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Fantasy football is good for you – and your kids
It’s 3.19 am and my brain cells are ricocheting. Nothing to do with the usual sleep-wreckers of money, sex or work but this: how to fit Antoine Semenyo, Bruno Fernandes and Morgan Rogers into my Fantasy Premier League (FPL) team before the season starts on 22 August, without exceeding my budget?
It would be nice to live in a world where FPL doesn’t stop my son calling his team “Saka my Balls FC”
4.24 am: I pore over dozens of players’ stats and watch several FPL influencer videos on YouTube, then try various permutations.
5.26 am: I crack it. I pack my defence with cheap workhorses from lesser teams like Hull, Ipswich and Coventry and can now fit in all Three Midfield Musketeers.
If you don’t know what I’m on about you are probably in the minority. There are now more three million FPL managers in the UK – an estimated 4.3 per cent of the population – and if those three million are anything like me they will probably have mentioned it to the remaining 95.7 per cent of you. Or, in extremis, rendered you briefly catatonic. (“You won’t BELIEVE what happened with my Fantasy team the other day…)
A basic summary: every FPL manager picks a squad of 15, worth a maximum of £100 million. A star like Semenyo costs £8.5 million; a journeyman from Hull, £4 million. You win points when your players score, assist, keep clean sheets or contribute defensively. And you can change one player a week.
It’s like Tolkien’s ring: it gradually takes you over, then eventually devours you. But some devotees, perhaps understandably, resent this.
In The Spectator last year, Angus Colwell bemoaned the fact “every moment of football becomes consequential”. He meant you end up watching EVERYTHING – even Hull v Coventry on a Tuesday night – when you could be reading, watching a film or doing something useful, because three of your FPL team are involved.
Typically, your train of thought will go something like this: “Eight minutes of injury time already blow the whistle ref if it stays 0-0 I will get 18 points from my three defenders what with each getting six points for keeping a clean sheet I am going to go from 34th to 28th in my league OH NO!!! FUCK!!! Coventry have scored NO WAY WAS THAT A GOAL I now have just the 12 points still never mind 12 is good OH NO NOW HULL HAVE SCORED!!! WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT now I have only six points, why didn’t I pick Leif Davis of Ipswich his game just finished he got 12 points own that’s twice as many as my three defenders combined and I could have played him!! He is in my squad!! But I left him on the bench! Why didn’t I play him!!??”
Sorry Angus, but this all-pervasive upsurge in interest is what does it for me. Life is an endless quest for meaning and FPL provides some of it.
It makes what was previously meaningless, meaningful. Every second matters. It’s an all-consuming distraction from death and boredom.
And balm for the uber competitive and easily addicted. Once you’ve had a dopamine surge from an unexpected 20-point haul by an unfancied Fulham midfielder, who you picked last minute on a whim, you desperately want more.
It’s also a force for good. It’s improved my relationship with my occasionally challenging 15-year-old and given us something to bond over. He was on holiday in France last week and we posted screenshots of our FPL teams to each other, triggering many enjoyable discussions.
We have further bonded over the so-called “Scunthorpe Problem”: that is, trying to outwit the FPL algorithm which weeds out allegedly offensive team names. Sometimes mistakenly, simply because of letters contained therein. “Mikel’s Artesanal”, an ostensible homage to the Arsenal manager, fell prey to this.
As a result – Free Speech Union take note – ludicrous red pencil decisions abound. Why ban “Sunderland COVID-19”? Or “The Mongooses”? Or ”Filthy Richy”?
I can understand, but not approve of, nixing “For Fuchs Sake” (named after former Leicester defender Christian Fuchs) or “Fred West Ham” or “Adam Johnson’s under 11s” (The former England striker was jailed for sexual activity with a minor).
But it would be nice to live in a world where FPL doesn’t stop my son calling his team “Saka my Balls FC”, in (part) tribute to the Arsenal winger. Ditto “Aaron One Ball Sack FC”, in honour of former Manchester United defender Aaron Wan-Bissaka.
“Notah Begay 111”, named after the American golfer, got biffed – it’s assumed – for containing “not be gay”, which were considered homophobic. But was it a cheeky attempt to get one over the censors, or a genuine tribute to said golfer? Probably the former. But even then, so what? Who would have been offended?
Congratulations, though, to the lawyer in my league this season who got “Palmer You Off” over the line.
For young people especially, FPL is a great way to develop mathematical, analytical and strategic skills. Just ask chess legend Magnus Carlsen. In 2019, he reached #1 in the global FPL rankings, out of seven million players, thanks to a mixture of intense preparation, data analysis and gut feeling. Three things any kid needs to succeed.
And – I hope my son is reading – it’s 100 times better than watching endless brain rotting TikTok videos.
Rewarding then, and in more ways than one: although there are no cash prizes in the pure form of the game, there are hundreds of thousands of leagues around the world, some of which pay the winner more than $1 million (£740,000).
My league pays a more modest £200 to the winner. Last season, I came sixth out of 98 but very much hope to do better this time. Indeed, I think of little else.
Dario Amodei’s wife emailed Epstein for sex blog seed round
How do you conceal yourself from the all-seeing-eye of the internet? Being married to the founder of an AI giant helps, apparently. A Wall Street Journal article this week delves into Cami Clark, the wife and key advisor to Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. “There are scant details about Clark online – and efforts have been made to remove references to her,” the Journal reports.
One reason for this could be Clark’s past exploits running Eddice, an online sex magazine-cum-blog – and how at one point she sought investment from, oops, Jeffrey Epstein.
Though it’s been scrubbed from the web, archived versions of the site – tagline “intellectually promiscuous” – reveal that it offered posts on “practical wisdom for sex,” Tavi Gevinson, “morning wood,” Grimes, “the power of orgasm” and several on the British TV show Skins. Eddice looks sort of like a libidinous version of Paper magazine. It’s not Cockburn’s thing – he prefers those grubby Victorian postcards.
The most prescient post on the site? “10 LESSONS IN ONLINE VIDEO.” What did she know?!
The Epstein Files show that Clark sought funding for Eddice to produce a series of pornographic films. “We have the free luxury porn company. Does that ring a bell?” Clark said in a 2012 email reintroducing herself to Epstein. “Yes, a loud gong,” the ephebophile replied. “Haha, I was going to say, you would be the first person that didn’t remember us,” said Clark. Haha indeed!
Epstein ultimately declined the opportunity to invest. “Can’t do sex TV,” he wrote, wistfully Cockburn assumes.
Consider for a moment, the possibility that the robots deserve to live more than we do.
On our radar
HAVING A BALL? The Trump administration is appealing to the Supreme Court for the chance to allow the construction of the White House ballroom to continue.
VANDAL CHARGED Melissa L. Farris faces two felony charges for vandalizing the World War Two memorial on the National Mall. Soap mixture was poured in the fountain and graffiti was sprayed on the monument yesterday afternoon.
MISSIONARY POSITION Kevin Rideout, an American missionary, has been freed after nine months in captivity in Niger. “Kevin, the United States of America looks forward to welcoming you HOME,” wrote President Trump on Truth Social. “Glad to have helped!”
What’s in a name?
The board of the John F. Kennedy Center decided to carve “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump” into the side of the building yesterday, as a solution to the federal court’s decision to remove his name in June.
Cockburn hates to sound too woke to tango, but the confines of reason require him to concede that this a stretch on multiple levels.
First, the ruling was a provision in the federal law. It said “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas” of the Kennedy Center. How this is not “in the nature of memorials” or considered a plaque of some kind should be beyond anyone with eyes – even Cockburn, who completely understands the human need for undue recognition.
Second, to say that the center (which is still closed) has been restored and renovated (artwork has been reportedly destroyed and misplaced, the management structure has deteriorated significantly since Trump took office, and several prominent artists have boycotted playing the center) sounds like a fairytale meant to teach children a lesson about politics. Only the lesson is unclear; the words are meant to refer to a real institution, and the politics are increasingly childish.
Take it or Leavitt
The news of Karoline Leavitt’s imminent departure as White House press secretary sent shockwaves through Washington on Wednesday. Leavitt will leave at the end of the month, shortly after turning 29 (August 24, mark your calendars!) – and there has been frenzied speculation about how she will be replaced. The Washington Examiner’s Rob Crilly writes that President Trump is “planning to retool his media operation, with a heavier focus on surrogates hammering his message on television, while he continues to talk to journalists whenever he can.”
Despite that, there are dozens of suggestions for who could fill Leavitt’s nude heels. The New York Post is alone in placing Breitbart’s Matt Boyle at the top of the pile, alongside Alina Habba. The more esoteric outside bets include Kari Lake (USA Today), Trump’s nominee for Ambassador to Jamaica, and Laura Loomer (Times of London). It would be compelling viewing.
Cockburn thinks it likeliest that if Trump does pick a replacement press secretary in the near future, it’ll be a telegenic woman who regularly wows him on cable news. Expect those in the running to be jockeying for Fox News and Newsmax bookings in the days to come…
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Mano a Marco
Ben Shapiro outlined why he believes Marco Rubio shouldn’t run for president in 2028. On Wednesday, Shapiro explained to Patrick Bet-David that Rubio running against Vance could end his political career, and it all depends on whether Vance would include him on the ticket. Shapiro thinks Rubio is a chicken and will choose to sit it out.
However, this week Marco and his wife went on Katie Miller’s para-government podcast. It was the most Jeanette has done with “the media” in almost a decade. They were good for television – considerably less awkward than J.D. and Usha’s turn on Miller’s show earlier in the year.
Rubio talked about how he could never lug a “cooler full of sauerkraut” around the world, like RFK Jr. He also outed Pete Hegseth as a cat person. His wife teased him for eating Pop Tarts and making them get to the airport three hours early. Someone has to keep their ducks in a row.
Subscribe to Cockburn’s Diary on Substack to get it in your inbox on Fridays – before anyone else.
The wildfires phone notification was hysterical
It’s reassuring to know the government has the ability to live-tweet the slow decline of Britain. We won’t go out with a whimper: we’ll crash out with a screaming phone alert.
If you’re reading from abroad, at 7 this evening, an emergency alert was sent out to the phones of everyone in England and Wales. I was on the tube, and jumped out of my seat as a horrific honk preceded the following:
You can just imagine the glee on the face of the Cabinet Office halfwit who got to press the big red button. It makes you feel sick.
Something has gone deeply wrong if we think sending an emergency message to the nation to tell them not to have a petrol-fuelled BBQ on a tinderbox field is a measured response.
Most fair-minded people signed up to the alert system in the knowledge, supposedly, that it would be used for genuine world-ending disasters, like, I don’t know, an asteroid? A nuke? Certainly not for this most obvious and patronising of nannying. And the net result? Millions of people could feasibly, and perhaps understandably, disable what could be a lifesaving feature going forward. Congratulations HMG.
Five things we learned from the Clacton by-election
1) Nigel Farage is king of Clacton
The Reform UK leader won the oddest by-election in UK political history. His margin of victory was that usually secured by an Iranian hardliner – 63 per cent of the vote – rather than the full North Korean or Saddam Hussein 99 per cent. Reform will be pretty happy with that as anything over 60 per cent was going to be a very healthy margin of victory.
The turnout also shows this was not a trick of the light. Forty-four per cent is very healthy in a by-election, particularly one which was not a contest, since it can easily fall to 25-30 per cent away from a general election.
Farage’s team is also pleased that his total number of votes, 22,239, was 1,014 more than he secured at the general election in 2024. His majority increased from 8,405 to 12,784. We can safely conclude that the vast majority of the people of Clacton have looked at the furore around Farage’s finances – and the political class dismissing this by-election as a farce – and said to themselves: ‘I don’t care. Nigel is our guy.’
2) A recall vote will fail
No sooner had Farage been crowned victor than the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards announced he was reopening the investigation into whether the Reform leader had broken the rules by failing to declare a £5 million ‘gift’ from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne. Reform insists Farage was not a politician when the money was handed over, though Gabriel Pogrund of the Sunday Times has showed that he was privately plotting a return.
It seems probable that the commissioner finds against Farage. He seems to think so himself, having said he ‘maybe’ neglected to ‘fill in a piece of paper’ about the five big ones. It seems more than possible that Farage will be given a ban of ten days or more from the Commons, the threshold which opens the way for a recall vote. But even then it is not an absolute banker that there would be such a vote – 10,000 signatures are needed to trigger one. I would expect the 9,455 Count Binface voters, plus a few hundred others, to coalesce in order to reach that mark. But given Farage’s dominance, it is hard to see how he loses another by-election.
The Tories would probably be his main opposition. That would likely raise turnout further, towards 60 per cent. However, some left-wing voters would prefer to back Binface than the Conservatives, and even if Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain steals four or five points from Reform, it is hard to see anyone stopping Farage. The trick the left used to drive Boris Johnson from politics seems doomed to fail against the Reform leader.
3) But tactical voting will be a problem for them elsewhere
It is not all good news for Reform. Count Binface is the most successful joke candidate there has ever been in a British by-election, and the only rival to retain their deposit – a first for Binny. The fact that he got 26 per cent of the vote shows that a significant number of Britons are motivated, even in a resolutely Reform heartland, to turn out for ‘anyone but Nigel’ or ‘Stop Reform’.
This is partly a testament to Farage’s success. The prospect of him becoming prime minister is no longer fanciful – and to some a threat that must be prevented. But it is undeniable that the extent of this tactical voting, which we have now seen in a succession of by-elections, is problematic for Reform. In closer contests than Clacton it is going to cost the party a host of seats and makes it materially less likely that Reform can secure either a majority or close enough to one to form a government. Any ruling against Farage by the commissioner could put off more Reform-curious voters. Which may be why…
4) Farage has pivoted to a core vote strategy
Reform’s response to their win, and Farage’s failure to turn up to the count, was instructive of the party’s current approach, which seems to be to appeal to their core vote, rather than attempt to widen support to the magic 35 per cent, which would all but guarantee a Reform majority at the next election. Farage was the first by-election winner not to turn up to the result since IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, who was behind bars at the time. Reform made much of a threat to Farage, which Essex Police then denied, saying the force had not advised anyone to stay away from the count.
The truth is that the police did warn Farage there were plans by his opponents to disrupt the count. But not turning up seems partly a security concern and partly a presentational issue. The man himself said: ‘I’m damned if I’m going to stand on a stage, having won a resounding victory, a ringing endorsement of all that I’ve tried to fight for, and you’ve tried to fight for, and be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies, and I will not sadly be attending the count.’
Farage does have legitimate security concerns. But the issue also allowed Reform to weaponise the issue to bash what they see as hostile broadcasters and print journalists. Suella Braverman told the BBC that the police lie and that she trusted them no more than the national broadcaster. Richard Tice slagged off ‘left-wing journalists’ who fail to believe the scale of the threats to Farage’s life. ‘Lefty journalists still don’t get it,’ he wrote on X. ‘Last week Met Police & Counter Terrorism had to admit they messed up over an alleged firebombing at Nigel’s home last year. Now they’re bleating & questioning the judgment of Nigel’s security team on whether to attend count or not. It’s as though they wanted something bad to happen. Sick.’
Reformers think the recent murder of Ann Widdecombe has made their point for them. However, choosing to have a row rather than turn up, as Margaret Thatcher did at the 1984 Tory conference in Brighton after the IRA had come close to murdering her in her bed, is the actions of someone more comfortable campaigning than someone who wants to project an image of national leadership. That seems to have broadly been Farage’s MO for the past few months.
5) Reform has other problems winning Clacton won’t solve
The move away from sunny Nige, the potential PM, towards angry Nige, bemoaning the wicked media, has been notable. It has begun to cause concern in the Reform ranks, most acutely from within the cadre of ex-Conservatives who thought they were joining a government in waiting rather than a grievance machine.
Zia Yusuf, the party’s home affairs spokesman, has put in place a deportations strategy which many think impractical, and his public utterances have become steadily more outspoken. Even Farage publicly said Yusuf had gone a bit too far when he denounced Ben Wallace, the former Tory defence secretary, who served on the front line in Northern Ireland, as a ‘traitor’. Tim Montgomerie, one of the Tory defectors, took Yusuf to task in public last week. Today, he said Farage had got it wrong.
He wrote: ‘This is a good result for Nigel Farage. Very good actually and he’s been the winsome happy warrior of olde on the sun-soaked streets of Clacton during the campaign. He should be on every TV screen this morning – underlining his win – and with that cheeky, trademark smile on his face… But this recently far too dominant aggrieved tone is still with us. It’s not good. You don’t skip your own victory count without a much better explanation. Anger from politicians can work but only if it’s on behalf of others – not yourself. He’s distracting from his victory. Puzzling.’
All this will convince Yusuf, who hates the Tories with a passion, that Reform were wrong to accept these defectors. But not a few inside the party believe Yusuf’s rhetoric is driving away potential middle-class voters. Yusuf, I’m told, privately dismisses the concerns about tactical voting. But as a former Tory No. 10 adviser told me this morning: ‘If you don’t care about tactical voting then you definitely don’t care about winning.’
As our leader said this week, Reform must decide if they want to form a government, or wish to remain the best protest party in the country. But let’s be clear, if Reform solidifies their vote in the 25-28 per cent range, neither Farage nor his party is going away.
AOC, the radical for normies
According to the prediction betting markets, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now favourite to be the Democratic nominee in 2028. Given that the Democrats are strongly expected to win back the presidency, that suggests the 36-year-old congresswoman from the Bronx has an extremely good chance of being America’s first female Commander-in-Chief.
Indeed, she’s now also neck-and-neck with Marco Rubio in the ‘Presidential Election Winner’ market, on 13 per cent. Vice President J.D. Vance, it should be added, remains the clear leader on 23 per cent. But AOC’s popularity is surging as the Democrats prepare for their big comeback moment as the midterm elections approach.
For many young left-liberals, her online phoniness is in fact an indication of authenticity
AOC hasn’t confirmed that she is running yet, of course, though her non-denials have become considerably less coy. ‘I haven’t ruled out the possibility,’ she told ABC last week. ‘And I’m very humbled by the tremendous amount of support out there.’
The arguments against AOC 2028 are well-rehearsed. A dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), she’s way too far to the left of America’s mainstream. She’s a goofy millennial feminist, riddled with internet-induced narcissism, who overshares and annoys people. This week, for instance, she began a series of selfie-videos ‘documenting’ her egg-freezing process for her 9.7 million followers on Instagram. To most decent people, that’s extremely cringe-inducing.
She’s never been a senator or a governor. And for all her self-confidence and proficiency in issuing progressive soundbites, she can sound foolish – especially when discussing foreign policy. In February, she attended the Munich Security Conference, and was widely mocked for her ‘word salads’ as she participated in various panels. She fumbled a response about the future of Taiwan, and said that Venezuela was south of the equator when it is not. ‘She had no idea what was happening,’ remarked President Trump, gleefully.
But sounding stupid on the world stage never dented Kamala Harris’s ambition, and she too is understood to be preparing another tilt at the presidency in 2028. In fact, AOC’s real opportunity might boil down to the fact that her likely primary opponents are older and even more flawed than she is. Gavin Newsom, the oily and disaster-prone Governor of California, is now the second favourite behind her to the Democratic nominee.
What AOC has in her favour is what modern politicians crave most of all – a brand. She has international name-recognition and tens of millions of followers across social media. And, at a time when Americans are sick of living under an incompetent gerontocracy, her youth is highly appealing.
For many young left-liberals, her online phoniness is in fact an indication of authenticity. She’s still good-looking, too, which is a powerful asset in our hyper-visual age. She is capable, moreover, of shrewdly positioning herself as a sort of bridge between the populist radical left of the Democratic party, with all its organisational muscle, and the more broadly palatable centre.
Though she utters all the correct progressive pieties about the ‘genocide in Gaza,’ Wall Street greed and ‘healthcare for all,’ AOC has been careful to eschew some of the extreme rhetoric of her fellow DSA members. Indeed, in 2024, the DSA withdrew its endorsement of her after she declined to oppose funding for Israel’s Iron Dome, voted in favour of Israel’s right to exist and hosted a panel on anti-Semitism.
She now insists she does oppose US military aid for Israel – though she still does not go far enough in her criticisms of the Jewish state for the more rabid fringes of her movement. This more nuanced position makes her more acceptable to moderates – and a public that is increasingly angry about the Iran war and the influence of Tel Aviv over Washington.
The latest Democratic primaries in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota have shown that, while hardcore DSA messaging still meets fierce resistance among even Democratic voters, a kind of DSA-lite politics – which signals its socialist virtue without ever being too explicit – can win.
And although often teased for pretending to have grown up poorer than she did, AOC does at least have a plausible working-class backstory as a Puerto Rican waitress from the Bronx. She can be a radical for normies, in other words. And, after the brash billionaire Trump, that might be all it takes to reach the White House.
This article originally appeared in Freddy Gray’s Americano newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
Who decides if a word is racist?
I swear Rod Liddle was smiling down on me last week, as I found myself tussling with an editor. I’d written a sentence containing the word “Chinamen.” She wanted me to remove it, because, she said, “Chinaman” is widely acknowledged to be a racial slur.
In my view, words have no single intrinsic meaning. Within limits, they can mean a variety of things, differing according to context – not least the tone of voice in which they’re delivered. Even “Yes” can mean “No,” when said by an Englishman trained in the subtle art of oblique speech.
Some members of historically ‘victimized’ groups are eager to exploit the power that membership confers
Sure, “Chinaman,” given a certain intonation, can be spoken in a deliberately demeaning way – rather as I learned as a youngster in Scotland to use “Sassenach” to refer to the English. Strictly, it just means “Saxon” in the Gaelic and when non-Anglophobic Gaelic-speakers want to refer to the people south of the border, that’s the word they use. But out of an English-speaking Scotsman’s mouth, you can be sure that’s not all it means. Uttered with a certain, semi-spitting vigor, it also means “snobbish, morally degenerate wankers.”
So, yes, I accept that “Chinaman” can be used as a slur and that it has been. But there’s nothing necessarily or intrinsically slurry about it. It’s the verbal equivalent of “Frenchman,” “Dutchman” and “Irishman.” Indeed, in the sentence to which my editor took exception, “Chinamen” appears nine words after “Englishmen.”
So, who declares it generally verboten? According to my editor, nothing less than the Oxford English Dictionary. But then I checked. Although the OED does say, “Frequently disparaging or derogatory (see also John Chinaman n. Johnny Chinaman n.),” it also lists four possible meanings, the first of which is the entirely innocent, “A man who is Chinese by descent, birth, or naturalization.”
Wikipedia, of course, is less nuanced. It simply announces that “Chinaman is an offensive term.” But it also tells us, indicatively, that its usage is “strongly discouraged by Asian-American organizations.”
What that indicates is that the original energy for the policing of language is generated by certain ethnic minority groups in the US. I suspect this is true in general: that the movement for linguistic censorship springs from America, perhaps from certain groups of members of ethnic minorities, often from “decolonizing” academics who presume to represent them.
These are the kinds of people trying to busybody us into abandoning the word “slave” for “enslaved person,” on the entirely spurious ground that the former necessarily dehumanizes, implying that someone is a slave by nature. That this is nonsense we can easily see by observing that, in English, if we want to refer to the idea that someone is a natural slave, we have to qualify “slave” by putting the word “natural” in front of it. No, “slave” is not intrinsically racist.
Frankly, my contextual view of verbal meaning extends even to the n-word. Lest there be any doubt, I object strongly to the racist use of that word to disparage people with non-white skin. Nonetheless, I was appalled years ago, when I read of a woman high up in some British organization – a nursing one, I think – being fired for referring explicitly to the original title of an Agatha Christie novel that contained the word. And I’ve heard of similar cases since. That people should be so punished is stupidly unjust, since using the n-word to refer to what someone else has written in no way endorses the racist disdain usually attached to it.
I say “usually,” because, according to Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction, and the excellent 2002 TV series The Wire, African Americans often use the n-word to refer to each other – but in an ironic, not a racist, manner. So, I think it plausible that a white person could use it in jest when speaking to a very close black friend, without racist contempt being either expressed or perceived. Tarantino thought so, too.
I don’t say all this because I’m keen to revive use of the word. Trust me, I’m not. I say it only because people are being unfairly penalized through a combination of malice, thoughtlessness and fear.
Some members of historically “victimized” groups are eager to exploit the power that membership confers. They’re on the lookout for opportunities to work themselves into a lather of being “offended” and daring others to call them out on it.
But the others don’t dare. Terrified of being called “racist,” they can’t afford the luxury of thought. Instead, jettisoning their critical faculties, they defer to the “offended” party and prove their “anti-racist” identity by punishing the alleged offender. It’s a disgusting dynamic, in which the malicious triumph and the innocent suffer through the cowardly thoughtlessness of those in authority. And the result? The bullies strut around while everyone else walks on eggshells. Fear dominates the field.
All that was at the back of my mind when I chose to make a fuss about my use of “Chinamen.” In the end, my editor was overruled by her boss, who, with some reservations, said I was free to go ahead and use the word if I wanted to. On reflection, however, I satisfied myself that a mellifluent alternative was available. That, together with uneasiness at the thought of making myself look even more cantankerous than usual, by going to war over a word, made me decide to drop the controversial noun.
Rod would have been bolder, of course, and more bloody-minded. And he might have been right. For I’m aware that this is how the authoritarian ideologues carry the day. Someone says something they don’t like. They kick up a fuss, defaming the offender. Conflict-averse onlookers, disturbed out of their quiet lives, view the person upsetting the offended as “contentious” and “divisive.” So, unwilling to suffer further opprobrium, the offender backs down and shuts up. Tongues are tied and the air is chilled. And the illiberal bastards win.
AOC, the radical for normies
According to the prediction betting markets, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now favorite to be the Democratic nominee in 2028. Given that the Democrats are strongly expected to win back the presidency, that suggests the 36-year-old congresswoman from the Bronx has an extremely good chance of being America’s first female Commander-in-Chief.
Indeed, she’s now also neck-and-neck with Marco Rubio in the “Presidential Election Winner” market, on 13 percent. Vice President J.D. Vance, it should be added, remains the clear leader on 23 percent. But AOC’s popularity is surging as the Democrats prepare for their big comeback moment as the midterm elections approach.
For many young left-liberals, her online phoniness is in fact an indication of authenticity
AOC hasn’t confirmed that she is running yet, of course, though her non-denials have become considerably less coy. “I haven’t ruled out the possibility,” she told ABC last week. “And I’m very humbled by the tremendous amount of support out there.”
The arguments against AOC 2028 are well-rehearsed. A dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, she’s way too far to the left of America’s mainstream. She’s a goofy millennial feminist, riddled with internet-induced narcissism, who overshares and annoys people. This week, for instance, she began a series of selfie-videos “documenting” her egg-freezing process for her 9.7 million followers on Instagram. To most decent people, that’s extremely cringe-inducing.
She’s never been a senator or a governor. And for all her self-confidence and proficiency in issuing progressive soundbites, she can sound foolish – especially when discussing foreign policy. In February, she attended the Munich Security Conference, and was widely mocked for her “word salads” as she participated in various panels. She fumbled a response about the future of Taiwan, and said that Venezuela was south of the equator when it is not. “She had no idea what was happening,” remarked President Trump, gleefully.
But sounding stupid on the world stage never dented Kamala Harris’s ambition, and she too is understood to be preparing another tilt at the presidency in 2028. In fact, AOC’s real opportunity might boil down to the fact that her likely primary opponents are older and even more flawed than she is. Gavin Newsom, the oily and disaster-prone Governor of California, is now the second favorite behind her to the Democratic nominee.
What AOC has in her favor is what modern politicians crave most of all – a brand. She has international name-recognition and tens of millions of followers across social media. And, at a time when Americans are sick of living under an incompetent gerontocracy, her youth is highly appealing.
For many young left-liberals, her online phoniness is in fact an indication of authenticity. She’s still good-looking, too, which is a powerful asset in our hyper-visual age. She is capable, moreover, of shrewdly positioning herself as a sort of bridge between the populist radical left of the Democratic party, with all its organizational muscle, and the more broadly palatable center.
Though she utters all the correct progressive pieties about the “genocide in Gaza,” Wall Street greed and “healthcare for all,” AOC has been careful to eschew some of the extreme rhetoric of her fellow DSA members. Indeed, in 2024, the DSA withdrew its endorsement of her after she declined to oppose funding for Israel’s Iron Dome, voted in favor of Israel’s right to exist and hosted a panel on anti-Semitism.
She now insists she does oppose US military aid for Israel – though she still does not go far enough in her criticisms of the Jewish state for the more rabid fringes of her movement. This more nuanced position makes her more acceptable to moderates – and a public that is increasingly angry about the Iran war and the influence of Tel Aviv over Washington.
The latest Democratic primaries in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota have shown that, while hardcore DSA messaging still meets fierce resistance among even Democratic voters, a kind of DSA-lite politics – which signals its socialist virtue without ever being too explicit – can win.
And although often teased for pretending to have grown up poorer than she did, AOC does at least have a plausible working-class backstory as a Puerto Rican waitress from the Bronx. She can be a radical for normies, in other words. And, after the brash billionaire Trump, that might be all it takes to reach the White House.
This article originally appeared in Freddy Gray’s Americano newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
What Clacton taught us about Nigel Farage’s path to power
The Clacton by-election was finally over. Even by the standards of August news stories, it had grown pretty stale pretty quickly. The result was never in doubt, nor were the entrenched responses of the key players. Reform figures took to the airwaves to insist all questions about Nigel Farage’s finances had been answered by the ballot box. Those who opposed him took to the airwaves to insist the opposite was true.
Back at the count, the media were having to make do with increasingly contorted attempts to pretend Binface was amusing
In Clacton itself, Mr Farage was essentially playing a game of cat and mouse with the media circus. They wanted photos of him with the terminally unfunny ‘Count Binface’ and all the other randomers crowded on the stage so that they could mock him on the front pages. He was determined to deny them this and so instead spent the evening at ‘Farage Fest’ a sort of festival in rural Essex at which the faithful were invited to Farage world.
This ‘political festival’ included Farage-branded plastic pint holders, a ‘Farage wheel’ (which ground to a halt with GB News’s Political Correspondent Christopher Hope on board) and the mind-boggling opportunity to ‘have a sleepover with Farage’. It was compared to Glastonbury, but it seemed to be more like a theme park that had been taken over by a personality cult. Peppa Pig World meets Heaven’s Gate. The man himself gave a three-hour long speech in which he ticked all the standard Farage boxes; he railed against the establishment, he told jokes, he made oblique references to being proved right in the future.
Meanwhile, back at the count, the media were having to make do with increasingly contorted attempts to pretend Binface was amusing. Inevitably the BBC led their coverage with the rather bizarre angle that the investigation into Mr Farage’s finances was immediately reopening. Herein lies the problem for those who want to discredit Farage; as their own attempts to do so become more and more ham-fisted, they also end up discrediting themselves.
Yet for all the flummery and scent of silly season, the Clacton affair has crystallised a deeper reality. Mr Farage’s path to victory nationally necessarily has two prongs to it. Firstly, he requires the continued quiet radicalisation of the public by the deceit, incompetence and refusal to listen which is displayed daily by our political class. This he can rely upon, and indeed, if the Clacton fallout shows anything it is that this mix of contempt and condescension is only getting worse.
However, it also requires the second path; that those voters for whom the whiff of spivvery, the soap opera style fallouts and the air of a lack of seriousness about Reform either change their minds or refuse to vote tactically to stop Mr Farage from becoming Prime Minister.
Clacton and its circus seem to have made this second path less likely, even as the first path becomes ever more well-trodden. In short, after Clacton, the gulf between those who love Mr Farage and those who hate him has never seemed wider.
Illegal migrants in Britain ‘need’ brothels, says Tory grandee
Oh dear. Just as the Tories were trying oh so hard to win back the right by presenting themselves as a serious party, Edwina Currie opened her mouth. The veteran Conservative was opining on the impending dumping of more than 1,000 illegal migrants in Piddington, Oxfordshire, when she dropped an absolute clanger. She told Times Radio:
The obvious thing that 1,200 young men are going to need in the middle of a village like little Piddington is a brothel – I don’t think they’re going to provide that.
The comments sparked fury on social media, with Zia Yusuf branding them particularly ‘sick’. The Reform home affairs spokesman fumed: ‘This former Tory Minister joking about brothels being made available to the military aged men they allowed to break into Britain illegally. Just sick. Never forget what the Tories did to this country.’
Journalist Allison Pearson suggested Currie had in fact ‘owned up here to the ugly and dangerous truth’ ignored by successive governments. She wrote: ‘If you allow tens of thousands of young men to illegally enter your country they will want sex. How are they going to get it? Check the rape statistics.’
Currie later clarified that her remarks had always been intended as ‘tongue-in-cheek’, but said she was glad they had ‘managed to annoy both Reform and some radial feminists’. She added: ‘I’m making a point which is that if we keep holding people here in idleness for a very long period of time then we are going to have problems wherever we put them. That is so not the answer. The answer is make sure people don’t arrive in the first place.’
A serious point, perhaps – but for a Tory party attempting to seduce the right, Currie’s intervention was hardly a happy ending.
Can Mike Ashley save Harvey Nichols?
It would be easy to make fun of the takeover of Harvey Nichols by the Sports Direct founder, Mike Ashley, this week. And yet, there is also an element of truth in it. Ashley is, without question, a very smart retailer. But he is more Newcastle than Knightsbridge – and it will be very hard to restore Harvey Nichols to its former glory.
It is a mark of how much London’s economy has declined over the last few years that there was so little interest in buying Harvey Nichols. Once Princess Diana’s favourite store, it was at one time one of the most glamorous fashion retailers in the world.
Its owner, the Hong Kong tycoon Sir Dickson Poon, had, however, tired of its recent losses. The Gulf wealth funds, tech billionaires, and luxury conglomerates like LVMH – who once might have been expected to buy the department store – all turned away. In the end, Ashley was the only real bidder. With a Labour government determined to drive wealth out of the country with extra taxes, sadly it seems no one is interested in the London market anymore.
The problem will be working out how to make the business hum again
In fairness, Ashley is a brilliant businessman. He built Sports Direct up from nothing into one of the largest chains in the country. From that base, he has taken over a whole string of retailers, including the upmarket fashion chain Flannels, the tailor Gieves & Hawkes, and the luxury lingerie firm Agent Provocateur, as well as Jack Wills and House of Fraser. According to Michael Murray, Frasers’ chief executive and Ashley’s son-in-law, Harvey Nicks – as it is always known – is a ‘British institution with significant potential’ and yet one where ‘clear meaningful change is needed’.
The problem will be working out how to make the business hum again. It is, after all, not hard to figure out why the department store has fallen so far from its glamorous heyday. The crackdown on non-doms has meant that the world’s wealthy no longer make London their home. The City is no longer paying out the huge bonuses that were often spent on its clothes and in its restaurants. The threat to impose VAT on tourists, making London one of the few major European cities to tax foreign visitors, means Paris or Milan are more attractive cities for the world’s high-rollers to stock up on designer trinkets. Add it all up, and one point is surely clear: the economy in which Harvey Nicks flourished has vanished.
Ashley may take Harvey Nichols into the mainstream, perhaps competing with its rival at the other end of Sloane Street, Peter Jones. Or he could franchise out its space to anyone who wants it. After all, there will always be someone who wants to sell Paddington Bears to the passing tourists. But it is going to be very tough. Does Ashley have any feel for the Knightsbridge market? He might keep it alive – but will he sacrifice what made it special?
America gets the AI boom. Europe gets the layoffs
The management consulting giant Accenture has laid off 11,000 people. The reason? It turns out that a smart chatbot can churn out meaningless waffle about “boiling the ocean” just as well as a recently hired MBA. Oracle has cut more than 20,000 jobs, as it discovered that Claude or ChatGPT could code as effectively as the quiet guy with glasses, while the legal giant Baker McKenzie is laying off as many as 1,000 people after figuring out that a machine could churn out a letter about “the aforementioned party of interest” as effectively as any of their junior lawyers.
America is getting both sides of a process of ‘creative destruction’
Almost every day, another round of white collar professionals falls victim to the AI-driven jobs apocalypse. And yet, while it is real enough, there is a twist that not many people have yet noticed. America will survive it far better than its rivals, while Europe will be the real loser.
There is already a backlash against the number of jobs lost to AI. Only this week protestors stormed the offices of the ChatGPT lobbyists in Washington demanding that they “stop stealing our future.” And yet, it is easy to miss one simple point. It is impacting different continents in different ways. Torsten Slok, the chief economist at the investment giant Apollo, has started tracking the divergence between the French and American labour markets.
The differences are striking. France’s unemployment rate climbed to 8.3 percent in the second quarter of 2026, the highest level since the pandemic, and crucially youth unemployment more than over 21 percent. Over a single year, despite President Macron’s promises to get the French working again, the total number of unemployed French workers has risen by more than 260,000 over the past year. Sure, with its tough labour laws (for employers that is), France may be an outlier. But unemployment is rising in Britain as well, and in Germany, where it rose to 6.4 percent in July and is close to punching through the politically sensitive three million barriers. Right across the continent’s major economies, jobs are scarce.
It is a very different story on the other side of the Atlantic. Sure, some of the recent job creation numbers have been a little disappointing, and the participation rate is sliding as workers drop out of the market. But an AI apocalypse? Not really. The unemployment rate stands at just 4.1 percent, effectively half the French rate, while 103,000 jobs were created in May and June, more than outpacing a slight fall in July. Add in that the United States is also coping with the imposition of tariffs, with all the disruption to supply chains that involves, and a sharp drop in immigration, which creates shortages of workers across a range of industries, and employment is holding up pretty well.
What’s going on? After all, AI should be impacting all the major economies in the same way. You can replace your accounts clerk with Claude just as easily in Birmingham, England, as you can in Birmingham, Alabama, and the paralegal can be switched for Gemini as simply in the old Orleans as in the new one. The roll out of smart chatbots from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google is a global phenomenon, and the rate of adoption by companies, and indeed the public sector, is roughly the same everywhere. It should be hitting everyone equally.
Here’s the explanation. Robots are coming for all our jobs. The labour market in Europe and America are being hit in exactly the same way. The difference is that in America there is also an offsetting boom. In the US, while AI is destroying some jobs, it is also creating lots of them. The American AI giants are on track to spend somewhere between $660 billion and $725 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone, roughly double what they spent in 2025. It is one of the largest ever periods of capital expenditure, perhaps comparable only to the great railway boom of the 19th century. The difference is that while rail building was global, AI is overwhelmingly built on American soil. All that spending ripples out into the wider economy. Indeed, a Brooking Institute report found that in areas where data hubs were being built local employment in roles such as information processing rose by 56 percent. It turns out you can’t spend $700 billion a year without creating some jobs, no matter how high-tech you are.
By contrast, Europe has nothing like the same boom. Capital spending in the EU on AI is estimated at just $46 billion this year, with the Commission in Brussels planning another $10 billion of public money. That is about 8 percent of American spending. Put simply, Europe’s labour markets are taking all of the pain of the AI roll-out, but not feeling any of the gain. Jobs are being wiped out at the same rate, but no new ones are being created.
It is not hard to understand why. The EU’s AI Act has made it virtually impossible for start-ups to try out new technologies. The region’s green policies mean industrial electricity is four times the American price in Britain and Germany, and twice in France. Planning laws make it very difficult to get permission for new data hubs, while employment rules make it prohibitively expensive to hire new people, or fire the ones you no longer need. Indeed, in France or Spain paralegals and consultants will still be sitting idly at their desk long after a chatbot has taken over all their actual work. Add it all together, and the AI boom is simply not happening.
To adopt a phrase from Joseph Schumpeter, America is getting both sides of a process of “creative destruction,” but Europe is only getting one half, and unfortunately it is the “destruction” bit of the formula. America is not escaping the jobs apocalypse. But it is the one major economy in the world that will create as many jobs as it loses, and perhaps creating even more, and many of those jobs will be more productive and better paid. The gulf between American and European economic performance has been widening for the past 20 years. But right now, AI is accelerating that, and it is starting to look as if it will be impossible for Europe to ever catch up.
One hot summer won’t silence us climate change sceptics
Hugo Rifkind – formerly of this parish, now a columnist in the Times – has written a Jeremiad blaming climate sceptics for this jolly hot summer we’re having. He admits that it is ‘overkill’ to make such a silly claim. But then goes on to make it anyway by accusing sceptics of helping to create a ‘political landscape in which inaction became a powerful rallying cry for much of the right’.
And what’s even worse, fumes our Hugo, they haven’t even got the decency to apologise for the damage done by their ‘blithe and ill-faith narratives’. Instead of wailing ‘mea culpa’ at Right-All-Along Rifkind as he crunches his sweaty way across the ‘Velcro-like grass’ in Hyde Park, these slippery sceptics have just slunk away and pretended it never happened.
The increase in global mean temperature over the last 150 years has been actually pretty modest
Not a word of this is true, though. And I should know because I’m one of the sceptics Rifkind singles out for blame, when he refers sneerily to a Spectator cover story I wrote in 2009 headlined ‘Relax: Global Warming Is All A Myth’. ‘Hmm. Was it?’ asks Rifkind, rhetorically. Yes, it was, Hugo. And it still very much is.
That’s why, far from crawling under a rock out of embarrassment for the role my scientific ignorance played in our boiling world’s imminent destruction, I have of late been doubling down on my claims.
In 2012, I published a book, Watermelons, noting that there was no credible evidence whatsoever for so-called ‘catastrophic anthropogenic global warming’. In the updated 2025 version, I add that it was a scam all along – and that the people behind it always knew it was a scam, because it was never about saving the planet but about money, power and Malthusian ideology.
One of the things Rifkind would have learned if he’d read the original book properly instead of just cherry-picking passages to scoff at is that weather is not the same as climate. A boiling summer in Europe is no more indicative of global warming than a freezing North American winter is of global cooling. Climate change is about worldwide trends over a prolonged period, not about localised extreme weather events which, by definition, are happening all the time all over the place and mean very little.
So even if – as the BBC keeps insisting – this really is the hottest summer in Britain ever, it wouldn’t alter the fact that the increase in global mean temperature over the past 150 years has actually been pretty modest: a rise of perhaps one degree centigrade or so. This is probably less warming than you experience every day between the time you get out of bed and the moment you have your mid-morning coffee. A crisis worth bombing the economy to the dark ages for, would you say?
Most people, when presented with an honest cost-benefit analysis, would say ‘no’. We like our cars, our foreign holidays and not being so fuel poor that we can’t afford to heat our homes in winter. But these and many other basic freedoms have become increasingly under threat thanks to policies like net zero, which characters such as Ed Miliband insist are vital if we are to avert climate catastrophe.
Where, though, is the proof that these economically destructive taxes and regulations are needed? And where is the evidence that quixotically attempting to reduce levels of the beneficial trace gas CO2 – currently busy greening the Sahel region, and regularly pumped into commercial greenhouses to increase productivity – will make any meaningful difference, especially when much bigger CO2 producers like China are ploughing on regardless?
These are questions that the vested interests pushing these policies never feel comfortable addressing because the answer in both cases is ‘there isn’t any’. That’s why so many of the arguments you hear from climate evangelists – Rifkind’s latest diatribe being a case in point – are aimed at the emotions rather than the intellect. The scientific and economic arguments just don’t stack up so they have to engage in rhetorical trickery.
This is one of the things that so shocked me when I was researching Watermelons: the extent to which the climate change industry depends on lies, bullying, cheating, tortured data, manufactured evidence and relentless propaganda. Some of this emerged in the Climategate email leak, which Rifkind misrepresents as climate scientists using ‘casual language about data, which they nonetheless used flawlessly’.
Nope, it showed the scientists at the very heart of the ‘climate consensus’ – the top experts cited in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports used by world leaders to justify extreme green policies – behaving not remotely like honest scientists but like paid political activists. They weren’t looking for the truth, which had already been decided. Their true function was policy-driven evidence-making on behalf of the powerful global elites, who stand, in various ways, to benefit from this utterly fake but profitable crisis.
Nigel Farage has been strengthened
Nigel Farage has been reelected as the Member of Parliament for Clacton. He resigned last month to force a contest in his seaside constituency following a series of news stories about his financial affairs. The central claim is that before becoming an MP in 2024, Farge received £5 million from a crypto investor and failed to declare it to the parliamentary authorities once he was elected.
The people who have been most embarrassed by this bizarre by-election are the liberal left
The Reform UK leader decided it was better to go to the voters than wait for some anonymous parliamentary inquiry to determine whether he had breached the rules. None of the main political parties ran a candidate against him, attempting to portray his by-election as a vanity project. Farage’s main opponent in the Clacton by-election was therefore a comedian who wears a bin on his head and calls himself Count Binface.
There are two words British readers will see endlessly today: “hollow victory.” The official narrative is that by doing battle with a bin, Farage has achieved nothing but embarrassed himself. He refused to attend the vote count, citing security concerns. That is taken as further evidence of his contempt for the voters.
This is what we are being told by many political commentators, but is it true? I would say the people who have been most embarrassed by this bizarre by-election are the liberal left. They perpetrated this fantasy that Count Binface would win and put an end to Farage’s political career. By suggesting that would happen, they have exposed the narrowness of their world.
In their minds, most of the country, deep inside, possesses the values of North London liberals; it is just that all those dim old people who live by the seaside get easily led along by populists. Now that Farage has been exposed as being in the pocket of a dodgy crypto millionaire and the like, even they must realize where their interests lie and should unite behind a protest candidate.
Except that they didn’t. The not-Farage candidate – which is what Count Binface was – failed miserably. His 27 percent of the vote will go down on the record as the highest ever received by a joke candidate, but in this instance he wasn’t a joke candidate. He became the deadly serious candidate of “decency” put up against the “far right.” And he fell flat on his face. Farage, meanwhile, showed that his personal support is every bit as strong as it was before, by winning more votes than he did in the 2024 general election in spite of the turnout collapsing.
The left-wing Liberal Democrats were first out of the blocks this morning demanding that the House of Commons investigation into Farage’s finances continue, and so presumably it will. But it will be much harder now for the Lib Dems or anyone else to claim that Farage’s donations put him beyond the political pale. The people of Clacton have re-elected him in spite of knowing all about them. If Farage gets skewered by some parliamentary rule, it will look all the more like the establishment plot that he asserts it is. A similar psychology emerged among Trump voters in 2024. The more the establishment tried to prosecute Trump, bringing endless lawsuits and indictments, the more voters felt it was an attempt to disenfranchise them.
It is possible to argue, of course, that the people of Clacton are not the same thing as the people of Britain, and that their views on the financial probity of public figures differs from those of the country as a whole. But that argument will only serve to expose another political figure who has taken personal approval from one constituency as a proxy for support from the country as a whole: Britain’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. He has not been elected by the country. Instead, he forced a by-election in the northern constituency of Makerfield, became an MP and convinced enough of his colleagues to depose Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister will be reminded endlessly of this fact, especially when he tries to diverge from Starmer’s 2024 manifesto, on which the country did vote.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch comes out a loser from Clacton, too. She gains the award for the most absurd thing said during the by-election campaign. The people of Clacton, she said a week ago, deserve better than Farage. In which case, why did she decline to put up a candidate?
On the face of it, Clacton tells us nothing about the state of political play in Britain at the moment, because it wasn’t a proper contest. But I would be wary of anyone claiming that Farage has been weakened by it. Look at this week’s polls, showing Labour only just about notching up a national lead over Reform in spite of Burnham’s honeymoon. They also show the Conservatives failing to make any capital from Farage’s personal troubles. If there is a winner from Clacton, it is pretty clearly Reform UK and its leader.
Watch: Tice flounders over Farage’s Clacton no-show
Richard Tice and Nick Ferrari were at loggerheads on LBC this morning over Nigel Farage’s no-show at the Clacton count. The Reform leader stayed away as the returning officer declared his victory, citing security concerns. According to the party, Farage faced ‘an organised campaign to disrupt and degrade the result’. The man himself declared earlier this morning: ‘I’m damned if I’m going to stand on a stage, having won a resounding victory … and be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies’. Ferrari, for his part, was not convinced that amounted to a security threat.
Essex Police contacted Farage’s office yesterday about a threat, but the force insisted it never advised him not to attend the count. Interviewing Tice, the LBC host remarked: ‘We heard Mr Farage say he would not be attending because he did not want to be demeaned and humiliated. So that’s nothing to do with his safety that’s he doesn’t want to stand next to someone dressed as a dustbin.’
The Reform deputy leader was not best pleased with this line of questioning. He blasted: ‘I trust the judgement of Nigel’s security team above everybody else. Let’s trust Nigel’s security team to keep him safe, secure and alive’. But when Ferrari pressed him again on why Farage had mentioned the prospect of being humiliated on stage, Tice could only reply: ‘I don’t know.’
Oh dear. Farage may have for very understandable security reasons refused to share a stage with a bin, but it was Tice’s explanation that ended up looking like rubbish.
The two lessons from Farage’s Clacton win
The result in Clacton is more evidence for my thesis that voters are so entrenched in their attitudes towards Nigel Farage that his chances of reaching No. 10 are slim. Reform is spinning the 17 per cent jump in its leader’s vote share as a triumph – and it might have been if it weren’t for the circumstances. This is a man we’re told wants to be the next prime minister, but just look at that result for Count Binface, the alleged comedy candidate.
A vote share of 27 per cent for an establishment progressive in Clacton of all places is a pretty significant data point. It’s no good blaming the other parties for dingying the contest or the media for being out to get Farage. By sticking a garbage can on his head, Jonathan David Harvey has demonstrated that one in every four locals who could be bothered to turn out at a by-election, and a thoroughly unnecessary by-election at that, were sufficiently hostile to Farage to vote for a novelty candidate.
Those who would have us believe this is irrelevant because, come the general election, the anti-Farage vote will be split between the usual parties and the electorate will be in a serious mood more befitting a battle for the country’s future, must contend with two lessons last night has taught. Reform’s opponents have learned that Farage is vulnerable to a single opponent, and if Count Binface is good for 27 per cent, what might a straight-faced anti-Farage candidate manage? Having stood aside this time for an ‘independent space warrior’, there is no reason why the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats shouldn’t do the same next time, perhaps tacitly throwing their support behind a Martin Bell-style integrity-in-politics candidate.
The voters of Clacton have learned what gets their MP’s attention
Meanwhile, the voters of Clacton have learned what gets their MP’s attention. Farage won’t be pulling this stunt again any time soon. My supposition is not necessarily that a serious, non-partisan independent could topple Farage at a general election, but that such a candidate would pose enough of a threat to tie Reform’s leader down in his own constituency, hampering his effectiveness as a national leader on the campaign trail. The mainstream media would be only too happy to give a substantive anti-Farage figure the same saintly treatment it gave Bell in 1997.
Nigel Farage returns to parliament to face his standards probes but also opponents who now know he is more vulnerable in Clacton than they – or he – previously realised.
Clacton shows how unserious Reform UK still is
First it was Nigel versus the establishment. Now it’s Nigel versus the police (although perhaps they’re part of the same establishment lambasted by Farage throughout the Clacton by-election – indeed, throughout his political career). Did Essex police warn Farage not to attend the Clacton count? Did they say only that they thought there would be disruption? Does anyone actually care?
Clacton was, as it always would be, a clear win for Farage. But when a man wearing a large bin on his head can win 27 per cent of the vote against the leader of the party topping the polls, one has to ask: who was the real satire candidate? I’d say it was, rather, the supposed man of the people who called a by-election to deflect from coverage of the £5 million he had been gifted. Surely the really satirical point about Clacton is that its MP called a by-election so he could then claim that he could win a by-election in his own constituency.
The Clacton by-election has been an almost entirely pointless and unnecessary affair. It’s cost the people of Clacton around £250,000. But it has had one tangential effect: it has once again drawn attention to the Farage paradox. The former leader of UKIP, the Brexit party and now Reform UK is one of the most consequential political figures of recent decades. In fact, forget that ‘one of’…
Farage and Reform are still barely credible enough to be trusted to control local councils
First on Brexit, then on immigration, Farage has shaped British politics in a way no other leader has been able to do since Thatcher. Even Blair has not had the lasting, long-term impact of Farage. And all that while being, to all intents and purposes, a one-man band, whose parties were simply support mechanisms for him.
Now Farage is head of a party which stands every chance of winning the next election. It is seeking to professionalise itself and has attracted a range of serious figures to work behind the scenes to do that. Objectively, this should be Farage’s moment, when the one-time outsider whose sheer force of personality and argument changed the destiny of a nation became a party leader whose inexorable journey into Downing Street was simply a matter of timing.
Yet for all the poll leads, the policy wonk hires and, yes, the by-election wins, Farage and Reform are still barely credible enough to be trusted to control local councils. Their policies are a mix of the fantastical and the impractical. Their economic approach is to promise everything to everyone who might potentially vote Reform.
Clacton has changed nothing. But it has managed to be a by-election win that highlights just how far away from being a serious party Reform remains.
Clacton has strengthened Nigel Farage
There are two words you will hear endlessly today: ‘hollow victory’. Nigel Farage is back as MP for Clacton, but by doing battle with a bin, he has achieved nothing but embarrassed himself. Look, his refusal to attend his own count just proves it.
That is what we will be told by many political commentators, but is it true? I would say the people who have been most embarrassed by this bizarre by-election were those on the liberal left who had this fantasy that Count Binface would win and put an end to Farage’s political career. By thinking that they have exposed the narrowness of their world. In their minds, most of the country, deep inside, possesses the values of Islington; it is just that all those dim, old people who live by the seaside get easily led along by populists. Now that Farage has been exposed as being in the pocket of a dodgy crypto millionaire and the like, even they will come round to realising where their interests lie and will unite behind a protest candidate.
I would be wary of anyone claiming that Farage has been weakened by it
Except that they didn’t. The not-Farage candidate – which is what Count Binface was – failed miserably. His 27 per cent of the vote will go down on the record as the highest ever received by a joke candidate, but in this instance he wasn’t a joke candidate. He was the deadly serious candidate of ‘decency’ put up against the ‘far right’. And he fell flat on his face. Farage, meanwhile, showed that his personal support is every bit as strong as it was before, by winning more votes than he did in the 2024 general election in spite of the turnout collapsing.
The LibDems were first out of the blocks this morning demanding that the Commons investigation into Farage’s finances continue, and so presumably it will. But it will be much harder now for the LibDems or anyone else to claim that Farage’s donations put him beyond the political pale. The people of Clacton have re-elected him in spite of knowing all about them. If Farage gets skewered by some parliamentary rule, it will look all the more like the establishment plot that he asserts it is. It will be like one of those legal cases where the judge thinks one thing and the jury quite another.
It is possible to argue, of course, that the people of Clacton are not the same thing as the people of Britain, and that their views on the financial probity of public figures differs from those of the country as a whole. But that argument will only serve to expose another political figure who has taken personal approval from one constituency as a proxy for support from the country as a whole: yes, Andy Burnham, who has no personal mandate other than from the people of Makerfield. The Prime Minister is going to be reminded endlessly about that this autumn, but especially every time he floats a proposal to diverge from the 2024 manifesto.
Kemi Badenoch comes out a loser from Clacton, too. She gains the award for the most absurd thing said during the by-election campaign. The people of Clacton, she said a week ago, deserve better than Farage. In which case, why did she decline to put up a candidate?
On the face of it, Clacton tells us nothing about the state of political play in Britain at the moment, because it wasn’t a proper contest. But I would be wary of anyone claiming that Farage has been weakened by it. Look at this week’s polls, showing Labour only just about notching up a national lead over Reform in spite of Burnham’s honeymoon. They also show the Conservatives failing to make any capital from Farage’s personal troubles. If there is a winner from Clacton, it is pretty clearly Reform UK and its leader.
Farage’s Clacton victory won’t save him from more scrutiny
Nigel Farage has been re-elected in Clacton, comfortably winning the self-inflicted by-election that Britain’s major parties chose to boycott. The Reform leader received 22,239 votes – 1,000 more than his total at the 2024 general election. His main rival, Count Binface, secured a respectable 9,455 votes – a 26.7 per cent share.
Turnout stood at 44.37 per cent, the constituency’s lowest since 2010. However, given the result was always fairly obvious the figure is impressive. It indicates voters did not view the by-election as a farce or gimmick, as much as the major parties tried to push the idea.
Farage did not attend this morning’s count amid concerns over an alleged ‘credible threat’ against him. The result was met with near silence as it was announced by the returning officer. Reform has also cancelled a ‘major speech’ by the returning Clacton MP that had been planned for 10.30 a.m. Farage said earlier:
The contest against Binface has merely delayed, rather than halted, that investigation
I’ve been advised tonight by Essex police that there is an organised campaign to disrupt and degrade the result that will take place in a few hours’ time. I’m damned if I’m going to stand on a stage, having won a resounding victory … and be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies, and I will not, sadly, be attending the count. Which means I’m going to be here all night!
However, Essex Police insisted it had not advised any candidate to stay away from the count over safety concerns. The force said: ‘We have a proportionate and robust policing operation to ensure the safety and security of all participants in the count.’
Earlier, at a party-organised event, Farage described his impending victory as an ‘overwhelming endorsement of me’. He trumpeted:
I have had enough of being judged by mainstream media, being called a criminal. Do you know, if I made one sin, if I haven’t filled in a piece of paper, I’ve broken no law, I’ve broken no tax law, I’ve taken no public money, I don’t even own a motorhome.
Following confirmation of his victory, the Reform leader posted on X: ‘The result in Clacton speaks for itself.’
Farage resigned his seat and triggered the by-election in July amid intense scrutiny of an undeclared £5 million gift from the crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne. The House of Commons ethics watchdog launched an investigation into the money, which was given to Farage in early 2024, before he announced his intention to stand for parliament at the general election.
The contest against Binface has merely delayed, rather than halted, that investigation. If Farage is found to have breached parliamentary standards procedures, another by-election will be forced upon him – and the major parties have vowed to contest it.
Responding to the result this morning, Labour chairwoman Bridget Phillipson claimed ‘this is no victory for Farage… it just shows he likely has so much more to hide’. A Conservative party spokesperson said: ‘All Farage can brag about this morning is beating a bloke with a bin on his head. What he should do is answer the serious outstanding questions about why he hid his £5mn from the public.’
The Reform leader’s success today underlines his strength as both a campaigner and judge of the public mood. Countless reporters travelled to Clacton in the build-up to the by-election and reached much the same conclusion in their dispatches: Farage is beloved in this corner of Essex. His constituents praise his work as a local MP, but also his willingness to champion causes the major parties have long avoided for fear of appearing politically incorrect.
Farage’s victory shows that, in Clacton at least, voters have reached their own judgement on the £5mn gift – irrespective of the views of the media or political establishment. But for that verdict to carry wider significance, it must be echoed nationally. The polls suggest that Farage faces an uphill struggle to achieve such a feat. Unlike when he was first elected in July 2024, Reform now faces challenges from Restore on the right, an uptick in approval ratings for Kemi Badenoch and of course, the Burnham bounce – though that may prove short-lived. On his return to parliament, he will have to persuade the country – not just Clacton – that he has the qualities of a serious statesman, not merely those of a brilliant campaigner.
Burnham should bin his disposable BBQ ban
Cooking has held little – actually, no – appeal during the steamy days and tropical nights of the past five heatwaves. Fortunately, salvation has been close at hand thanks to disposable barbecues.
Fired up in the garden, they’ve been my go-to ally for an easy supper, ready to char whatever happens to be lurking in the fridge. Indeed, given al fresco dining has a singular charm, the quality of the food never really matters. (Call it smoke and mirrors if you like, ho, ho.) Rather, the taste of the outdoors, washed down with a cool beer, more than makes up for even the most haphazard chill and grill dish.
What’s more, these single-use foil trays with their pre-treated charcoal are so easy to use. No scrubbing or soaking. Just cool them down and chuck them out (carefully).
Yet unless we splash out on a permanent home barbecue, the days of cooking this way in our house could soon be numbered. Not only has the Prime Minister suggested that retailers stop selling disposable barbecues due to wildfire risk. In the ‘longer term’, it seems the government may consider outlawing single-use grills altogether.
A disposable barbecue ban is also a headline-grabbing distraction from the bigger issue
The idea was cooked up (sorry) at a COBRA meeting convened this week to deal with the government’s response to this summer’s record temperatures. Yet, given the halting delivery of Andy Burnham’s – or ‘don’t burn’em’s – statement to the media on the matter, could it be that even the PM isn’t quite convinced by the idea? Or perhaps he’s simply embarrassed that, given COBRA’s remit – to deal with crises and emergencies – the level of Solomonic wisdom brought to bear on a moment of national risk amounted to little more than junking tray-cooked sausages.
Whatever the reason for the Prime Minister’s faltering reaction, clearly banning these disposable items is a stupid idea. A case, if you like, of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Or rather with the barbecue.
Of course the spread of wildfires has been shocking. Some 1,017 have been recorded in England and Wales so far this year.
But such prohibition-like tactics would surely be a blunt instrument, penalising law-abiding people who cannot afford a fancy outdoor number from John Lewis yet still want to enjoy the simple pleasure of dining in the garden. All because of the knuckleheads who carelessly cook burgers on parched grassland, where a stray spark can turn into a blazing inferno.
More significantly, a disposable barbecue ban is also a headline-grabbing distraction from the bigger issue: why this country is so ill-equipped to cope with drought, when hotter countries withstand far more extreme conditions without going into meltdown.
Clearly the strategy hasn’t been to fix the roof when the sun isn’t shining. Which is why we have water companies losing around 2,954 million litres of the stuff per day. Or the reason few major new reservoirs have been constructed since the early 1990s, meaning the country fails to capture and hold excess water during wet weather. Meanwhile, farmland is saturated in the winter – even to the detriment of crops – with no obvious provision to store millions of gallons from seasonal downpours. All of which is no reason to make the disposable barbecue the scapegoat for lack of judicious planning or robust infrastructure.
Rather than an outright ban, when conditions are disproportionately hot, local councils should make increasing use of Public Spaces Protection Orders to impose on-the-spot fines for lighting barbecues in high-risk areas. The financial penalty should be set high enough to make people think twice about grilling in the wide open. Signage should be clear, unmissable and strategically placed to remind potential offenders of their responsibilities.
To satiate the appetite for eating out, country parks or beaches could install permanent, non-flammable barbecue stations where visitors can safely place reusable grills. Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council, for example, already provide free public electric barbecue cooktops along the seafront.
As for Andy Burnham, he should junk those tediously blokeish TikTok videos and instruct his social media team to launch a vigorous educational campaign about barbecuing outdoors. One which would cover the dangers, the penalties, no-go areas and, crucially, how to do it responsibly. This would encourage good practice and foster the same sense of national responsibility as a hosepipe ban, making people feel they are part of the solution rather than simply being told what not to do.
It’s also worth pointing out that outdoor barbecues in this country have a limited window, even if the climate change agitators argue otherwise. At some point the rain will come and before you know it, we’ll be bickering over whether it’s time to put the central heating back on (chez moi at least). Eating outside will be a distant memory.
Until then the barbecue should be embraced – an affordable way to enjoy hot food outside and for families and friends to spend time together in nature. That’s why the disposables should stay – unlike the government’s throwaway gimmickry. That should be consigned to the bin and replaced by credible solutions to an ongoing problem.
Weekend tips for Ripon and Newbury
Ripon has a unique sprint course with its undulations, which means that strong course and distance form is always a huge plus when backing a horse there. This is particularly true in a big field such as tomorrow’s William Hill/MND Association Great St Wilfrid Handicap (3.25 p.m.).
However, of tomorrow’s 15 runners, no less than five have recorded course and distance wins over tomorrow’s trip of six furlongs. Of these, my preference is for the Nigel Tinkler-trained LORD ROXBY, who won at Ripon as recently as 3 August, beating another of today’s rivals, Dark Cloud Rising, in the process.
Dark Cloud Rising has a 5 lb pull at the weights for a one-and-three-quarter length beating and so he will be fancied by many punters to gain revenge, especially given his high draw. However, I will stick with the consistent Lord Roxby, given the four-year-old gelding won quite cosily and he again has in-form apprentice Alex Jary in the saddle. Back this fast-ground sprinter 1 point each way at 7-1 with either bet365 or William Hill, both paying four places.
I am hoping jockey and horse get a soft lead tomorrow
Jockey Saffie Osborne is riding with a huge amount of confidence after a fine season and she has now landed the mount of WITNESS STAND for the big race at Newbury tomorrow, the Grade 2 Visit Malta Hungerford Stakes (3.10 p.m.).
The five-year-old gelding, who was second in this race a year ago, ran well enough when third in the Group 2 World Pool Lennox Stakes at Glorious Goodwood last month and trainer Richard Newland says the horse has been in good form at home since. The handler told the Racing Post:
He did a nice piece of work on Wednesday morning. We were thrilled with Goodwood; he’s obviously got a great record of running well there and just got collared by two very good horses. This was always the plan. I don’t see why he shouldn’t run a big race.
I am hoping jockey and horse get a soft lead tomorrow, in which case they could be hard to catch. Back Witness Stand 1 point each way at 13-2 with William Hill, paying three places.
Trainer Hugo Palmer has his horses in good form and I am going to add ADAAY OF SCARLETT to my ante-post portfolio for next week’s Ebor meeting at York. The horse is due to run in the Grade 2 Al Basti Equiworld Dubai Gimcrack Stakes a week today (Friday April 21, 3 p.m.).
Adaay Of Scarlett was the stable’s first two-year-old runner of the season back in April, winning at Newmarket, and since then he has run well five more times – another win and four seconds, including three in Group 2s at Royal Ascot, Newmarket and Glorious Goodwood.
Palmer says he has ‘unfinished business’ with this admirably consistent horse and so back Adaay Of Scarlett 1 point each way at 8-1 with William Hill or bet365, both paying three places.
I will be back next Friday to look at the final two days of this superb York meeting and I have a major fancy for the Sky Bet Melrose Handicap on Saturday, all the more so if that strange and rare thing called ‘rain’ finally arrives, as this talented horse is better with some cut.
Pending:
1 point each way Witness Stand at 13-2 for the Hungerford Stakes, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Lord Roxby at 7-1 for the Great St Wilfred, paying 1/5th odds, 4 places.
1 point each way Tattycoram at 10-1 for the Yorkshire Oaks, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Coedana at 66-1 for the Yorkshire Oaks, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Adaay of Scarlett at 8-1 for the Gimcrack Stakes, paying 1/5th odds, 3 places.
1 point each way Daiquiri Bay at 16-1 for the Ebor Handicap, paying ¼ odds, 4 places.
1 point each way Paddy The Squire at 33-1 for the Ebor Handicap, paying ¼ odds, 4 places.
Last weekend: no runners.
2026 flat season running total: + 18.625 points.
2025-26 jumps season: – 57.785 points on all tips.
2025 flat season: + 84.12 points on all tips.
2024-5 jumps season: – 47.61 points on all tips.
2024 flat season: + 41.4 points on all tips.
2023-4 jumps season: + 42.01 points on all tips.
2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.
2022-3 jumps season: + 54.3 points on all tips.
Total for seven full seasons of tipping: + 68.215 points on all tips.
2026 flat season running total: + 12.225 points.
2025-26 jumps season: – 57.785 points on all tips.
2025 flat season: + 84.12 points on all tips.
2024-5 jumps season: – 47.61 points on all tips.
2024 flat season: + 41.4 points on all tips.
2023-4 jumps season: + 42.01 points on all tips.
2023 flat season: – 48.22 points on all tips.
2022-3 jumps season: + 54.3 points on all tips.
Total for seven full seasons of tipping: + 68.215 points on all tips.