woman to take the job in its 1,428-year history.

The world’s first 100% AI actor, Tilly Norwood, causes a stir when she is unveiled at the Zurich Film Festival in a video that shows off her range in a series of clips. “That’s an AI?” exclaims actress Emily Blunt, when shown the video. “Good lord, we’re screwed.” Two weeks after unveiling his 20-point plan for peace in Gaza, Donald Trump declares that “the war is over”, and all the living hostages held in the Strip are released, along with some 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees. However, Trump is not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It goes to Venezuelan opposition politician María Corina Machado, who then dedicates it to Trump.

Rumours of a romance between pop star Katy Perry and former Canadian PM Justin Trudeau are confirmed when a photo appears of the pair caught in a clinch on Perry’s yacht. In a statement from Buckingham Palace, Prince Andrew (pictured, above) says he will no longer be called the Duke of York, as Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoirs are published. The head of MI5, Ken McCallum, voices his frustration over the collapse of the trial of two British men accused of spying for China between 2021 and 2023. The charges were dropped after the Crown Prosecution Service said it couldn’t get evidence from the government that it had viewed China as a national security threat.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, begins a five-year prison sentence for conspiring to raise campaign funds illegally; he is released three weeks later pending his appeal. In a bold daylight heist, thieves steal eight pieces of the French “crown jewels” from the Louvre’s Apollo Gallery in Paris. The jewellery – worth an estimated £77 million – hasn’t been recovered, but four suspects are in custody.

November

With public anger about the Epstein affair not abating, King Charles initiates moves to strip his younger brother of all his titles and evict him from his 30-room mansion in Windsor. Millions of people tune in to watch Alan Carr win the inaugural UK series of “The Celebrity Traitors”. The self-described “democratic socialist” Zohran Mamdani wins New York’s mayoral election.

Donald Trump threatens to sue the BBC for up to $10 billion (£7.4 billion) for “deceitfully” editing footage of a speech he gave on 6 January 2021, the day of the Capitol riot. The furore prompts the resignation of two of the BBC’s most senior figures: director-general Tim Davie and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness. David Szalay wins the Booker Prize with his sixth novel, “Flesh”.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood unveils a string of tough measures, which she says amount to the most significant reform of the asylum system since the Second World War. After months of speculation, leaks and apparent U-turns – notably on raising income tax – Rachel Reeves finally delivers her second Budget. It is widely viewed as a failure, leading to renewed speculation about the Labour leadership. In her second report, Covid Inquiry chair Heather Hallett condemns the slow response of Boris Johnson’s government: had it imposed a national lockdown even one week earlier, the report states, 23,000 lives could have been saved.

December

Time names “The Architects of AI” as its “person” of the year. Justice Secretary David Lammy announces plans to curb jury trials in England and Wales. The Trump administration publishes a stark new National Security Strategy, warning that “decaying” European countries face the prospect of “civilizational erasure”. A terrorist attack on Bondi Beach, in Sydney, claims 15 lives. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, hits out at resident doctors for striking during a flu crisis. Film legend Dick Van Dyke celebrates his 100th birthday.

The UK’s return to the EU’s Erasmus student-exchange programme has sparked hope among die-hard Remainers that this is a first step towards Britain rejoining the customs union – and even, ultimately, the European Union.

The new agreement with Brussels allows UK students to participate in the EU-wide university scheme from 2027, without any additional fees. And it has excited those who support a return to the customs union, even though Keir Starmer has repeatedly rejected any such plan. This is a “clear step towards repairing the disastrous Conservative Brexit deal”, said Lib Dem MP Ian Sollom.

What did the commentators say?

Starmer has declared Britain’s “need to get closer” to the EU bloc, and, as talks continue about a “reset” deal on food exports, energy markets and a youth mobility scheme, “the breakthrough on Erasmus will help” him “demonstrate progress”, said The Guardian’s Pippa Crerar.

Labour strategists believe there is “a growing political benefit” to ministers in “arguing more openly for a closer relationship with Europe”.

The party “is waking up to the damage done by Brexit” and signalling they’re “intent on doing something about it”, said Chris Blackhurst in The Independent. With repeated polls showing that a majority of voters believe leaving the EU was a mistake, there is an element of “political pragmatism” at play “for a party desperate to put distance” between themselves and Reform UK, as well as the Tories.

There are also “concerns” that, without stronger ties to the EU, “the measures announced in last month’s Budget will fail to secure sufficient economic growth for the UK”, said Amy Gibbons in The Telegraph.

Minouche Shafik, the PM’s chief economic adviser, reportedly recommended rejoining the customs union, arguing it would cut costs for businesses and increase exports, said Oliver Wright in The Times. Starmer has argued, however, that a return to a customs union would undo recent deals with Donald Trump, which were particularly beneficial to carmaker Jaguar Land Rover.

What next?

Until ministers stop maintaining that “a return to full EU membership remains off the table”, said Jon Stone and Dan Bloom on Politico, there will be “scepticism” in Brussels “as to how much room for manoeuvre the British PM actually has”.

There are ways that Labour’s “manifesto ‘red line’ commitments” not to rejoin the EU, the customs union or single market “could be bypassed”, said Starmer’s biographer Tom Baldwin in The Guardian. They could, for instance, “announce the start of negotiations now on a much bolder deal, for inclusion in the next manifesto, with implementation only if Labour won a fresh mandate”.

Even though I voted Remain, I’ve always thought the referendum must be respected but now “posh lefties” have “spotted their chance” to make “cuddling up to Brussels the big issue at the next election”, said former Labour MP Ian Austin in The Sun. The hope is that they can “pile up the pro-EU votes in a crazy coalition of Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, the SNP and Uncle Tom Cobley to take on Nigel Farage” and “what remains of the Tory party” .

Reform UK has received a record £9 million donation from Christopher Harborne, a British-Thai cryptocurrency mogul, according to the latest quarterly declarations to the Electoral Commission.

It’s the largest-ever single donation by a living person to a British political party. News of the gift comes at a time when Reform is leading in the national polls, but has been forced onto the defensive over a series of other, less welcome, stories.

‘Toxic’ and ‘divisive’

Last week Nigel Farage denounced what he called “a false story” in the Financial Times, which reported that he had told donors that he expected “a deal or merger” between his party and the Tories ahead of the next general election. “The idea I’d work with them is ludicrous,” he said. Reform also faced more questions about Farage’s alleged behaviour at school.

Twenty-eight former pupils and teachers now claim to have witnessed racist or antisemitic behaviour by him at Dulwich College in south London. Richard Tice, Reform’s deputy leader, said Farage’s accusers were peddling “made up twaddle”.

Farage has admitted that he was “offensive” at school, but insists he never made comments “with malice”. He angrily accused the BBC of “double standards and hypocrisy”, saying it should apologise for all the politically incorrect programmes it broadcast during the same era, such as “The Black and White Minstrel Show” and “It Ain’t Half Hot Mum”.

Farage faced separate accusations of racism last week over a campaign video in which he lamented the “cultural smashing of Glasgow”, citing the recent finding that nearly one in three school pupils in the city speak English as a second language. The comment prompted Keir Starmer to call Farage a “toxic, divisive disgrace”.

This week, it emerged that Farage had been reported to the police over claims of falsified election expenses. A former member of his campaign team, Richard Everett, says the Reform leader exceeded the £20,660 local election spending limit during his successful bid for the Clacton constituency last year by about £9,000, because some costs – including the refurbishment of a Reform-themed bar in the campaign office, and the loan of an armoured Land Rover used in a rally – weren’t declared. A Reform UK spokesman denied any wrongdoing.

Nigel Farage reportedly expects an electoral pact or even a merger between Reform UK and the Conservatives before the next general election, a shift which would represent a historic realignment of the right.

A Reform donor said Farage told them that an agreement on cooperation between the two parties could help his party’s path to electoral success, according to the Financial Times. Another associate said that Farage described a pact or merger as “inevitable”, although the party leader said he “felt betrayed after the pact he made with the Tories at the 2019 election”.

“They will have to come together,” the donor said. “The Conservatives have been a successful political party forever because the left was always divided…If the right is divided, it can’t win.”

What did the commentators say?

I have long been sceptical of such a pact, said the newspaper’s Stephen Bush in his Inside Politics newsletter. Farage is a “polarising figure” who could unite the left and centre against him. Reform may be the “stronger party” in the polls, but the Tories have far more MPs – any deal would have to involve a lot of Tory losers, with many serving MPs “shunted out of plum seats”. But talk of a pact is “no longer far-fetched”. Kemi Badenoch’s lacklustre leadership has “made the Tory party such a marginal bit-part player that I am no longer so sure”.

Farage dismissed the accounts of his alleged remarks, telling the FT that “sometimes people hear what they want to”. After next May’s devolved elections and local polls, the Conservatives “will no longer be a national party”, he said. “I would never do a deal with a party that I don’t trust. No deals, just a reverse takeover. A deal with them as they are would cost us votes.”

But even if Reform does as well as current polls suggest, those numbers still wouldn’t give the party a Commons majority, said Sky News’ deputy political editor Sam Coates. Farage would need backing from Tory MPs to get into No. 10. While Badenoch has dismissed the idea, YouGov polling of members before conference season found that 64% supported an electoral pact, and 46% supported a full-blown merger. “The appetite’s there.”

Frankly, there is “already a slow merger going on”, said George Eaton in The New Statesman. Over the past year, 21 current or former Conservative MPs have “defected to Reform” – three this week. Reform’s ratings have also fallen in recent polls, and “waves of tactical voting” saw it lose the Hamilton and Caerphilly by-elections. Under a “more confident” Badenoch, the Tories’ standing is improving. “So is a deal inevitable?” One of Farage’s closest aides told the magazine: “Over my dead body.”

What next?

No pacts or deals will be considered while Badenoch is party leader, a Conservative spokesperson told Sky News. “Reform wants higher welfare spending and to cosy up to Putin.”

Anthony Wells, head of politics and elections at YouGov, told the FT that although Reform was “miles ahead in the polls”, tactical voting by left-leaning voters could block Farage from power. There are also a significant number of Conservative voters who wouldn’t back Farage even if the alternative was Keir Starmer’s Labour. “There are some Tories that really don’t like Reform,” said Wells, “so there will be some leakage from right to left.”

And therein lies “the key point to keep in mind: pact or no pact”, said Eaton. What really matters for the election is “whether the right is more divided than the left”. Labour and the Lib Dems have never needed a pact to “demolish” the Conservatives with progressive tactical voting, such as in 2024. Reform and the Tories don’t need a pact to “do the same to Starmer”.

It is the hectoring, jeering tone in Nigel Farage’s voice that brings it all back for Peter Ettedgui, said The Guardian. Farage used the same tone, at Dulwich College, the south London private school that both men attended in the late 1970s, when he would sidle up to him and growl: “Hitler was right” or “Gas them”. He would sometimes add “a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers”, says Ettedgui, now in his 60s, who was one of the few Jewish children at the school. It wasn’t just Jews the young Farage singled out. “I’d hear him calling other students ‘P*ki’ or ‘W*g’ and urging them to ‘go home’,” says Ettedgui.

Smear campaign

Farage has denied the specifics of these allegations. But The Guardian has spoken to 22 contemporaries and former teachers who say otherwise. They remember him, as a prefect, singling an Asian boy out for detention, for no reason; doing Nazi salutes and chanting “Oswald Ernald Mosley”; and singing racist songs as an army cadet. No one is claiming that Farage still holds such views. “Nevertheless, extreme views in any person’s history matter, particularly if that person may be a future PM.”

“A smear campaign is always a nasty thing,” said Brendan O’Neill in The Telegraph. “Deploying rumour and insinuation to taint the reputation of someone you hate – it’s the lowest form of politics.” Obviously, Farage denies these claims, but “there is just something so ominous, so elementally unpleasant about marshalling childhood rumours against a 61-year-old man”. The most recent offence The Guardian accuses him of took place more than 40 years ago. In the case of some allegations, he was just 13 or 14 at the time. “Jim Callaghan was prime minister. The Sex Pistols were storming the charts.”

Only ‘banter’

Bear in mind, too, that social norms were different back then, said Niall Gooch in The Spectator. “There were not the same sensitivities around racially charged language. It is absurd for this to be an issue in national politics in 2025.”

I agree up to a point, said Victoria Richards in The Independent. We were all idiots at school, and I wouldn’t want to be judged for many things I did as a 16-year-old. But we weren’t all vile racists. Farage’s sort-of denials have been “slippery”. He claims that he “never directly racially abused anyone”, and didn’t engage in “racism with intent”; that it was only “banter”. Even so, surely it’s “revealing” that he apparently chose to make jokes about the Holocaust, and to sing horrific songs about gassing Jews and P*kis. The child is father to the man. Isn’t it fair to suspect that Farage’s teenage prejudices might have an influence on his “grown-up” policies?

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced today the most significant change to UK asylum rules in a generation, saying the current asylum system is “out of control,” and “tearing our country apart”.

In a move calculated to seize back initiative for the government after months of false starts and plunging poll ratings, Mahmood unveiled proposals that will mean anyone granted refugee status will no longer have guaranteed housing and financial support, will face a 20-year wait before they can seek permanent residency, and could be returned to their home country in the meantime, if it is considered safe. She plans to narrow a refugee’s right to a family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, so it only applies to immediate family in the UK. And she has threatened visa bans on Angola, Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo unless they cooperate in taking back their citizens who are in Britain unlawfully.

These tough new measures have sparked outcry among progressives, including many in her own party. But Mahmood has warned that, if Labour does not do something now to tackle illegal immigration, the populist right will sweep to power and do something much, much worse. Or as The Atlantic’s David Frum once put it: “If liberals won’t enforce borders, fascists will.”

What did the commentators say?

The UK’s new stance “draws inspiration” from Denmark “where refugee status is temporary, support is conditional and integration is expected”, said Laura Sharman and Christian Edwards at CNN. The Home Office has been impressed that “Denmark’s policies have reduced asylum claims there to a 40-year low and resulted in the removal of 95% of rejected applicants”.

The Danes’ tougher approach also helped nullify the threat from the far-right and secure re-election for the centre-left Social Democrat government last year. But it has also “drawn significant criticism, with rights groups saying the measures foster a hostile climate for migrants” and “leave asylum-seekers in prolonged uncertainty”.

Mahmood’s proposed visa bans “mirror measures introduced by Donald Trump during his first term”, said Matt Dathan and Ben Clatworthy in The Times. Those sanctions – on various African and eastern Asian nations – “have had varying success but the penalties imposed on the Gambia and Sierra Leone” did lead to “improved cooperation on returns”.

“Reducing ‘pull’ factors and making the UK less attractive to migrants is a massive long-term battle,” said the BBC’s Joe Pike. “Up against sophisticated people-smuggling gangs who have shown they can adapt fast”, the home secretary “will be hoping her ‘throw the kitchen sink at it’ approach gradually reduces arrivals and increases deportations”.

There’s no one “silver bullet” to deal with small boats, “and I think the government recognises that”, Dr Peter Walsh, a senior researcher at Oxford University’s Migration Observatory told the BBC. That is why “it is taking a broader approach, focusing on enforcement and return deals. Will people know about restrictions enough to deter them? We will have to wait and see.”

What next?

The challenge now for the government is selling these changes to Labour MPs, especially those on the left of the party or facing a growing challenge to their seat from the Lib Dems and the Greens. There is also “significant unease among senior aides” and at least one minister is on “resignation watch”, said Jessica Elgot in The Guardian.

Both the Conservatives and Reform have sought to exploit these tensions. Kemi Badenoch has offered to work with Mahmood to get the changes through, and Nigel Farage has said the “Home Secretary sounds like a Reform supporter”.

Writing in The Guardian, Mahmood has said she knows “some of these measures will face opposition” but “this is a moral mission for me” and “unless we act, we risk losing popular consent for having an asylum system at all”.

One government official put in starker terms to Politico’s Andrew McDonald: “We’ve got to restore order and control.” If we don’t do that, what will come after us “will be darker”.

Nigel Farage today sought to position Reform UK as the “party of alarm clock Britain” championing both business and workers.

In a speech in the City of London this morning, the former stockbroker said the country was being “led by human rights lawyers, not entrepreneurs”, and blamed a “political class who are not business people” of wasting the “opportunities to deregulate and become more competitive” offered by Brexit.

Promising to balance the budget, and that the party would “never borrow to spend” if it came to power, “marks the first time Reform has articulated something resembling a fiscal rule”, said the Financial Times. It also raises serious “questions over the spending cuts or tax increases needed to achieve this goal, as well as the precise definition of the pledge itself”.

What did the commentators say?

This is a “big moment” for Reform, said Matthew Lynn in The Spectator. Headline-grabbing promises made at the last election such as lifting the income tax threshold to £20,000, scrapping inheritance tax on estates of less than £2 million, and taking water companies back into public ownership, are set to be junked.

In their place the “new-look ‘Nigel from Accounts’” is promising “a far more sober approach to the public finances”. But still “don’t be fooled: this doesn’t mean that Reform is abandoning the economic radicalism that the UK desperately needs if it is to break out of its doom loop of stagnant growth and rising taxes”.

One area the party appears willing to challenge the status quo is on the pension triple lock. The policy of raising the UK state pension each year by whichever is highest out of inflation, average earnings or 2.5% has “trapped Britain’s two main parties since 2012 in a bind that, for some, has come to symbolise the paralysis of the state”, said Politico’s Dan Bloom.

While economists have long argued this has become unsustainable, successive governments of both main parties have shied away from touching it in fear of angering older voters.

Reform, by contrast, has been “remarkably open” about whether the triple lock would survive, said Bloom. While any decision appears a “long way off”, when Farage does make up his mind, “he has the power to radically alter the political landscape in the UK – and set a new bar for insurgent parties across Europe telling hard truths that the centre cannot”. But saying that, “he would also come under ferocious attack”.

Another major spending area the party appears ready to start a fight over is reforming public sector pensions to bring them more in line with those offered by companies.

When spending is “under control” and borrowing costs down, said Farage, “then, and only then, will I cut taxes to stimulate growth”.

What next?

There is a belief among Reform insiders that the economy is “only going to worsen before the next election,” said The Times, which will mean the Tories “having to abandon many of their promises to cut taxes”.

Farage may choose to keep his cards close to his chest until then, but he is “at least trying to signal a more traditional coding when it comes to the economy, entering the financial stability battleground on which elections are routinely fought”, said Politico’s London Playbook.

“On that front, the insurgent is straining to sound a little more like the opponents he’s trying to banish”.

Right on cue, Labour last night attacked Reform’s claim to be “on the side of working people, whilst also promising to slash the public services they rely on”, saying Farage’s plan would mark “a return to austerity, pure and simple”.

Meanwhile, Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, said Farage has committed to “extra welfare spending and a huge expansion of the state”, adding it is “impossible to take Reform seriously on the economy when their promises disintegrate after five minutes”.

Herein lies both the danger and opportunity for Reform as it looks to hone its offering to voters on both the left and the right.

Officials were “understandably chuckling at the opposing attacks from each angle – but there’s a serious point here”, said London Playbook. “Each new bit of detail that Farage fleshes out will give his rivals, and the public, more to unpick him on.”

Plaid Cymru’s triumph in the Caerphilly Senedd by-election is a “reset for Welsh politics”, said the party’s leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth.

The Welsh nationalists got 47% of the vote in a record turnout of 50%. Reform UK came second on 36% and Labour a distant third with 11%. Here are five things we learned from a historic night in south Wales.

UK politics is evolving 

The result was terrible for the “two big beasts of Westminster politics”, said political editor Chris Mason on the BBC. Labour was “humbled, pummelled, crushed”, while the Tories got just 2%. “Yes, you read that right,” – they “managed just 13% of the vote between them”.

So the “key lesson” from Caerphilly for “every political leader” is that UK politics is “moving at speed, with voter loyalties shifting and atomising in unprecedented ways”, said The Guardian. “Those who cannot adapt will be crushed.”

Bad headlines ‘hampered’ Reform  

Reform UK “threw everything at the campaign”, said Sky News. Nigel Farage “visited three times” and his party was expected to win, but when the result was declared at 2.10am, the party leader was “nowhere to be seen”.

The outcome “represents a clear disappointment for Reform”, said The Guardian, and it’s “possible the party’s chances were hampered” by reports that its former leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, had admitted to taking bribes to make pro-Russia comments in the European Parliament.

In-fighting harmed Labour

Labour “had a horror of a start to this campaign”, said Wales Online. Its council leader “quit”, explaining that he “couldn’t support” either Keir Starmer or the "Johnny-come-lately" by-election candidate, Richard Tunnicliffe.

The Caerphilly “drubbing” could reinforce the “ongoing narrative” that Labour is going to do badly in the full Senedd elections next May. Canvassers “might now think twice” about "whether it is worth their effort” to go door-knocking over the winter.

Reform’s regional obstacles 

Reform coming second with 36% of the vote is a “solid performance for an upstart”, said Mason, but “insurgencies remain insurgent by winning – and they were easily beaten”. It’s “clearly not easy for them to be the first choice ‘none of the above’” alternative to Labour and the Tories when there’s “another party also claiming that mantle”.

So this could continue to be "a challenge for them in Wales, as it is in Scotland with the SNP, in a way that it isn’t in England”.

Labour faces threat from left

Much has been made of the threat to Labour from the right, but “the road to a Labour recovery does not simply lie in winning back voters from Reform”, said polling expert John Curtice in The Times. “The party is losing ground to its left as well as its right.” In Caerphilly it was Plaid who “were able to do most of the damage”.

Welsh Labour is clear where the blame lies for its poor performance. It “remains supportive of and loyal to first minister Eluned Morgan”, said Tom Harris in The Telegraph, but there is “simmering resentment towards Keir Starmer” for the “party’s unpopularity”.

Reform UK has suspended four councillors after a leaked video showed an ill-tempered meeting in which their leader swore at colleagues and threatened to mute them.

The councillors sit on Kent County Council, one of 10 local authorities run by Reform UK and “seen by the party as a test case of its ability to govern”, said the BBC. The bitter public row has made some question if wider cracks are appearing in the party while it continues to gather momentum.

‘Suck it up’

The virtual meeting at Reform’s “showcase county council” took place in late August and showed there are “bitter divisions in their ranks”, said The Guardian. The video showed councillors complaining about “backbiting” and being told by their leader, Linden Kemkaran, to “f**king suck it up” if they didn’t agree with her decisions.

After The Guardian broke the story, Kemkaran vowed to root out the source of the leaked video, which she called an act of “treachery”. In a message to fellow councillors, she said the “cowards” responsible would be expelled from the party and would have “no political future”.

This isn’t the first controversy surrounding Kent County Council since the party took over. During the election campaign in May, Reform “lambasted” the previous Conservative leadership for increasing council tax bills by the maximum 5% each year, said The Telegraph. But in "an about-turn”, a Reform cabinet member has since admitted that spending was “down to the bare bones” and said taxes would probably have to go up 5% again.

If Kent is “a window into what Reform could look like in power” it seems that “some voters aren’t all that impressed with what they’re seeing”.

‘Policy vacuum’ 

“Cracks are beginning to show” in the party, said The Independent’s political editor, David Maddox. After taking control of 10 councils last May, Reform’s “experience so far is that governing and running things is hard work. Easy political slogans and simple solutions are much more difficult to implement than say.”

The team tasked with filling the party’s “policy vacuum” might be looking to “extreme social conservatism”, which would be a “narrow perspective” that’s “unlikely to get the sort of broad appeal needed to win in the UK”.

Reform’s support is “made up of a very diverse group of voters whose views often clash”. The “gulf” between the left and right of their base is “unbridgeable”, so one group “will be disappointed”.

Not helping matters is the fact that Reform is still “the Nigel Farage party”, so there is a “microscope” examining “those closest to him and surrounding him”, and discovering that “the picture is less than pretty”. Farage’s French partner, Laure Ferrari, is at the centre of a fraud investigation in Brussels, and the party leader has also faced unflattering headlines over his residence, or lack of, in his Clacton constituency.

One “school of thought” is that “displays” such as the Kent virtual meeting “meltdown” will be ”the thing that eventually implodes” Reform's “march towards Downing Street”, said Marina Hyde in The Guardian. But “for my money”, it may well be that “enough people will have had enough” of the mainstream parties that, when it comes to Reform’s “loony lightweight tendency”, they simply “won’t care”.

“The impact of Brexit is severe and long lasting,” said Chancellor Rachel Reeves yesterday. The economic fallout from Britain’s decision to leave the EU is, she indicated, one of the main reasons that tax rises and spending cuts are on the table for next month’s Budget.

This is a clear shift in strategy from a government that has long tiptoed round Brexit, for fear of losing its Red Wall supporters. Putting the issue front and centre of its economic analysis, and using it to attack Nigel Farage and Reform, has been welcomed by many in the Labour Party, including cabinet ministers. Health Secretary Wes Streeting said: “I’m glad Brexit is a problem whose name we now dare speak”.

What did the commentators say?

“Economically, Brexit has not been good for us,” Jonathan Brash, MP for Leave-voting Hartlepool told Kitty Donaldson in The i Paper. We should “look at the facts”. The Office for Budget Responsibility has said that Brexit has reduced “long-term productivity” in the UK economy by 4%.

As Reeves talks of “undoing some of that damage”, the marked shift in messaging from fellow government figures is “part of a larger Labour strategy to take on Reform” over Farage’s role in Brexit, said The Spectator’s Steerpike column. Keir Starmer wants to argue that “Farage used ‘easy sloganeering’” during the referendum campaign but “didn’t have a plan” for afterwards. With this “attack line”, he can say Reform offers “quick fixes rather than thought-through policy proposals” and, he hopes, “persuade voters to come back to the reds”.

“Farage is as guilty as fellow Leaver Boris Johnson,” said The Mirror’s associate editor Kevin Maguire. He and Reform “these days rarely talk about Brexit” because he “mis-sold” it “as El Dorado”, and “no Brexit champion, particularly Farage, is worthy of high office after proving so conclusively wrong on such a seismic issue”.

Blaming Farage is “effectively attacking the largest democratic decision ever made by the British electorate”, said former Tory MP and Reform supporter Jacob Rees-Mogg in The Telegraph. “Too scared to accuse the voters themselves of getting it wrong, Labour attacks one of Brexit’s main protagonists, implying that he gulled foolish voters into doing something that was not in their interest.”

Pointing the finger at Farage “also risks re-energising the two-fingers to Westminster attitude that swung the Leave vote in 2016”, said The i Paper’s Donaldson. Reform will say that Farage may have campaigned for Brexit “but it was the Tories who implemented it” and it’s now Labour seeking to undermine it. “I don’t think voters in places like mine see Brexit as a mistake at all; they see it as unfinished business,” Reform’s deputy leader of Durham County Council Darren Grimes told Donaldson.

What next?

“Brexit was only ever going to be a blank canvas,” said Ross Clark in The Sun. “Of itself, it promised neither economic success or failure” but simply gave Britain the chance to “make its own economic policies and negotiate its own trade deals”.

But the Brexit benefits are hard to see, and increased export costs and new EU border checks for travellers mean that even those without an “emotional connection” to the European project “experience a sense of irritation at barriers to their pleasures or their profits having been erected against their will”, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times.

The latest YouGov poll on Brexit shows that just 31% of the public now believe it was the right decision to leave the EU.

People who have been granted asylum in the UK will no longer be given automatic settlement and family reunion rights – as part of a government effort to “reduce the pull factor for small boat crossings”.

To “make the system fairer”, Keir Starmer has announced changes to asylum policy that end a refugee’s so-called “golden ticket” rights to bring their family to the UK and earn settled residency status after five years. Automatic family reunification will end, and migrants granted asylum will have to wait 10 years and meet new “contribution-based” conditions before they can apply for indefinite leave to remain.

With Nigel Farage announcing his party’s intention to scrap all indefinite leave to remain, the government’s announcement “marks the latest hardening of Labour’s immigration policy in an attempt to stymie the popularity” of Reform UK, said The Times.

What is the current process?

People who have been granted asylum used automatically to gain the right to petition for their spouse and children to join them in Britain. In early September, the government temporarily suspended applications to this family reunification scheme.

Refugees are also currently given the right to stay in the UK for five years, during which they can study, work and apply for benefits. When the five years are up, they can apply for indefinite leave to remain, which gives them the right to apply for a British passport.

The government has said it wants to “continue to play its role in welcoming genuine refugees” but this current system is “not fit for purpose”. It is therefore making the “route to settlement” longer. “There will be no golden ticket to settling in the UK,” said Starmer. People will have to earn it “by contributing to our country, not by paying a people smuggler to cross the Channel in a boat”.

How will things change?

The suspension of automatic family reunification rights will now become permanent – meaning refugees must meet the same requirements for family reunion as any other migrant.

Refugees will still be “entitled to a package of core protection” but will not be able to apply for indefinite leave to remain until they have been in the country for 10 years. Additionally, there will be new “contribution” requirements for indefinite leave to remain. These include being in work, making National Insurance contributions, not taking benefits, learning English “to a high standard”, having a “spotless” criminal record, and “giving back” to the local community.

Refugee advocates have expressed their concern. “Blocking our chance to settle or to reunite with family members still at risk of harm keeps people like us, and our children, on the outside, never really allowed to feel secure or like we truly belong,” Kolbassia Haoussou, a refugee and a director at the charity Freedom from Torture, told The Guardian. These measures “are taken straight from the populist playbook the government itself has condemned”.

There are also concerns that restricting legal paths to family reunion “only pushes more desperate people into the arms of smugglers” in an effort to reach their loved ones, Jon Featonby, chief policy analyst at The Refugee Council, told the paper.

How many people have arrived in the UK through the family reunification scheme?

Numbers have been rising. Between 2010 and 2020, refugee family reunion consistently accounted for 30% to 40% of the 10,000 to 20,000 people granted asylum-related permission to stay in the UK each year, according to the University of Oxford’s The Migration Observatory. By 2023, that total number had jumped significantly to 63,000, “partly due to family reunion”. In 2024, 19,700 people were issued with a family reunion visa – a “likely knock-on effect” of the government’s efforts to clear the backlog in asylum applications.

The public “should be in a state of collective outrage and revulsion” at the crimes of Nathan Gill, said Neil Mackay in The Herald.

Gill, Reform UK’s former leader in Wales, has admitted accepting bribes in exchange for making statements in favour of Russia while he was a member of the European Parliament.

‘In bed with Putin’

The 52-year-old pleaded guilty to eight counts of bribery between December 2018 and July 2019 involving payments from Oleg Voloshyn, whom the US government once described as a “pawn” of Russia’s secret services.

But instead of outrage, there’s “a collective sense of ‘oh well, so now we know the rumours were true’”, said Mackay. That “tells you all you need to know about Reform”. Gill may no longer be a member of Nigel Farage’s party, but when it comes to connections between Russia and the British far-right, “there’s much to pick over”.

Farage is “in bed with Putin”, Rachel Reeves claimed at the recent Labour conference. Boris Johnson, a one-time Farage ally, also described his stance on Russia as “extremely dangerous”. The former prime minister recently told the “Harry Cole Saves the West” show that he had “serious anxieties” about Reform’s position on the Ukraine war.

The Reform leader does have a “long record of falling for even the most inventive of Kremlin cock-and-bull tales”, said The Telegraph. His response to Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 “proved his willingness to believe Russian propaganda”. Putin’s “cover story” was that Ukraine had “provoked its own invasion” by applying to join the EU and Nato. That year Farage told the European Parliament that “amongst the long list of foreign policy failures” had been “the unnecessary provocation” of Putin – although Putin had already annexed Crimea.

Far from retreating from this speech, he “retweeted it approvingly” last year. Even on the day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, “he could not stop himself from repeating the Kremlin’s cover story that the whole tragedy was a ‘consequence of EU and Nato expansion’”.

Until the channel was banned, Farage had a regular paid role on Kremlin broadcaster Russia Today, voicing similar views. Such thoughts raise “a vital question: is there anything he would not believe if the Kremlin claimed it to be true?”

‘Ideological alignment’

During the last general election, ABC News in Australia discovered a “network of Facebook pages” spreading “pro-Kremlin talking points” and posting support for Reform. Some of the posts were shared by Reform candidates.

In March, The New York Times reported that “one of the biggest corporate donors” to Reform had “sold almost $2 million” worth of sensitive technology to “a major supplier of Moscow’s blacklisted state weapons agency” – just two days after Farage was announced as party leader.

There is “no suggestion” that Farage ever received illegal bribes for his opinions about Russia, said Byline Times. But the Gill case highlights “a consistent alignment between senior members of Reform and Kremlin messaging”. And as Reform continues to rise in UK polls, that “ideological alignment raises urgent questions in need of answers”.

A person or a party “does not need to be a paid stooge of the Kremlin to be a threat to national security”, said Mackay. “Simply being in any way simpatico with Putin should be enough in this day and age to render a movement or an individual so beyond the moral pale as to be unelectable.”

“Ed Davey has lost none of his skill at the eye-catching but ultimately vacuous video-opportunity,” said The Independent.

He paraded into the Liberal Democrat annual conference in Bournemouth this weekend at the head of a drummer band, proudly twirling a baton. Yet even if the stunt was cringeworthy, it’s true that the Lib Dems are “on the march”. Having shrunk to a low point of just eight MPs after the 2015 election, the party won 72 seats in last year’s election, the best result by any third party in Britain in a century.

The Lib Dems now control more councils than the Tories do, said Oliver Wright in The Times, and, with polls suggesting that they’re trailing the Conservatives by only two points, the Lib Dems believe they could end up winning more seats than them at the next election. “It’s not a completely implausible scenario.”

‘The Gail’s strategy’

The Lib Dems owe their recent success partly to a more focused electoral strategy, said Ian Birrell in The i Paper. In the 1992 election, they won almost one in five votes, but only 20 seats. Last year, Davey’s tactic of targeting prosperous Tory constituencies – nicknamed the “Gail’s strategy” because of the popularity of the high-end bakery chain in such areas – won them 72 MPs with the support of only one in eight voters.

The party’s plan now seems to be “to sit tight, play it safe, and seek to pick up more seats” from the two stricken main parties. “But is this really sufficient?” One can’t help feeling that in this tumultuous era of populism, with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party dominating political debate, the Liberal Democrats are failing to meet the moment and offer a proper defence of “liberalism and democracy”.

‘Profile-raising stunts’

For all Davey’s much-mocked stunts, only 37% of people were able to identify him from a photo in a recent survey, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. But he has had some success in raising his profile by speaking out on issues that other leaders prefer to avoid. For instance, he said he would not be attending the recent state banquet for Donald Trump, in protest at the treatment of the people of Gaza. Such statements go down well with Lib Dem activists, who “skew left”.

At the same time, though, Davey has attacked Labour for imposing VAT on private school fees and removing inheritance tax relief from farms, a stance that puts him to the right of the Government. This attempt to peel off centre-right voters is risky: it could exacerbate the existing “tension between the kind of party the Lib Dems are and the kind of seats they aspire to hold or already do”.

The Royal Parks and RSPCA have dismissed Nigel Farage’s claim that migrants are killing and eating swans.

The Reform UK leader suggested that swans are being stolen and eaten by “people who come from countries where that’s quite acceptable” in an interview on LBC. He was echoing Donald Trump’s baseless allegation last year that illegal immigrants from Haiti were eating domestic pets in Ohio.

Old legends

Dubious and sensational claims about which animals immigrants eat go back centuries. For instance, the “dog eater” trope is a “fearmongering tactic white politicians have long deployed against immigrants of colour, particularly those of Asian descent”, said The Guardian.

“Racists have long twisted dietary rules to divide people and dehumanise immigrants,” said Cornell University lecturer Adrienne Bitar on The Conversation. “The myth of eating pets traces back to old legends”, including that Asian immigrants in the US were capturing and cooking people’s pets.

In 1883, a Chinese-American journalist offered $500 for proof that Chinese people were eating cats or rats in New York. No one came forward “but that didn’t stop the racist jokes or urban legends”, said Bitar. In 1888, Grover Cleveland’s presidential election campaign team published trading cards featuring cartoons of Chinese men eating rats. In 1971, an “outrageously silly urban legend” that a pet poodle named Rosa was served up at a Hong Kong restaurant, “complete with chilli sauce and bamboo shoots”, was reported by mainstream news organisations, and in 1980, the city of Stockton, in California, was gripped by rumours of Vietnamese families stealing expensive pedigree dogs for food. More recently, in 2016, the Oregon county commissioner and US Senate hopeful Faye Stewart accused Vietnamese refugees of “harvesting” dogs and cats for food.

Corrosive consequences 

The consequences of these sorts of stories can be “serious”, said Bitar. In 2024, a rumour that a Laotian and Thai restaurant in California cooked pit bulls led to “such vile harassment” that the owner moved the restaurant to a new location. Trump’s claim that Haitian immigrants were eating pets made the community the target of bomb threats and forced city buildings and schools to close.

After Trump’s allegation hit the headlines, social media was “flooded” with “AI-generated images” of him holding kittens and ducks and sometimes “carrying them away from Black people giving them chase”, said Slate. “There’s no dog whistle here – the bigotry is open and gleeful.”

The consequences of rumours like Farage’s aren’t “abstract” but “corrosive”, said Alexandra Jones in The Independent, because they “feed prejudice” and “normalise the idea that entire groups can be smeared without proof”. Political discourse itself is degraded because if a party leader can “traffic in tales from the internet’s underbelly, why should anyone else stick to the truth?”

A Reform government would turn Britain into “Trump’s America”, Ed Davey has said, as he tried to tie the policies of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump together in voters’ minds.

“Imagine living in the Trump-inspired country Farage wants us to become,” said the Lib Dem leader in his keynote speech at his party’s conference in Bournemouth. Davey painted “a nightmarish vision”, said the BBC, of the end of the NHS, a countryside destroyed by fracking, lax gun laws, racism, misogyny and “a constant state of chaos”.

Farage duly rubbished those claims but Davey’s warning about the Trumpification of British politics should be taken seriously, said Peter Geoghegan in Prospect: the American president is a “lodestar, the harbinger of a populist revolution that could be emulated on this side of the pond”.

What did the commentators say?

The year is 2029, and Donald Trump “holds two titles”, said Politico’s Paul Dallison: “US President-for-Life and UK prime minister”.

That sentence “would have been firmly in the realm of science fiction even a couple of years ago. But now, it doesn’t sound quite so far-fetched.” After all, the US president, with his British mother, would be eligible for the UK premiership, as former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg pointed out on GB News during Trump’s state visit.

For the past decade, “some of Trump’s biggest donors have been secretly funding a clutch of the most influential groups on the right of British politics”, said Prospect’s Geoghegan.

Former Conservative bigwigs Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel and Liz Truss have “all traipsed to Washington” and spoken at the Heritage Foundation, the “hugely influential” think tank behind Project 2025, the “blueprint for a state-eviscerating” second Trump administration.

But few UK politicians are “as close to Trump as Nigel Farage”. He is “plugged into the very top” of the Republican party and has recently claimed Trump “knows” that he will be Britain’s next prime minister. He told the Harry Cole Saves the West YouTube show that Trump’s team saw “similarities in what they’ve done and what we’ve done, and you know what, we speak the same language”.

Farage has “enjoyed a friendship with Trump for almost a decade”, said Dominic Penna in The Telegraph. He joined him on the US presidential campaign trail in 2016 and told his supporters that a Republican victory would be “Brexit plus, plus, plus”.

What next?

Regardless of Trump’s next political endeavour, it’s clear that the tech billionaires who have supported him are already having their own impact on politics abroad.

Palantir founder Peter Thiel and his fellow Silicon Valley “political kingmakers” are heavily influenced by far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin’s “dark enlightenment” ideas, said The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi. They believe “super-rich elites should have dictatorial powers” while the “hoi polloi should suck it all up”.

Elon Musk, Tesla boss and Trump’s former “first buddy” is “increasingly taking his political meddling worldwide”, from Canada and Germany to the UK. He “spent January posting about grooming gangs”, then, at the “Unite the Kingdom” rally, called for a “change of government”. Over a video link, he told the crowd, “Violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.”

It feels as if Musk is increasingly trying to “destabilise democracies worldwide so he can accumulate more power”, said Mahdawi. It is “not inconceivable” that a tech mogul “could effect regime change in Britain”.

Nigel Farage has announced Reform UK's tough new proposals for dealing with the “Boriswave” of migrants which, he claims, could end up costing the British taxpayer hundreds of billions of pounds in benefit payments.

The liberal immigration policy overseen by Boris Johnson after the UK left the EU was, said Farage, “the biggest betrayal of democratic wishes in anyone’s living memory”. He’s not alone in his criticism. Keir Starmer has also called it an “experiment in open borders, conducted on a country that voted for control”.

What is the ‘Boriswave’?

The term refers to the sharp increase in migration to the UK after January 2021, when new post-Brexit points-based visa rules came into force.

The then home secretary Priti Patel vowed the new system would slash immigration numbers and cherry-pick only “the best and the brightest” but, by the end of 2022, net migration reached 873,000: four times more than it had been before Brexit. The numbers did drop to 431,000 in 2024, according to Office for National Statistics data, but they are still higher than they were in the 2010s.

What happened?

There are differing views within the Conservative party of what went wrong, said The Telegraph. Some say the system Johnson designed was "flawed”; some say the “myopic and incompetent Home Office let Johnson down”, and others say “Johnson was mostly mugged by circumstance”. But the “most damaging accusation” is that Johnson and his top team “knew what they were doing and what the consequences would be” but “consciously opted to ramp up net migration for economic reasons”.

Speaking on The Sun’s podcast last year, Johnson said he was forced to keep the migration policy loose to ensure there were enough workers to “stack the shelves and fill the petrol stations with petrol”. Everyone was “freaking out” and “saying we need more pairs of hands to get things done”, said the former PM. Under pressure to fill labour shortages, especially in lower-paid sectors such as care, his government lowered the qualification and salary thresholds needed to get visa points – and the number of visas issued to lower-skilled workers ballooned.

A recent report from Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee found the “insufficient” intra-governmental collaboration on “workforce strategies” meant the Home Office lacked a “full understanding of the potential consequences” of its immigration policy changes. To put it more bluntly, said Michael Simmons in The Spectator, the Home Office “didn’t think about how a flood of new working-age migrants (and their dependants) might affect salaries, services or housing”.

And now, with millions of Boriswave migrants close to having spent five years in Britain and therefore able to apply for indefinite leave to remain (and the means-tested benefits that come with it), there is concern that they will end up taking more from the British state that they contribute.

What is Reform proposing?

Farage has promised to abolish indefinite leave to remain status, which, once granted, allows migrants the permanent right to live, work and study in the UK, and access the health and benefits system. It would be replaced with a renewable five-year visa for those who meet certain criteria, and those who currently have settled status would be forced to re-apply.

His plans would “save British taxpayers at least £234 billion over the lifetime of these migrants”, said Farage, citing a report by the Centre for Policy Studies think tank. The Centre for Policy Studies has since said, however, that the fiscal data contained within its report was the “subject of dispute”.

Labour, which is already consulting on plans to increase the waiting criteria to apply for indefinite leave to remain, has said Farage’s forecasted savings “have no basis in reality”.

Reform UK is on a "mission" that "boils down to bringing back British babies", said Politico. Nigel Farage's party "has started to see childbearing as fertile political territory" and is backing up the rhetoric with policy proposals.

We want a "shift in attitudes" to improve the country's birth rate, a spokesperson said. "We're trying to cut immigration drastically", so "to fix the population crisis", we need to "encourage British people already here to have kids".

What policies is Reform proposing?

In May, Farage said Reform would scrap the two-child benefit cap, which restricts the amount of means-tested state benefit a family can receive for their children. Last year, in its election manifesto, the party said, "Families are the bedrock of a thriving society," and pledged to "give parents back control" by extending the tax break for married couples to the first £25,000 of annual income for either spouse, and "front-loading the child benefit system" for parents with young children.

"The majority of mothers would choose to stay at home more if they could," the manifesto said. So "front-loading" child benefit for children aged one to four, would "give parents the choice to spend more time with their children".

Why is Reform focusing on babies?

It's not just about addressing the birth-rate figures; Farage believes his "family focus" will win him votes, said Politico. Reform's parenting policies are thought to be a factor that's "drawing in some of its youngest female recruits". The party's vote share among women aged 18 to 26 has "shot up", according to the More in Common think tank.

Reform also wants to target "voters switching from Labour to Reform", partly in protest at the government's failure to scrap the two-child benefit cap. While the two-child limit actually "polls well among voters, especially Reform voters", said social-policy professor Chris Grover on The Conversation, to get into government, Reform needs to "build a coalition of voters or split left-leaning voters". Its pledge to abolish the two-child limit "may be aimed at both".

Will it work in the UK?

A fixation on family and birth rates "echoes US-style conservatism", said Politico. But it might not work here because the UK is a "more secular society", said Patrick Brown, Republican family policy expert at Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center. "Family" is considered "the F-word in British politics", said Joe Shalam, policy director at the UK's influential Centre for Social Justice think tank, as parties fear accusations of "moralising about what people should or shouldn't be doing".

The rhetoric is certainly "straight from the playbook of other right-leaning politicians", such as the US Vice President J.D. Vance, said Vicky Spratt in The i Paper. In Hungary, the right-wing populist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán introduced free SUVs, generous tax breaks and subsidised mortgages for families under the age of 40 who have three or more children, but this "has not worked" and birth rates are "still falling".

Other countries, such as France and Sweden, offer "generous" support for parents but birth rates continue to fall there, too, so "it's going to take more than a free SUV or time off work to change this downward trajectory". One thing seems clear, though: if Labour fails to offer "progressive policies to support young families and those who would like to have children, other voices will fill the void".

"Make no mistake about it: if people like Jimmy Savile were alive today, they would be perpetrating their crimes online – and Nigel Farage is saying that he is on their side."

Last week's comments by Technology Secretary Peter Kyle, in response to Farage's criticism of the government's new Online Safety Act, are "the talk show equivalent of a declaration of war", said The Telegraph. In political battles, there is no weapon as loaded with controversy as associating your enemy with the DJ and TV presenter believed to be Britain's worst sexual abuser.

Savile is now "the face of evil", City A.M. said. He was "guilty not just of appalling crimes" but also of "abusing trust, exploiting his celebrity" and "flaunting clues to his grotesque nature". Kyle's comments were not "like calling someone a 'Nazi' or a 'war criminal'. This is more personal: summoning up a universal hate figure and saying that your opponent is like him or on his side."

The 'weaponisation of suffering'

Kyle's remarks were not a slip of the tongue; they were sanctioned in advance by Downing Street, according to multiple reports.

Ministers believe Farage and Reform UK have "made a misjudgement in pledging to scrap internet safety laws, given the massive unease across the country about what children are viewing online", said Sky News political correspondent Rob Powell. "But the risk inherent in tactics like this is that it makes some on your own side feel a little icky."

When former PM Boris Johnson "dragged Savile's name" into an "attempt to save his disintegrating premiership" and suggested that Keir Starmer had failed to prosecute Savile when he was Director of Public Prosecutions, widespread "disgust" was "felt across the political spectrum", said John Rentoul in The Independent.

Johnson's "deliberate attempt to invoke conspiracy theories driven by fears of paedophilia" prompted his policy adviser, Munira Mirza, to resign, and did little to deflect from the furore around lockdown-busting parties that ultimately ended his tenure as PM.

Richard Scorer, a lawyer who represented survivors of Savile's abuse, condemned Johnson's remarks at the time. And he told The Telegraph last week he felt the same way about Kyle's comments: "It is completely wrong for any politician of any party to seek to score points using the suffering of Savile victims. Victims and survivors want to see action to protect children, not weaponisation of their suffering for political purposes".

An opening for Farage

Johnson's attack on Starmer was "desperate" but it was also "more relevant than Kyle's attack on Farage", said Rentoul. "Farage has nothing to do with Savile" and attempting to "link the Reform leader with a notorious child sex abuser" is not only "gratuitous and offensive" but "makes Kyle seem desperate, and allows Farage to pose as the wronged party".

Now, Farage's criticisms of the Online Safety Act "seem more credible". And, said The Telegraph, Kyle's outburst "opens the door" for Farage to go after Starmer's actions "at the time the first complaints" against Savile were filed in the 2000s.

Reform "sources" have already signalled they "could focus on the PM's record as a prosecutor" and even try to contrast it with their ever-tougher-on-crime stance that is proving popular with voters.

Kyle's comments could "backfire" dramatically, said The Spectator. "Opposing a law that fails to protect children and cracks down on free speech doesn't put you in the same group as Savile", and trying to suggest that it does only makes "one thing clear: Labour is seriously rattled about the rise of Reform".

Some colourful words have been used to describe Nigel Farage over the years but "socialist" has rarely been one of them.

But, as the Reform leader pledged to reverse cuts to winter fuel payments and lift the two-child benefit cap, he and his party appear to be trying to court voters who lean left economically – and that could cause a headache for Keir Starmer and Labour.

What did the commentators say?

"Something significant has changed" about the man who "made his name as a nationalist" and has "berated socialism all his career", said David Maddox in The Independent. He's now "openly espousing traditionally left-wing causes".

His "handbrake turn to the left" started with the "much deeper-seated left-wing policy" of nationalisation. In a "shocker" of a move, the former metals market trader went to Scunthorpe and "promised to nationalise British Steel".

Farage is "in the party-smashing business" and, "having taken a wrecking ball" to the Tories, he's now "openly working to outflank" Labour "from the left", said Mark Wallace in The i Paper. While the "government is a sluggish galleon, becalmed" by fiscal rules, Farage can excel as the "nippy privateer" because he doesn't have to worry about the "balance sheet".

Although it "might seem baffling" that a party of the right could appeal to left-wing voters, much of what was the Labour core vote has always been "right-wing on issues like immigration and border control, law and order and defence".

Reform is still "right-wing" if you "define your political spectrum entirely on attitudes to national borders and on woke issues", like net zero, critical race theory and trans rights, said Ross Clark in The Spectator. But, "if your spectrum is drawn along economic lines", the party is now "firmly on the centre-left". That's a problem for Labour but it's mostly "good news" for the Tories because it "opens up a large flank for them on the economically liberal side": they can be, "once again, the only party in favour of small government and free markets".

Farage once said his "thinking" aligned with Jeremy Corbyn's, in the sense that both are "anti-establishment" and bristle against the "giant corporates" who dominate our lives, said George Eaton in The New Statesman. An "astute political entrepreneur", the Reform leader has "spotted" that "there are votes to be won from railing against big business".

"Faith in the state is gone" and politics is "no longer" right vs. left but "plebs vs patricians", said Tim Stanley in The Telegraph. Farage is simply an opportunist who knows "you've got to identify yourself" with the "larger half" of that divide.

What next?

Farage's statements about scrapping winter fuel payment cuts, lifting the two-child benefit cap and introducing tax breaks for married couples have grabbed the headlines, but they will now come under the scrutiny of the economists' microscope.

"As it stands", Reform haven't "really set out how they would pay for such big giveaways", Stuart Adam, a senior economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank, told the BBC.

"Of course they don't have to do that yet – we're not at a general election. But, at some point, if they're going to be a party of government, they would have to make those numbers add up."

When Reform UK won two mayoralties, 677 council seats and overall control of 10 councils earlier this month, it was hailed as a political tsunami.

Three weeks on from those election results, Reform is beginning to face up to "the enormous challenges that local government poses" – particularly for a party that's "been so rapidly thrust into positions of political power", said Local Government Chronicle. And already there are signs that things "could get messy", said The Independent.

'Embarrassing' councillors

Nigel Farage hailed his party's election success as proof that Reform had professionalised but, just a few weeks on, "the truth is beginning to emerge", said The New European, "as newly-elected Reform councillors begin to quit, wasting tens of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money" on by-election costs for their replacements.

Des Clarke resigned from Nottinghamshire County Council just days after being elected, citing "significant changes" to his personal circumstances. Donna Edmunds – elected in Hodnet in Shropshire – has also stepped down, after being suspended from the party just 48 hours after her election for a social-media post about her plans to defect. Andrew Kilburn quit his post in Durham after failing to declare that he worked for the council. Luke Shingler, who was elected in Warwickshire, is now serving as an independent because his RAF job prohibits him from representing a political party. And Staffordshire Reform councillor Wayne Titley resigned for "personal reasons", after posting on social media that the Royal Navy should use a "volley of gunfire" to sink small boats crossing the Channel.

Despite Reform's pledge to vet candidates "rigorously at all levels", an investigation by The Telegraph has uncovered other statements by a number of the party's new councillors that "may prove embarrassing" – including a Ku Klux Klan "joke" in response to a meeting of Grenfell Tower survivors. All this raises questions about and whether Farage "has what it takes to build a serious political machine".

Part of the problem lies in Reform's "sheer unexpected success" at the ballot box, said The Independent. It's meant many "'paper' candidates" – those who "were not expected to win" – are now elected, "with a job that they didn't particularly want to do".

'Collision course with reality'

Reform has "very clearly signalled that its approach will be confrontational", said The Covert Councillor in Prospect magazine. Deputy leader Richard Tice has announced a "war" against renewable energy projects and diversity initiatives. Reform councils will only fly the Union Jack, St George's flag and county flags, "banning shows of solidarity with war-torn Ukraine, for instance".

But this approach will put the party "on a collision course with financial reality". Any savings made from scrapping diversity and inclusion initiatives will be "nominal", unlike "the costs of picking fights with unions or stalling job creation and investment in solar tech".

On a wider level, the party "still hasn't really made up its mind" about some issues, said The Independent. This includes whether or not to back far-right activist Tommy Robinson, to endorse mass deportations or, indeed, "to publish a full manifesto with detailed policies and plans".

As he unveiled his much-touted "reset" deal with the EU, Keir Starmer said it is time to move on from "political fights" and "stale old debates" about Brexit.

Nearly 10 years on from the Brexit referendum, and more than five since the UK formally left the EU, the new agreement strengthens ties over areas including fishing, trade, defence and energy.

Starmer's appeal to "common sense" and "practical solutions" may strike a chord with the public, but his "big bet" is that "nobody really cares" about Brexit any more, said the BBC's chief political correspondent Henry Zeffman.

What did the commentators say?

"This was the day the Brexit dream died," said the Daily Mail in an editorial, while The Express called it "a betrayal dressed up as a policy".

Staunch Brexiteers will "blast" Starmer "on fisheries, rule taking and youth migration", while diehard Remainers "will argue it's a meek deal that hasn't gone far enough to repair the economic scars of Brexit", said Politico. But "this fight down the middle is one the prime minister's quite happy to pick", while the Conservatives and Reform UK, both of whom have described the deal as a "surrender", "risk sounding like broken records on Brexit".

With this deal – coming in the same month that trade agreements were announced with the US and India – Starmer has managed the "impossible", said The Independent: "to have his cake and eat it".

When Labour under Starmer "pivoted" in 2020, from campaigning for a second referendum to a policy of "make Brexit work", "nobody really took it seriously". But he has "succeeded where others failed and managed to break the Brexit conundrum".

Despite the "upbeat rhetoric", some of the "most difficult issues to resolve have been pushed back into future negotiations" – including the shape of a youth mobility scheme, said The Times. The deal also "leaves a number of difficult questions unanswered", such as how much Britain will have to pay to access the new EU defence fund and to align with the EU food standards and energy trading system.

But the government hopes that voters will warm to the tangible effects of a "reset" in relations with the EU, including cheaper food and energy, and a reduction of red tape for small businesses.

What next?

What will "prove revealing over the coming days, weeks, and months" is how much Reform and the Conservatives decide to campaign around the idea of a Brexit "betrayal", said the BBC's Zeffman.

If opposition to the deal becomes a "significant part of these parties' platforms, it will tell us that they believe there is in fact plenty of controversy yet in the decades-long debate over the UK's relationship with the EU".

If that's right, it could thrust questions about Brexit "right back to the centre of political life.

"But if Sir Keir is right that the bulk of the public simply wants as little friction with the EU as possible, then he could prove to be our first truly post-Brexit prime minister."

British voters have heard many politicians over the past two decades vow to "take back control of our borders". Unveiling the government's long-awaited white paper on immigration on Monday, Keir Starmer became the latest PM to promise the UK's "broken system" will be fixed, enforcement will be "tougher than ever", and net migration numbers will tumble.

"It's a sign of the times," said Anne McElvoy in The i Paper, that a party led by human rights lawyers and confirmed centrists is "about to undertake a U-turn which is going to make it sound like it has adopted the Fortress Britain vision it once disdained as parochial or even subliminally racist".

What did the commentators say?

There's "just one problem" with the government's new approach, said Jonathan Walker in the Daily Express. "Labour and their lefty friends" have spent years branding opposition politicians who raised concerns about immigration as "horrible, xenophobic and racist". Starmer and his colleagues are "massive hypocrites".

British voters will be "sceptical" of Starmer's new-found hardline stance on immigration, said Martin Ivens on Bloomberg. "They've heard it all before when it comes to pledges to make the borders less porous." For two decades, "politicians of all stripes" have pledged to reduce net migration, only to produce "half-hearted, ineffective or muddled" measures, even when "promises to curb the influx played a large part in the pledges that got them elected in the first place".

Many proposals – training Britons rather than importing unskilled foreign workers, and raising education levels and standards of English for those applying for skilled work visas – sound "pretty familiar", said The Independent in an editorial. But a proposed change giving clearer guidance to judges on the application of human rights provisions "could have a quantifiable effect, as well as helping to reassure that doubting public".

Starmer's warning that "we risk becoming an island of strangers" has already resulted in the PM being accused of "pandering to the populist right", said The Guardian. Some MPs on the left claimed that his words echo Enoch Powell's notorious 1968 "rivers of blood" speech, which imagined a future multicultural Britain where the white population "found themselves made strangers in their own country". But while this rhetoric may put off some progressives, Labour HQ will be more than happy if this message cuts through to up-for-grabs voters in red wall constituencies.

What next?

With Reform UK surging ahead in the polls and surveys showing immigration emerging as the number one issue for voters, it is clear why Labour feels the need to talk tough. "Whether voters will believe Sir Keir really means what he's saying remains to be seen", said Walker in the Express.

"Fury with the failure of successive governments to honour their effusive promises to 'take control' will mean that nothing short of Trump-style mass deportations will be enough" to mollify some voters, said The Independent. But a "first impression" of the government's proposals is that "their bark may be worse than their bite, and deliberately so".

Starmer has avoided setting any targets, other than bringing about a "substantial reduction" in net migration. But successive governments' failure to tackle the issue has "turned the voters against the political class", said Ivens on Bloomberg. "Now Starmer needs to own the change – not just mouth the slogans."

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK emerged as the biggest winner of the first major polls since Labour swept into government last year. The right-wing populist party won its fifth seat in Parliament in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, as well as two mayoralities and hundreds of local council seats.

The results mean the party, seen until recently as an underdog in British politics, has now arrived as a serious force. But it has many progressives asking: where is a serious left-wing populist alternative?

Keir Starmer's welcoming of the Supreme Court ruling on the definition of a woman revealed that he "doesn't fear the left", said UnHerd. Rather, he is adopting a "defensive position out of fear of the populist right – and specifically Reform UK". Starmer could lean so far in that direction that he alienates Labour's "anti-populist supporters". But his "tricky balancing act is made much easier by one of the most underrated features of British politics: the sheer weakness of the left-wing opposition to Labour".

As Labour’s leadership "shifts rightwards", a few alternative left-wing movements "are beginning to fill the void left behind", said Brian McDaid for Yorkshire Bylines. The Green Party, the most significant of these alternative left movements, gained 43 seats in the local elections. Its platform, which is focused on tackling climate change, social justice and the redistribution of wealth, "aligns closely with the left-wing populism that Labour abandoned under Starmer".

"The Greens have the potential to be a real threat,” one Labour MP, whose nearest rival at the last election was a Green candidate, told Politico.

John McTernan, a political strategist who served as a key aide to Tony Blair, warned that Labour would ignore its progressive voters "at its peril", arguing that the party needs to "deliver change to every single part of the country that voted for it, and create a new coalition of voters to support it for the next election".

Yet when it comes to economic policy it is Reform, surprisingly, which appears to be most in tune with left-leaning voters, said James Kirkup in The Spectator. More than two-thirds of Reform UK voters support the public ownership of the water, rail and energy sectors, Almost 70% believe foreign ownership of British firms is bad for the country, and 68% agree that big companies don't pay enough tax. Indeed, Reform voters are "further left on those questions than the typical British voter". "An economic cocktail of Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn might sound unlikely, but it's notable that Farage is happy to praise both men as he sketches out Reform's new economic agenda."

What next?

"What should be taken from the results? That the electoral contest is now all about change – that was Labour's slogan last year and is also the message implicit in the name of Farage's party," said McTernan. "But change to what? Reform is clear – being pro-worker and pro-nationalisation, a sort of Labour-lite. That's a fight Labour can win if it remembers who the party is for."

For the left as a whole, the "choice is obvious", said politics lecturer David Jeffery on The Conversation. It should "resist the urge to ape the populist radical right" and instead adapt to a political landscape where its existence is "a problem to be managed". But openly ignoring the issues Reform campaigns on "will not work".

Reform UK has successfully converted its recent opinion-poll surge into a string of ballot-box victories across England – solidifying its status as an electoral threat to the country's two main political parties.

Most eye-catching of all was the win in this parliament's first by-election, with Reform candidate Sarah Pochin snatching the once-safe Labour seat of Runcorn and Helsby by a mere six votes.

Nigel Farage's insurgent right-wing party also won its first mayoral contest, with Andrea Jenkyns taking 42% of the vote in Greater Lincolnshire, far ahead of the Conservative candidate's 26%. In county-council elections, Reform looks to be gaining ground rapidly, too, taking about 35% of the vote share so far.

What did the commentators say?

The "big question" on everyone's lips as polls opened yesterday was whether Reform "now pose a significant challenge to both the Conservatives and the Labour party", political scientist John Curtice said in a BBC interview. "The answer to that question so far is quite clearly yes."

Reform's by-election victory confirms that this "still new" Labour government "is so deeply unpopular that it cannot hold one of its safest seats", said John Rentoul in The Independent. A "landslide general election win", just 10 months ago, "that matched the giddiness of Blairphoria" has now "turned into the humiliation of defeat at the hands of Nigel Farage". It also confirms that Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer's chief of staff, "is right to see Farage as the main threat to the Labour government".

For the Conservatives, it's even worse. They are losing support to Reform on the right and the Liberal Democrats on the left, said Nigel Jones in The Spectator. They are vulnerable both to "affluent middle-class progressives still upset by Brexit, and working-class communities concerned by mass immigration and the rising cost of living". The "big peril" is that "they're caught in an irreversible death spiral from which there can be no return."

"Voter volatility has been the foundation of Reform's swift rise," said Stephen Pollard in The Telegraph. But that could just as easily become its "Achilles heel" in the months to come. Reform's local-election triumphs mean "it is going to have to start running social care, transport, schools and collecting the bins". And Labour's "dreadful" start in government has shown just how difficult it is "to actually do things in power".

Reform doesn't seem to have much plan, other than "not being Labour or the Tories". And even if they did, they'd do well to remember boxer Mike Tyson’s "famous assertion that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Reality tends to punch governments – and councils and mayors – in the face."

What next?

Council declarations will keep rolling in throughout the day, with the majority due by around 7pm. Reform is expected to take over several councils.

"Make no mistake, these results will shape the tone, tenor and focus of the political conversation" in the months ahead, said Chris Mason, political editor of the BBC. And both Labour and Tory politicians will be "staring, sleep-deprived, hard into the mirror and working out how to respond".

In the 1951 general election Labour and the Conservatives between them secured 98% of the vote. By 2024 that had dropped to 59%, and polling suggests support for the two main parties has continued to fall over the past year, driven in large part by the rise of Reform UK.

What this reveals is that UK politics has been "slowly but steadily unwinding from a two-party to a multi-party system for decades", said Byline Times. But "just like going bankrupt, things in politics change gradually and then very quickly".

What did the commentators say?

With Reform, Labour and the Conservatives roughly tied nationally and the Lib Dems slowly gaining ground in the south, "British politics is heading towards a place it was never designed to go, with a fractured four-way split", said The Economist. "Call it 20-20-20-20 vision."

This is because "politics is no longer one-dimensional," polling expert Sir John Curtice told the Financial Times. The old left-right divide no longer explains British politics; cultural issues are now a key factor.

With both Labour and the Tories shedding votes, "the conditions are there for the biggest challenge to the political conventions of British politics since the 1920s".

Seizing this opportunity is Farage's insurgent party, which "is proving adept at adapting itself to the ideologically fluid political positions of its target voters, for whom the distinction between left and right in politics is not set in stone", said the FT.

The "story of polarisation" – when "working-class" and "middle-class" had clear meanings and strong party affiliations – "holds the key to understanding the threat to the Labour-Tory dominance", said pollster Peter Kellner in Prospect. He described the condition of Britain's two-party system as "chronic".

"We shall of course see fluctuations in party support" but with issues like "Ukraine, slow growth, weak public finances and Donald Trump's presidency" all presenting "tough challenges for years to come" there is "no obvious reason why today's mainstream total, Labour plus Tory, should return to sustained dominance of the electorate".

What next?

This "unprecedented fragmentation puts the electorate on a collision course with the electoral system", said Robert Ford, professor of political science at Manchester University, in The Guardian. "First past the post is an amplifier: the winner takes all, everyone else gets nothing. But when voters divide evenly between multiple choices, this is a recipe for chaos."

This means "once unviable strategies" – like putting up a celebrity candidate with little experience but huge name recognition – "can work", said The Economist. Tactical voting, "the grease that keeps British democracy turning, becomes close to impossible".

Many agree that a new electoral system is needed to better reflect this new multi-party political reality. But neither Labour (who won two-thirds of seats at the last election on a third of the vote) or the Conservatives, nor it seems Reform, appear interested in this – at least for now.

"That doesn't mean that events like another pandemic, war or a climate catastrophe won't squeeze voters back into the two-party fold," said Byline Times. "But it won't be willing and will therefore only ever be temporary."

The Labour government's Employment Rights Bill will amount to a "banter ban" if it's allowed to go ahead, critics have said.

A particular passage of the bill, which addresses "harassment by third parties", is being seen in some quarters as an effective ban on "discussion of sensitive subjects such as religion or views on transgender rights", said Jessica Elgot in The Guardian.

The government says that particular clause is designed to protect workers from sexual harassment by customers. But, there are concerns that pub customers could be asked to leave or bar staff could begin to launch tribunals if an overheard conversation is taken as offensive.

'Pubs will no longer be a safe haven'

Trade Unions have urged the government to continue with the bill without amendments, at the same time the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has said that the government should provide "guidance for employers not to overinterpret the legislation".

The EHRC also warned that without guidance, employers could face "complexity", which could lead to "excessive limitations on debate", something that critics, like Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, claim "could lead to the end of pub banter", said Elgot.

The pub has always been the "one place" people "felt free to speak our minds" away from home, and "although these ancient freedoms still exist", the impending bill will mean "pubs will no longer be a safe haven", said Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail.

A "bartender with big ears" who overhears a "lively discussion in a pub about religion or abortion or transgender issues" could "demand that the pub landlord take action". Or, if no action is taken, take things to an "employment tribunal". It's not so "far-fetched", Glover wrote, with the term "harassment" now "very broad" in "modern Britain".

The bill is still making its way through Parliament, with some peers in the House of Lords warning of an "attempt to block" the "crackdown on pub banter" in its next reading, said Amy Gibbons at The Telegraph. Those Lords, including Conservative peer and Free Speech Union founder Toby Young, are demanding that certain "venues are excluded" from the bill, including pubs and universities. Young claimed that the bill meant "woke activists" at universities "could block certain speakers" over claims of harassment.

'Banter is a tiresome noise'

"Any sane proponent of Britain’s liberal democratic values should be angry", said Zoe Strimpel in The Spectator, as the bill could "equate to a clampdown on normal back-and-forth between human beings". But while the bill should "not threaten conversation", would it be such a bad thing if it were able to "outlaw banter full stop"?

Banter is a "tiresome noise" and "often a synonym for sexual inquisition" in which there is "no place for the sensitive or thinking person" and "certainly not women", she wrote. So while it is positive that "British freedoms are being throatily defended", there will be little regret in ensuring "the boys" have to "think twice before letting loose with their noisy banter".

The bill is now with the House of Lords and it is as yet unclear whether it will return to the Commons with amendments. If critics are able to push through the amendments, then landlords "won’t have to worry about protecting bar staff from the opinions (or even jokes) of their customers", said Christian May at CityAM. But if they do not, it will be a clear example of Keir Starmer extending "the power and reach of the state", he said.

The bill's clause will still mean people are "able to talk freely in pubs" and will ensure "employers take reasonable steps to protect workers from aggressive customers", said TUC general secretary Paul Nowak. Critics like Nigel Farage have "no plan for workers" and are only "promising the same broken status quo".

"It's time to give the people what they want: a Tory-Reform, non-aggression pact," said Jacob Rees-Mogg on GB News, arguing that Labour won its majority because the right-leaning vote was split between Reform and his party, the Conservatives.

It's simple logic in the context of a recent YouGov poll of almost 2,500 UK adults on how people would vote were a general election to be held tomorrow: 25% for Reform UK, 24% for Labour and 21% for the Conservatives. But Rees-Mogg's strongest argument in favour of an electoral pact is that the poll revealed one in five of those who voted Tory in the last general election would now vote for Nigel Farage's Reform UK party.

'Nigel Farage wants to destroy the Conservative party'

Even Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has admitted that Reform is likely to triumph at the Runcorn by-election next month but she has ruled out a "national level" deal with Reform because "Nigel Farage has said that he wants to destroy the Conservative Party". A number of her MPs told The i Paper that an informal non-competition agreement would "make a lot of sense", and Badenoch told BBC Breakfast that Tory councillors would have to "make the choice about what is right for their councils" after the elections. In an attempt to defuse the issue, she pointed out that Tories were already governing locally as part of "various coalitions" with other parties, including Labour and the Lib Dems.

But any kind of local level pact might not be the win for Reform that it first appears. The insurgent party is "thus far untainted by the realities of power", said UnHerd's Tom Jones. "Getting into government, even if limited to the local level, may dull the insurgent edge on which the party trades".

'Drifting further to the right'

But cosying up to Reform won't save Badenoch's party either, said Bloomberg columnist Rosa Prince. The Tories should realise that they're always better off occupying the centre ground rather than continuing a "half-hearted attempt to restore the party's fortunes by drifting further to the right". Instead of mimicking Reform's populist policies as her internal leadership rival Robert Jenrick is wont to do, Badenoch should challenge Labour on the economy and particularly taxation.

The combination of a gloomy economic outlook, not helped by Trump's trade wars, and Labour's lack of connection with voters gives the Tories an opportunity to appeal to voters who care less about "irrelevant woke wars" than about "their own personal finances". And Badenoch should remember that Farage's character is off-putting to as many centrists as it is attractive to those who have defected to Reform.

Speaking of defectors, Conservative-MP-turned-Reform-candidate Andrea Jenkyns is running for mayor of Greater Lincolnshire in one of the more closely watched contests of the local elections coming up on 1 May. If Jenkyns wins, the Tory party is braced for further defections and a "renewed frenzy over a potential deal or even merger", said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. But if Jenkyns loses, Reform's momentum may falter. "The party has poured everything it has into Lincolnshire. If it can't win here, doubts will emerge over how solid its polling figures really are."

This week's local elections could bring a historic shift in voting patterns, says one of Britain's leading pollsters.

Professor Sir John Curtice, of the University of Strathclyde, told The Independent that less than half of those polled planned to vote for Labour or the Conservatives, the two parties that have dominated British politics for a century.

The "big winner" from the shift in voter intentions is likely to be Reform UK. Nigel Farage's insurgent party is on course to pick up hundreds of council seats across England as it looks to establish itself as a genuine alternative to the Tories and Labour.

The last time these councils were contested was in 2021. That was the high point of Boris Johnson's premiership when the Conservatives won control of dozens of local authorities. Four years on and the picture could not look more different.

Where are elections and when?

Around a third of electors in England are eligible to vote in local elections to be held on Thursday 1 May.

In total, 23 councils will be contested, with more than 1,600 councillors up for election. These include:

14 county councils: Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire, Devon, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Kent, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire.

8 unitary authorities: Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, County Durham, North Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Shropshire, West Northamptonshire and Wiltshire.

1 metropolitan district: Doncaster.

Six mayoral elections are also taking place in the West of England, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, North Tyneside, Doncaster and – for the first time – in Greater Lincolnshire, and Hull and East Yorkshire.

In February, the government announced that local elections in East Sussex, West Sussex, Essex, Thurrock, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Norfolk, Suffolk and Surrey, due to also take place on 1 May, would be delayed for one year to allow for the reorganisation of local councils.

No routine elections are taking place in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.

Who is eligible to vote?

The BBC, in collaboration with the Electoral Commission, has produced a postcode tool for voters to check if elections are taking place in their area on 1 May.

British citizens, qualifying Commonwealth citizens and those with citizenship of an EU member state are all eligible to vote in local elections, although rules vary according to which country you are from.

If you have not already registered to vote, the deadline has unfortunately already passed.

After changes to the law brought in under the last Tory government, voters in England now need to show photo ID to confirm their identity at polling stations. You can see the list of accepted forms of identification here. The ID document does not need to be in date, as long as the photo is still clearly recognisable.

If you do not possess any of these, you need to apply for a free Voter Authority Certificate not later than Wednesday 23 April.

What ID do you need?

After changes to the law brought in under the last Tory government, voters in England now need to show photo ID to confirm their identity at polling stations. You can see the list of accepted forms of identification here. The ID document does not need to be in date, as long as the photo is still clearly recognisable.

If you do not possess any of these, you can apply for a free Voter Authority Certificate but not in time for this week's local elections as the deadline has also passed.

What are the polls saying?

"They might not span the whole UK," said Left Foot Forward, but the 1 May local elections still offer a "critical litmus test" and "all eyes are on whether Reform's bluster holds up in the ballot box".

Politico's latest poll of polls has the party leading nationally on 25%, ahead of Labour on 23% and the Conservatives on 21%.

The Conservatives, who are defending almost two-thirds of the seats that are up for grabs, are "braced for a hammering", said the Financial Times. Reform is "challenging the main rightwing party across many areas" and the Liberal Democrats are "targeting big gains in the south".

Farage's party "could take control of eight councils to gain their first real power-base in local government", said Martin Baxter, founder of Electoral Calculus.

At the same time, the Lib Dems, who are polling around 15% nationally, are looking to build on their success in last year's general election and replace the Conservatives as the natural "party of Middle England".

"The party believes it can become the second largest in local government by surpassing the Conservatives, as well as making gains in areas where voters have become disaffected with Labour since the general election", said London's The Standard.

As for Labour, this will be Keir Starmer's first major test at the ballot box since last year's general election landslide. With traditionally Labour local councils such as Doncaster and Durham forecast to swing to Reform, the narrative that the far-right populist party is simply a problem for the Conservatives will be "shattered", said Conservative Home.

Things could get even worse for Labour if Reform overturns a huge majority to win the Runcorn and Helsby by-election taking place on the same day. With Farage vowing to park his talks on Labour's Red Wall lawn, such a result, The Independent said, would be "disastrous for the government".

Bitter in-fighting has broken out within Nigel Farage's Reform UK party, culminating in the suspension of one of its five MPs, Rupert Lowe.

Lowe, who represents Great Yarmouth, had the party whip withdrawn following allegations of "serious bullying" in his parliamentary office, and of "threats of physical violence", now reported to the police, against the party chair, Zia Yusuf.

The allegations surfaced shortly after Lowe criticised Farage and the party leadership in a Daily Mail interview, describing Reform under Farage as a "protest party led by the messiah". Lowe has now threatened to "take legal action" for his "political assassination".

'Chopped off at the knees'

I'm "acutely aware", wrote Nigel Farage in The Telegraph, that "the public does not like political parties that engage in constant infighting". That's why Reform has been devoting time to "building a unified national party". But now, thanks to Lowe "unloading a barrage of criticisms against our operations and its main actors, that sense of unity has been dented".

The party has appointed a top barrister to "conduct an independent inquiry" because "to ignore such allegations" would be "inconceivable".

Farage critics will view all this as "Ukip folklore" unfolding again: a "politician in a Farage party becomes so popular as to threaten his supremacy and then gets chopped off at the knees", said Patrick O'Flynn in The Spectator.

But "this is more than just a clash of personalities", said the BBC's Chris Mason. "There are differences of policy instinct between the two men." While Lowe has "advocated mass deportations", for example, Farage "doesn't think that is practical or popular". And Lowe has "praised the jailed far-right activist Stephen Yaxley Lennon", otherwise known as Tommy Robinson, while Farage "refuses to have anything to do with him".

'Success limited by ego'

For some politicians, the Reform fallout was inevitable. In the run-up to last July's election, Tory peer and columnist Daniel Finkelstein wrote on X: "Nigel Farage should hope that he is the only Reform MP elected. Because if there are two or more of them, the Reform parliamentary party will split at some point".

Finkelstein's prediction was "based on a record of success limited by ego," said John Rentoul in The Independent. "Farage has often shone brightly but briefly, and broken everything he touches." His dreams of "displacing the Tories as the largest opposition party at the next election depend on a level of organisation of which Farage and his loyalists have never been capable". And while Kemi Badenoch "must be a little more cheerful today", the real beneficiary of the Reform split will be Keir Starmer.

This spat has shown that, for "all his undoubted skills" Farage's limitations "are just as important". He "will never be as effective a politician as he could be because he is not a team player". This current row means "the chances of a two-term Labour government have increased – slightly but perceptibly".

Labour is trying a new tactic to fight off the political threat of Reform UK: being tough on immigration.

The Home Office is to launch "a fresh wave of immigration raids for illegal working" and highlight "record numbers" of deportations, said The Guardian. More than 16,400 "failed asylum seekers, irregular immigrants and foreign criminals" have been deported since the election.

The government believes a strong record on limiting migration numbers "could help retain Labour voters tempted by Nigel Farage’s party" but the move is "fuelling disquiet" among some Labour MPs, who fear a return to the Theresa May-era "hostile environment", with its controversial "Go Home" billboards.

What did the commentators say?

It only takes a quick look at the polls to see why "a big tactical rethink" is underway in Downing Street, said The Observer. Starmer told his cabinet ministers this week that they had to be the "'disrupters if you don't want to be disrupted'. He meant disrupted by Reform UK."

Having concluded that "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em", Starmer and his government appear to be "brazenly using the tactics" of Farage's "buddy", President Donald Trump, to attack the Reform leader. A new National Crime Agency video reportedly shows "staff packing bags at a migrant removal centre", followed by a shackled returnee "escorted by seven staff" on to a charter jet, said Sky News.

If this "aggressive campaigning all sounds very Trumpian, that's because it is". Last week the prime minister adapted Trump's "drill, baby, drill" mantra to "build, baby, build" as he hit out at "blockers" thwarting Labour's growth agenda. Now, like Trump, he has "propelled immigration to the top of his agenda".

Not all Downing Street sources believe that a tougher immigration message is the "silver bullet that will see off Reform", said the BBC. What the government needs to do is "deliver on its promises" and "on the cost of living and on health care in particular" in order to fend off the threat from rival parties.

Former shadow home secretary Diane Abbott warned that it would be a "big mistake" for Labour to present itself as "Reform-lite". "All you do is give legitimacy to their agenda and encourage people to vote for the real thing," she told The Guardian. Such a move would "alienate Labour voters in our core seats", she said.

What next?

The immigration publicity blitz comes as the government's Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill is due to be debated in the House of Commons at its second reading stage. The bill aims to introduce a raft of new offences and counterterror-style powers to crack down on people-smugglers bringing migrants across the English Channel. It is expected to come into force this year.

"The government is failing and the Tory opposition is rubbish but we aren’t sure yet about Reform – they seem a bit scary – and we are happy to have the Lib Dems in our back pockets for a rainy day."

With the latest polls suggesting both Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch are struggling against the insurgent populism of Nigel Farage, The New Statesman's political editor Andrew Marr summed up the mood of many voters across the country.

What did the commentators say?

Both Tory and Labour leaders are "looking weak", said Patience Wheatcroft in The New European, but Badenoch "will surely go first".

Her "strategy of not having policies is proving a short-term disaster, which should worry her because the short term may be all she has", said Marr.

Just over 100 days as leader of the opposition and Badenoch has so far failed to improve the Conservatives' dismal approval ratings and, critics say, failed to articulate what exactly the party stands for. Meanwhile, Reform grows ever stronger and presents a real right-wing alternative.

She was forced to issue a rallying cry to her staff on Monday while seeking to blame others "for not pulling their weight", according to Guido Fawkes. That comes after The Spectator – now edited by her former mentor Michael Gove – criticised her performances at PMQs.

There is still "time for her leadership skills to improve and for some enticing policies to emerge", said Wheatcroft, "but the prospects for such change are slight, and the Conservative party tends to be ruthless when deciding the future of a wobbling leader".

Having won a landslide general election victory just six months ago, Starmer is obviously in a stronger position, and "there are still four years for recovery – in political terms, a lifetime", said Marr.

"Patience – the resilience Starmer has shown – is the underrated political virtue" but unless he can tell a better story about what Labour are for, calls for him to go will only continue to grow louder.

What next?

The elephant in the room for both Labour and the Conservatives is, of course, Reform, which has a "plausible, credible and identifiable Roadmap to Power", said the academic Matt Goodwin on Substack.

As Badenoch shifts her party to the right, "there's the obvious danger that they get squeezed" or even worse "overlooked" entirely, said Sean O'Grady in The Independent.

For Labour, which recent analysis by The Observer found is at risk of losing dozens of seats to Reform at the next election, the problem of what to do about Farage is just as acute. That is why talk of a potential successor to Starmer has rounded on the ambitious health secretary, Wes Streeting, who "from the moment he arrived in the Commons in 2015 the words 'future leader' had been appended to his name like a Homeric epithet", said The Sunday Times.

"As one of the few members of the cabinet who's actually good at politics and taking the fight to the enemy, Streeting will be a formidable foil to Farage, who's used to not having his breezy assertions properly challenged," said O'Grady.

Whether Streeting gets the opportunity to go head-to-head with Farage in a future leaders' debate depends on whether Starmer can "change the political mood", said Wheatcroft. Otherwise, "his party might also start to look at him as a problem rather than a leader".

Keir Starmer has admitted the failure of the state to stop the Southport child killer Axel Rudakubana "leaps off the page" but has strongly hit back at accusations of a cover-up.

Rudakubana dramatically pleaded guilty yesterday to killing six-year-old Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe (seven) and Alice da Silva Aguiar (nine) at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last summer.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced there will be a public inquiry into the attacks. But the guilty plea has given the green light for the publication of more information about Rudakubana's past, "all of which poses very serious questions for the state about how it failed to intervene before tragedy struck", said Politico.

What did the commentators say?

Rudakubana "seemed, on the face of it, an unthreatening figure: a quiet boy from a God-fearing family, slightly built and small for his age", said The Guardian. So how he was able to carry out such a heinous crime "will be the subject of intense scrutiny".

Following the guilty plea, it can be revealed that the 18-year-old had been referred to the counterterrorism Prevent programme three times between 2019 and 2021, but on each occasion a "judgement was made that he did not meet the threshold for intervention", said Katy Balls in The Spectator.

The killer had had "contact with the police, the courts, the youth justice system, social services and mental health services", said Sky News. He also had a history of violence. ITV News reported that he was "widely rumoured" to have had a "'kill list'" of pupils he wanted to murder, while The Times said "he had planned an attack on that same school" just a "week before his killing spree", after he had been expelled for carrying a knife.

Both Cooper and Starmer have been quick to stress they could not reveal details of Rudakubana's past for fear of prejudicing the trial, but this has not stopped opposition figures accusing the government and police of orchestrating a cover-up.

Nigel Farage today claimed on X that "cover up Keir" was "once again hiding behind the contempt of court argument", while Reform's deputy leader Richard Tice said the PM has "deliberately misled the British people to continue suiting his own narrative". It follows calls by shadow home secretary Chris Philp for the public "to know who in government knew what and when, as well as why the authorities may have withheld some information from the public".

This drew stinging criticism from the Mail on Sunday columnist Dan Hodges. He wrote on social media that while he understood that "conspiracy theorists" were "peddling their crazy Southport lines", what is "unforgivable is politicians – and even some journalists – who know precisely what restrictions are imposed when major cases are pending suddenly pretend to be ignorant of them".

What next?

Much of the "controversy" surrounding the case has arisen from the decision not to classify the attack as terrorism, said The i Paper. This came after police revealed in October that Rudakubana had also been charged with production of the biological toxin ricin and possession of an Al-Qaeda training manual – a terror offence.

Despite this, the BBC said his case has "never been treated as terror-related by police as he did not appear to follow an ideology, such as Islamism or racial hatred, and instead appeared to be motivated by an interest in extreme violence".

The decision by the Prevent panel that Rudakubana was not motivated by a terrorist ideology or posed a terrorist danger is "likely to be at the heart" of the upcoming public inquiry, said The Times.

There was nothing in Starmer's latest comments to suggest that this will be "any sort of whitewash", said The Guardian. If anything he "sounded like someone happy for it to be as damning as it needs to be".

Elon Musk has called for Nigel Farage to be replaced as leader of Reform UK, just weeks after the tech billionaire was reportedly in talks to donate a substantial amount to the party.

In a post on X, Musk said Farage "doesn't have what it takes" to lead the party. The surprising souring of relations came just hours after Farage described Musk as a "friend" and called him a "hero" of free speech in an interview with the BBC.

The fall-out appears to be connected to Musk's support for far-right activist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, whom Farage has condemned, said The Independent.

Musk's involvement in UK politics has intensified in a series of posts that target Keir Starmer, accusing him of failing to properly prosecute "rape gangs" while he was director of public prosecutions. Musk also called safeguarding minister Jess Phillips a "rape genocide apologist" who "deserves to be in prison".

What did the commentators say?

Musk poses "a delicate new challenge for Britain’s political leaders", said CNN. Starmer is "taking great pains to charm" President-elect Donald Trump, while "also hoping to hold back at home the growing influence of Reform UK".

For many Labour MPs, Musk's "anger – like much online trolling – remains little more than a sideshow", but others find themselves asking: "why us?" Unlike in other European countries, such as Germany, "there is no impending parliamentary election through which Musk can exert his influence", leaving many scratching their heads over Musk's apparent fixation with British politics.

While the next general election is still as much as four years away, "Musk can't be entirely ignored". With Labour "desperate to build trust with the Trump administration" and to generate economic growth at home, "the delicate nature of Starmer’s relationship with Trump may depend on keeping the billionaire at arm's length – for as long as that remains possible".

Earlier today, Starmer called out "those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible", although, notably, he refrained from naming Musk among them. Indeed, the "concern in No. 10 is that meeting fire with fire will only escalate the row further, and give Musk more oxygen", said The Times. And for No. 10, "the importance of retaining good relations with Trump cannot be overstated", after the president-elect "spent much of the US election campaign threatening to impose a blanket 10% tariffs on imports", a move that would do "huge damage" to Britain's economic prospects, a key priority for Starmer's government.

Musk has demonstrated that he is "capable of setting the political weather in the UK", with both the Conservatives and Reform UK now backing his calls for a public inquiry into grooming gangs. But as his volte-face on Farage this weekend demonstrates, the Tesla and X boss can be a "precarious ally". "So for now the strategy for dealing with Musk remains unchanged – to challenge him on points of fact but to avoid directly confronting him over his rhetoric."

What next?

Britain is far from Musk's "only target in Europe", said Euractiv. He met Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, "a leading figure on the radical right", in December at his Florida home, and Musk has "also been accused of interference by the German government for his strong support of the far-right AfD party ahead of parliamentary elections". He is due to host a conversation with AfD co-leader Alice Weidel on X later this week.

And Musk could soon turn his attentions towards Paris, said Politico, with President Emmanuel Macron reportedly "desperate to get him onside".

With Nigel Farage's Reform UK increasingly threatening to split the right, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has refused to be drawn on the specifics of her policy positions. Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, she said she would not "rush out" stances within six weeks of her taking over as leader of the opposition, claiming she wanted to earn the public's trust first.

"We are about what we are for, not just what we are against," Badenoch told presenter Amol Rajan. "I do the thinking and what people are going to get with new leadership under me is thoughtful Conservatism, not knee-jerk analysis."

What did the commentators say?

During the leadership contest, Badenoch "deliberately avoided" specific policy positions, instead focusing on "Conservative 'principles'", said the BBC. But some in her party have warned against "leaving a void on key issues such as migration that could be filled by Reform".

Badenoch "risks missing a golden chance" to fix the party machine, opting instead to keep the party "as one of empty slogans", said Simone Hanna in The Telegraph. She has offered "little in terms of practical solutions to anything at the top of most voters' agendas", such as migration. Rather, she is "fixated on the optics of 'owning' her opponents as if she were a 2015 YouTuber" and "ignoring" the reality that she is leading a party "on the very edge of survival". The Tories "stay alive by the grace of Labour's catastrophic start in government".

Badenoch's "combative and outspoken manner" was "invaluable" during the leadership race, but "if Tories voted for Badenoch expecting her to be making the political weather, they will have been disappointed", said former Conservative Lord Chancellor David Gauke in The New Statesman. While she has avoided "serious howlers", she has not "landed any heavy blows on the government", while Farage has "maintained a much higher profile". Badenoch was "wise to eschew" committing to policy announcements too early, but "come the New Year, she will need to set out a clearer political strategy".

When Donald Trump's second term in office begins "there will be more than the usual ripples across the pond from Washington to Westminster", said Patrick O'Flynn in The Spectator. As Trump's "paradigm-busting political programme" unfolds, Farage and his Reform UK "stand to benefit the most".

"Seeing the most successful nation in the world prioritise its own citizens and send the woke Left packing is bound to increase the appetite for a similar radical approach to be tried out here," said Flynn, and Farage "is the obvious man to spearhead it".

What next?

It would require a "huge electoral feat" for Reform to go from five MPs to a political threat to the Labour Party in the next general election, said the i news site. Yet there is the "increasing volatility of an electorate that has already blown previous preconceptions out of the water by delivering a landslide majority" to a party that had been "well beaten in 2019".

And Reform UK is garnering interest from across the pond too – and not just from billionaire Elon Musk, who is rumoured to be offering a substantial donation to the party, but from a "number of billionaires", according to treasurer Nick Candy. Speaking to the Financial Times, Candy said British politics is set to undergo "disruption like we have never seen before" thanks to large donations apparently in the pipeline.

Nigel Farage was named "Newcomer of the Year" last week at Westminster's answer to the Oscars, The Spectator's Parliamentarian of the Year awards, said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail.

The award was, of course, tongue-in-cheek: Farage, not exactly a newcomer, had finally managed to get elected as an MP. The man himself, however, was in no mood for jokes. "I've got a bit of a shock for you," he declared. "Politics is about to change in the most astonishing way." He went on to vow that he would win the next election. This met with a "stunned silence" as those present reflected that "he might well be right".

Reform UK won more than four million votes in the last election, about 14% of the total. A poll last week put it on 24%, ahead of Labour, on 23%, for the first time, and only two points behind the Tories. Most polls now give it at least 20%. It's time to take Reform "seriously".

'Electrifying USP'

It's obvious why Reform UK is doing so well, said Janice Turner in The Times. The most recent immigration figures – 906,000 people added to the British population in the year to June 2023 – were mind-boggling. At his big relaunch last week, Keir Starmer, bizarrely, chose to say nothing at all about this. Reform now has "an electrifying USP": it is positioning itself as the truth-sayer on an issue that other parties refuse to address. Lack of housing, rising rents, overstretched infrastructure – Farage makes no bones about blaming migration for all this. And he must be at least partly right. It looked as if Britain had swerved the populist revolt. But "maybe Starmer is our Biden and we're just one election behind".

The political landscape suits Farage perfectly, said George Eaton in The New Statesman. "The UK has an unpopular government and an unpopular opposition." This is an age of voter volatility in which the public is less tribal than ever. But equally, Farage has clear weaknesses. He is personally unpopular; and the right-wing vote will be split between Reform UK and the Conservatives.

A cash injection

There's another crucial factor that could boost Reform, said Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. It was rumoured last week that Elon Musk would donate $100m to the party. Musk denied it; but Reform would certainly know what to do with the cash. There was a time when money didn't matter that much in British politics, because parties can't buy TV ads, which for decades were "by far the most impactful form of political communication".

But it's now possible to buy online advertising of a very targeted and effective kind. Fundraising may, in time, become as important here as it is in the US. "Money has just begun its ascent to the political throne."

There wasn't much to enjoy about the opening episode of "I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here", said Guy Kelly in The Telegraph. "But we could at least laugh at all the ousted Tory MPs who must have assumed they'd be a shoo-in for a spot in camp."

From Matt Hancock to Nigel Farage, offering politicians an opportunity to "launder their dignity by eating anus under the glib supervision of Ant and Dec" has been the show's "go-to ploy" for years, said Kelly. The glaring absence of any such "Westminster-type" in the 2024 iteration felt like a "failure" by the producers.

Celebrities 'too nice'

In fact, there are no "glaringly obvious provocateurs" in the 2024 line-up. Instead it is "reality TV by numbers", said Katie Rosseinsky in The Independent: a Corrie star, a "Loose Women" panellist, a McFly band member... "Rinse and repeat."

The biggest attraction is "surely Coleen Rooney" – the "typically private" wife of former England footballer Wayne Rooney – who has hit the headlines for her starring role in the "Wagatha Christie" libel trial. Her presence, it turns out, is an excuse for Ant and Dec to try out their best gags. Five minutes into the first episode, Dec jokes: "It'll be nice for Coleen to face a trial that doesn't involve Rebekah Vardy."

If anything, the celebrities this year seem "whisper it, too nice – which is great for their enjoyment levels, but, let's be honest, not so good for us viewers at home". Without the show's usual assortment of "tricky personalities" and potential for "intra-camp romance", it's unlikely to deliver the "twists and turns" audiences have come to expect.

'Physically tiring to watch'

As the theme song began, the "sweeping drone shots" of the jungle flashed on to the TV, and the "people off-camera who are literally paid to laugh at Ant and Dec's jokes (are they being dangled over the side of the walkway?) guffawed". The new series "felt physically tiring to watch", said Kelly in The Telegraph. "The whole thing is utterly bereft of new ideas."

Indeed, after more than two decades of the show, viewers know exactly what they're getting, said Rosseinsky in The Independent. The celebs must "feign surprise" when they hear helicopters approaching, hinting at the "inevitable skydiving challenge"; the welcome drinks are, of course, "blended bulls penis and fish eyes, garnished with cocktail umbrellas".

Perhaps Irish reality star Maura Higgins (who is rumoured to be making an appearance) will "bring some zip if and when she arrives", said Ed Power in The Irish Times. But so far "it's all a bit ho-hum".

Reform UK will be the "main challenger" to Labour at the Welsh election in 2026, Nigel Farage said this morning.

Farage takes "top billing" at his party's conference in Wales today, said the BBC, after returning from the US "having supported Donald Trump's successful presidential campaign". The former Ukip leader said it is in the "national interest" for him to "help break down barriers" between the Labour government and the US president-elect.

What did the commentators say?

The "biggest winner" in the UK from Trump's "victory across the pond" may be Farage, said Katy Balls in The Spectator, because he "can boast to have a direct line to the so-called leader of the free world".

"No other country on this side of the Atlantic" has "such access to the soon-to-be most powerful man in the world", said The Telegraph. This presents a "glorious opportunity" for Starmer to "get the jump on our competitors", but he'll "undoubtedly pass up" the chance for ideological reasons.

"Now would be the time to accept Farage's reasonable proposal" to be a middle man, "eat some humble pie, and look to guard against any economic hit to the UK", said the Daily Express, but we are likely to "see more student politics from the Labour Party".

But taking Farage up on his offer "could even be clever politics for Labour as it seeks to win over wavering Reform supporters", said the Express. And Balls said the biggest problem Farage poses to Starmer is "an electoral one", because Reform is "looking to make gains in Wales and Scotland" and become "the main challenger to Labour" in the Midlands and northern England.

So despite their "thumping victory in July, Labour politicians are looking nervously over their shoulders at the prospect of an election fought on immigration and the cost of living", said Politico. Farage's Reform would be "well-placed to benefit both from general anti-incumbent feeling and from a demand for tougher action on immigration".

Another cause of unease in Labour circles came from a YouGov survey last month. It found that Starmer is more unpopular than Farage, with a net approval rating of -36 for the prime minister, compared to -35 for Farage.

As anxiety grows in Labour ranks, one of its MPs said that "we cannot be distracted by bull****" because "it's all about jobs and borders". That, said Balls, is "the lesson" Labour MPs worried about Reform hope Starmer and his team will "take from this week's election result" in the US.

What next?

Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden seems to have "slapped down" Farage's offer to act as an intermediary, said The Mirror. Speaking to Times Radio, McFadden said working with Washington was not about a "single individual" and insisted Labour already had a good relationship with Trump.

But even if Starmer tries to keep Farage at arm's length in transatlantic dealings, the Reform leader could yet embarrass him, said The Telegraph. The prime minister will ask the King to invite Trump for a state visit to Britain, and he'll already know that "risks the humiliation of the president spending more time" with Farage "than with him".

"This weekend is when Reform UK comes of age," bellowed Nigel Farage at his party's largest-ever conference in Birmingham over the weekend, as he both revelled in its unexpected election success and looked to strengthen its future ambitions.

Farage and Reform "shook up" the general election in July, capitalising on the Conservatives' failing fortunes to win five seats in Parliament and come "third in the popular vote", said Politico.

That was a "warning shot to the established political parties", and while the Reform leader continued to reinforce his upstart message of defiance to the existing members at the conference, it was the declaration that the party must now begin "taking itself seriously" to make future progress.

'Capitalise on disillusionment'

Ahead of the conference, Farage announced he would relinquish control of the party, which had been set up as a limited company, to its members and set up as other political parties do. That change was one of the initial signs that Farage is looking to make the party "fit for the long-term future", said The Independent. There are also likely to be "wide-ranging changes" to the party's structure as it looks towards its next big test at local elections in England next year.

That will be a building block towards the next general election when Reform hopes to "capitalise on disillusionment" of Labour and Tory voters to gain more seats, said Politico.

But to get there, the party needs to "professionalise", Farage said, as he "urged his party to learn from the Liberal Democrats" and focus efforts on "local activism and winning seats on councils" to "attract middle-of-the-road voters" sick of "endless scandals", said the BBC.

'Self-forced errors'

If Reform is to attract those disillusioned voters it must also rid itself of the "self-forced errors" it made in the last campaign, said Katy Balls in The Spectator. The party "is already working on candidate selection", she wrote, after it blamed poor vetting for getting caught in racism rows involving prospective candidates.

By distancing itself from these controversies, Farage believes the party can challenge Labour as it did with the Tories in the last election. While immigration remains Reforms "cause célèbre" and will push Labour on any "shortcomings", it will also hope to attack Labour's "austerity" and any job losses caused by its "so-called green transition".

There is a sense that Farage is approaching Reform's future with "hard-headed pragmatism", hence the "dull but important changes" announced at the conference, said Politico. But while he's given "members control of the party" and pushed them to pounce on public disillusionment, Farage "is still its main attraction".

Labour's landslide win is the big story of the general election, but there were historic gains for Reform UK and the Greens, and victories by pro-Gaza independent candidates.

Speaking after winning in Clacton-on-Sea, Reform leader Nigel Farage said he plans to "build a mass national movement over the course of the next few years", and "hopefully it'll be big enough to challenge the general election properly" in 2029.

'Fox in the henhouse'

Reform came second in more than 100 seats, suggesting it could become "even more of a force at future elections", said Politico. Speaking to Sky News, the party's deputy leader David Bull said that, by 2029, "you'll see Nigel as prime minister".

With Reform in such ebullient form, the Tories must "decide what to do about Mr Farage and his insurgent party", said The Economist. "Put simply," Farage "must be buried or bedded". 

But "judging by the amount of votes won by Reform", the "mob will not happily return to the Tories". Although the two parties have much in common, the "narcissism of small differences is often the hardest to overcome".

Farage will be "emboldened to replace, rather than seek a pact with" the Conservatives, said Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times. His plan is to "destroy the Tories by poaching much of their vote", then "replace – or take over – the party’s remnants", said The New York Times.

At the eighth attempt, Farage has finally become an MP, so now the "fox is in the henhouse", said the former Ukip MEP Patrick O'Flynn in The Telegraph. His party is "about to tear the cosy Westminster clique to shreds".

Not only does he have "democratic legitimacy and a media platform as an MP", but Reform now "qualifies for a small fortune in Short Money with which to bankroll a professional party machine". So there is "every reason to believe" that Farage can successfully gun for Labour next.

British politics is "about to change utterly", said Shrimsley. Thanks to the success of Reform, there will "suddenly be many Labour MPs looking at the threat from the nationalist right" and this "may well check some progressive instincts".

'Shape government policy'

But the threat to Labour might not just be coming from the right. 

Gaza has cost Labour at least five seats, said Isabel Hardman in The Spectator. So the success of those independent candidates might "shape UK government policy" because Starmer will "have to decide" what to do about Israel and "whether to change the current arms exports licensing regime".

Meanwhile, the new Green MP for Brighton Pavilion, Siân Berry, said that her party will be looking to influence Starmer on climate. "We've got a change of government," she told the i news site, but "that doesn't change very much unless we can get some of the ideas in our manifesto into Labour's programme", so "that's what we're working on".

Although the first-past-the-post electoral system favours the big two, the rise of the smaller parties shows that they can significantly influence the fortunes of Labour and the Conservatives. Whether Farage can go further than that and challenge for the top job remains to be seen.

It has been a bruising end to the election campaign for Reform UK, said Stephen Bush in the FT. 

Nigel Farage has attracted flak for asserting in an interview that the West "provoked" Russia into invading Ukraine. And his party has been hit by a string of embarrassing news reports about its supporters. 

Last week it distanced itself from a volunteer canvasser who had been filmed by an undercover Channel 4 reporter making offensive comments. Andrew Parker had called Rishi Sunak a "f**king P***", and suggested that the Army should use migrants arriving on British beaches for target practice. Over the weekend, Reform disowned three candidates over other offensive remarks. 

Collectively, these stories have generated "the worst headlines in the party's brief existence". But since Reform UK is largely targeting older voters, many of whom are likely to have already voted by post, the impact may be limited.

Lib Dems' 'patron saint'

Despite the fuss over his "Putin-sympathising language", Farage looks on track to "turn British politics upside-down" once again, said Fraser Nelson in The Spectator. By splitting the conservative vote, Reform will gift seats to the other opposition parties and devastate the Tories.

The Lib Dems are predicted to win Salisbury, which has been Tory for a century, and could even claim Tunbridge Wells, which has voted Tory for even longer. "Farage has become our patron saint," says one Lib Dem strategist. "He can do more for our chances than we can. Our guys should really dress up [like] his and campaign for Reform."

The voice of voter discontent

Farage has been tormenting the Tories for 14 years, said Freddie Hayward in The New Statesman. After the election, he'll become Labour's problem, too. No other politician in Britain can match him when it comes to getting a message across and enthusing supporters.

Although many of his backers are older, he has been attracting growing support from the young. Reform UK polls higher than the Tories with 18- to 25-year-olds. "Farage has 804,000 followers on TikTok, compared with Labour's 207,000 and the Tories' 67,000."

The difference between Farage's campaign and those of the main parties has been striking, said John Crace in The Guardian. While Sunak and Keir Starmer "have gone out of their way to meet as few members of the public as possible – one or two strictly controlled photo ops a day", Farage has held old-fashioned rallies. His plans, to the extent that he has revealed any, don't bear much examination, but he does know how to give voice to people's discontent. Next week, in all likeliness, he will have a seat in Parliament. "Don't say you haven't been warned."

If the polls are right, this general election could deliver the most "lopsided" results in modern history, said The Guardian. The Labour Party looks set to enter Downing Street with "a record number of seats and an immense majority", despite receiving slightly fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. 

The latest YouGov MRP poll projects Labour taking 39% of the vote, and winning 425 seats, its largest-ever number; the Tories, with 22%, would have only 108 seats. Our first-past-the-post (FPTP) system is notoriously unfair to third parties, but this time the outcome would be particularly "skewed". Nigel Farage's Reform UK, according to YouGov, would come third, with 15% of votes, but would win only five seats; by contrast the Lib Dems, with only 12% of the vote, would get 67. In short, this election "could make the case for proportional representation (PR)".

'PR for foreigners'

FPTP has long been defended on the grounds that it roots MPs in their local community and provides stable governments, said Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. "PR was for foreigners, typically Italian, who like being governed by chaotic coalitions" collated from party lists. But that case now looks less convincing. "The two-party system is dying." 

Smaller parties have emerged to represent "the disenfranchised" and "the discontented": the SNP, Reform UK, the Greens. Yet elections are still delivering results as if we were living under two mass-membership parties, circa 1945. Curiously, this is one part of the political system Keir Starmer doesn't want to reform. "Votes for 16-year-olds, Lords reform, yes." But why would he "tinker with an electoral system that hands him Napoleonic powers"?

'Screwed by the system'

Still, the Lib Dems, long the victims of FPTP, have shown a way to adapt to it, said Andrew Adonis in Prospect. Experts in "tactical opposition", they have built up their support so that it is concentrated in a hundred or so seats, mainly in the southwest and the Home Counties.

FPTP has always had its "quirks", said John Burn-Murdoch in the FT. But the "mismatch between votes and seats" is becoming much harder to wave away. And it's not clear that it "ensures greater political stability" and moderates the influence of extreme parties, as its defenders claim.

Analysis by the group Make Votes Matter shows that governments actually stay in power longer under PR than under FPTP. And if next week it deprives smaller parties of seats, its effect will be to boost populists like Farage by leaving "millions of voters with a justifiable sense of having been screwed by the system". It's time for change. "The make-up of Britain's Parliament should reflect the views of Britain's voters, not the peculiarities of its electoral system."

Nigel Farage has made no bones about his desire for Reform UK to supplant the Conservatives as the main opposition to Labour following next week's general election.

Political commentators and many voters may scoff at the idea that a party with no current MPs could replace one of the most electorally successful political entities in the history of democracy, but "there is a playbook for this", said The Telegraph's Philip Johnston.

Just such a surprise victory in Canada in 1993 has "acquired a near mythical status on the populist right". And the parallels with the UK today – a Conservative administration in office for over a decade and led by a relatively new prime minister – are "uncanny".

What happened to Canada's Conservatives?

It is "difficult to overstate the magnitude" of what happened at the 1993 Canadian federal elections, said the UK in a Changing Europe think tank.

Just five years earlier, under then prime minister Brian Mulroney, the Progressive Conservatives (PC) had won a second consecutive majority with 43% of the vote. Following the 1993 election, they were reduced to two seats in Canada's 295-seat Parliament. "They had official party status removed, and were effectively supplanted by Canada's Reform Party, which became the broad home of right-wing voters" said City A.M.

The result "fundamentally altered the country's political landscape" said The Guardian, and "shattered the notion that only the Liberals and the Progressive Conservatives were the rightful parties of government".

"The lessons of 1993 are that the worst-case scenario can happen," said political analyst Éric Grenier at the Writ. "Just because you've been around forever doesn't mean that you will be around forever. You can have the kind of election that requires you to restart a party and to come back from almost zero."

As UK Conservatives faces the prospect of a comparable defeat, political historians say Canada's recent past offers "lessons on the challenges of tempering populist rumbles – and the steep electoral losses that can follow", said The Guardian.

What happened to Canada's Reform Party?

"Huge, huge, huge," said Farage when he was asked about how important the former leader of Canada's Reform Party has been in shaping his campaign.

Founded and led by Preston Manning, initially as a protest movement, Reform won its first seat in Canada's parliament in a by-election in Alberta in 1989. Campaigning on a "populist agenda, which included creating an elected Senate, abolishing official bilingualism and broadly reducing the size of government" at the 1993 federal election, Reform "stormed to prominence, winning 52 seats and replacing the Progressive Conservatives as the voice of Western Canada" said the national broadcaster CBC News.

In less than a decade, rebranded as the Conservative Alliance, the party swept to power under Stephen Harper, who served as prime minister for nine years.

"In the end they sort of 'reverse took over' the old Conservative Party – they are the model," said Farage. "That's the plan." 

Will it happen in the UK?

There are some "almost exact parallels with the current political moment in the UK", said the London Evening Standard: the economy was failing, a conservative incumbent had recently replaced its leader, and it was up against a young, insurgent right-wing party named Reform. The "most significant similarity" between Westminster and Canada may be that both use first past the post (FPTP), "a system that has the potential to significantly skew how votes are converted into MPs".

If the polls are correct, the Conservatives are heading for a cataclysmic defeat on 4 July. 

Clearly, there are "several similarities between the difficulties they confront and the PC’s dire situation in 1993", said UK in a Changing Europe. But "as dim as the prospects are for the Tories, they are unlikely to suffer an electoral rout on the same scale due to the much more territorialised nature of the Canadian party system".

In the 1993 Canadian election, "regional issues were highly salient, and whereas the PC vote share was geographically diffuse and highly inefficient, two of their main competitors benefitted from having regionally concentrated support".

That Reform UK does not have the "geographical base in the same way that Reform in Canada had" poses Farage's real problem in Britain's FPTP system, as his party will struggle to translate votes into seats, Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, told CBC News.

If Labour returns to power next week, it is "likely that the Conservatives will be the biggest opposition party", said Prospect magazine. "What is remarkable is that the question is even worth asking."

Nigel Farage has set out a two-election strategy that he claims paves the way for him to be elected as prime minister after his Reform UK party becomes the main opposition to Labour.

Speaking yesterday before launching his party's manifesto, called "Our Contract With You", Farage said he hoped the upcoming 4 July election would result in Reform establishing a "bridgehead" in the House of Commons. He would then build a "big national campaigning movement around the country over the course of the next five years for genuine change".

The "real ambition", he said, was to clinch the top job at the next election, which must be held in 2029 at the latest.

What did the commentators say?

The most obvious route to No. 10 for Farage would involve staging a "reverse takeover of the Conservatives", said the i news site. He has "made no bones about his desire to see the Conservatives 'destroyed' and for him to pick up the pieces to shape the remnants of whatever is left in his own image".

But the choice of Merthyr Tydfil for Monday's manifesto launch was telling, said UnHerd. Far from the fabled Red Wall, the South Wales town has been solidly Labour for more than a century.

For Farage, "that seems to be the point". The former Ukip leader "barely bothered with the Tories in his remarks, but rather set out a two-election strategy to establish Reform as the true opposition to Labour" and then "storm to power in 2029".

That has a "fleetingly plausible ring to it", said The Independent's chief political commentator John Rentoul, "and sounds less like a snake-oil preacher predicting the Rapture" – unlike the two pages of "costings" at the end of the "contract" document, which "look like a ChatGPT version of something the Institute for Fiscal Studies might endorse".

For all the oxygen that Farage's return to front-line politics has taken up, debate continues about how popular his policies actually are with the wider public and if the manifesto is really a winning platform with the electorate.

"The mainstream elite in the media and in politics who claim to oppose Farage, and who pretend to stand as a bulwark against far-right politics, are again duly buying into the hype he has created for himself," said Aurelien Mondon, senior lecturer in politics at Bath University, on The Conversation.

What next?

Farage may be right when he said that UK politics was becoming more "presidential-style", with people voting for leaders rather than parties. But strong poll numbers do not necessarily translate into power in a first-past-the-post parliamentary system. Even in a best-case scenario, Reform will enter the next Parliament with just a handful of MPs.

Should the Tories suffer a near-extinction level event, Farage will still "not be the leader of the opposition, and he will not be the 'real' leader of the opposition", said Rentoul. "He will be a lonely figure at the back of the far end of the opposition benches." And while "the 'What to do about Nigel' question may continue to split the Tory party", the "prospect of a reverse takeover, of the larger entity by the smaller, will remain distant".

If Farage is "serious about spearheading a movement, is Reform really the right vehicle for it", asked Sky News's deputy political editor Sam Coates. Or "is a broken Conservative Party a better host for his ambition", given that "there is a chance the membership could well elect him leader if he ever got into the last two candidates in a contest to run the party"?

Farage has repeatedly side-stepped questions about whether he would rejoin the Tories to lead them, probably because he "genuinely has not ruled out the possibility, depending on the success or otherwise of Reform UK and the makeup of the Conservative Parliamentary party after 5 July".

"He is clearly enjoying himself – the TikTok videos, the TV interviews, the campaign events… It's all part of his love of publicity and the airtime which Reform's position in the polls gives him right now," said Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC.

But questions remain about whether he genuinely wants to be PM – or even become an MP, with all the limits that entails.

"He's just a reality TV star," said a source quoted by Kuenssberg. "Going to the jungle wasn't leaving the political arena, it was coming home."

Nigel Farage's announcement that he will lead Reform UK into the upcoming general election is Rishi Sunak's "worst nightmare" come true, said The Times's political sketchwriter Tom Peck.

At an "emergency general election announcement" press conference in London yesterday, Richard Tice – Reform's leader since 2021 – revealed that he would be handing the reins to Farage, who will also be running as the party's candidate in Clacton.

A buoyant Farage then took to the stage, "popping out of the darkness like a clockwork Jack the Ripper", for a bullish victory speech in which he claimed the Conservatives were on "the verge of total collapse", and laid down the welcome mat to Tory defectors.

It was another "potentially damaging blow" for the Conservative Party's "faltering" general election campaign, said The Guardian. Not only does Farage's entry into the election "pose an immediate threat" to the Tory candidate in Clacton, it may also "energise his party's national campaign, splitting the right-wing vote in other constituencies".

Even more than that, Farage's decision to stand could "both reset and re-align the Conservative Party", said the BBC's political correspondent Ione Wells. By "worrying Conservatives afraid of losing their seats", Reform UK will now be able to "influence Conservative policy" without even holding any seats.

Farage has never won a parliamentary seat despite trying seven times, but Clacton is the "perfect place" for him to stand, said The Independent. The Essex seaside town was the constituency of the only UKIP MP ever to make it to the House of Commons, Douglas Carswell, who held the seat until 2017.

The town's current Tory MP, former sitcom actor Giles Watling, was elected for the second time in 2019 with a comfortable 24,000 majority that now looks anything but safe. Or, as Farage's campaign manager, Peter Harris, put it: "Giles Watling starred in 'Bread', but now he is toast."

Regardless of whether the eighth time will prove to be the lucky one for Farage's parliamentary ambitions, his dramatic re-entry into British politics is "a moment that will haunt Rishi Sunak for four more weeks", said Peck, "and after that, one suspects, the rest of his life".

When the exit poll drops on general election night, Dominic Cummings wants to spring back to the centre of British politics at the head of a new political party.

Back in August, the former Downing Street svengali laid out a plan on his Substack blog describing next steps if Rishi Sunak suffers an election night knockout, including the need to "divert energy and money away from 'how to revive the Tories' to 'how to replace the Tories'" .

He has now revealed that he will do this by launching a new party, currently referred to as The Startup Party, which will be "completely different from the other parties", he told The ipaper.

What's the new party?

First, it's not actually going to be called The Startup Party. Cummings wrote that "a new party is a startup and it’s a good way to think about this project", but The Startup Party "isn’t an actual name, it’s a place holder". There is "plenty of time for horrific arguments about names if we make this real!", he added.

In his Substack post, he said he wanted a new party focused on cutting immigration, closing tax loopholes for "the 1 percent", investing in public services and dramatically reforming the civil service.

It will be "ruthlessly focused on the voters not on Westminster and the old media", he told the ipaper, and "friendly towards all the amazing talent in the country, people who build things in [the] private and public sector".

Cummings wants the party to be filled with entrepreneurs, NHS workers and military veterans, but "he has not released any details about important factors such as its funding, membership and governance", said the outlet.

Although he believes that if Nigel Farage returns to frontline politics the Tories "could easily be driven down to double digit seats", making challenger movements like the Startup Party e a "very mainstream idea", Farage himself would not be welcome in Cummings' party because he is "basically the same as the MPs".

New parties generally fare better in nations with proportional representation, but Cummings insists his imagined party can be electorally successful despite the first-past-the-post system because history shows that big changes that "reshape states" can follow wars and pandemics.

What do commentators say?

Cummings "seems to believe that the start up party he envisages will magically arise like a phoenix from the ashes of the old Westminster parties", wrote Nigel Jones in The Spectator, but he forgets that "even with Farage's dynamic presence" it took Ukip "more than twenty years of patient work before it harvested enough support" to become an "existential threat" to the Tories.

Although "everything militates against the idea" of him succeeding, "right now there's a gap in the market", wrote Melanie McDonagh in the Evening Standard, so "just because it’s Dom, it doesn't mean it's wrong".

Although Cummings "may be too tarnished to upturn British politics again" as a public figure, wrote Will Lloyd for The Times, he "may also be the prophet who seeds these ideas among British conservatives", so his detractors "would be unwise to laugh too much" .

It's "hard to avoid the conclusion" that political success "isn't even his ambition", wrote Tom Harris in The Telegraph. So "if his ambition stretches, for now", no further than "contributing to the sense" that Sunak's government is "on its last legs", then "he can consider his latest intervention a success".

Complaints about debanking have soared as worried customers turn to the industry watchdog for help.

Cases referred to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) rose by 44%, the Commons' Treasury committee was told, with 3,858 new complaints about closed accounts received in the 12 months to the end of March.

The prevalence of debanking, where customers – in both a personal and business capacity – have their accounts closed, has led to "wider concerns" about how and when banks can "deny basic services to customers", said The Times. 

The rise in complaints has once again drawn attention to a "hot political topic" recently highlighted by Nigel Farage. The former Brexit Party leader launched a "furious public response" to the closing of his accounts at private bank Coutts last year, after his political views were deemed a factor in the bank's decision, said Bloomberg. 

Why are people debanked?  

There is a "long list" of circumstances where a bank may choose to close down a person's account. These can range from "instances or suspicions of fraud and money laundering" to an individual using their account to move cryptocurrency, which could "raise red flags" as the currency is unregulated, said The Telegraph.

However, there are also "random and confusing" reasons a bank could close your account; for example, if your account is "barely used". 

Banks are also said to be "keeping an eye on so-called politically exposed people", whose public views come under scrutiny, the paper added. Financial institutions must "apply enhanced due diligence" to politically affiliated customers, due to concerns about "money laundering or accepting cash from illegal sources".

However, MPs have warned that some people are being "frozen out of the financial system" by banks and other providers due to "opinions or lifestyle or because of cost issues", rather than worries about potential financial crime, The Times said.

What to do if you've been debanked

With "thousands of everyday people" having their bank accounts closed each day, it is important to pay attention to what could happen next, said The Telegraph.

The matter can "cause confusion and financial problems" for those affected, "especially when they believe they haven't done anything wrong". 

Indeed, the consequences for those who have been debanked can be wide-ranging. The measure "cuts off access to essential financial utilities that most law-abiding citizens and companies take for granted", said law firm Bindmans. This can include  a person being unable to receive income, or struggling to process payments themselves. 

If you lose access to your bank account, customers should contact their "bank's customer service team as soon as possible" to see if the matter can be resolved, said Interpolitan Money. If this fails, complaining to the Financial Ombudsman Service is the next best course of action.

What happens next?

Debanking may not be a huge risk to everyone. In fact, "tougher rules" are being brought in to "stamp out debanking" and protect both banks and customers, the government website confirmed in October 2023.

New legislation set to be placed before parliament will require banks to "give people 90 days' notice that their account will be shut – up from two months", said The Telegraph. In the vast majority of cases, the bank will also be required to tell their customer why the account is being closed "unless they are not legally allowed to". 

These new rules – the Payment Services (Contract Terminations Amendment) Regulations 2024 – are expected to be approved by parliament before the summer and come into force "as soon as practicable thereafter".