Nigel farage

When Zia Yusuf first walked into the headquarters of Reform UK, he gestured at the empty room and asked: ‘Where’s the office?’ Ed Sumner, the party’s director of communications, replied: ‘This is it. It’s empty. This is the party.’ That was not even two years ago. Since then, Nigel Farage and Yusuf have built a party from scratch and expect to be the biggest winners in the local elections on 7 May. With more than 270,000 members, their grassroots base is the largest in Britain, bigger than both Labour and the Tories. ‘I would argue no party has built political infrastructure and established itself more quickly in British history than Reform,’ Yusuf says.

Murton is a rather frowsy former pit village in County Durham, about half a dozen miles down the A19 from Sunderland. Chip shops, tanning salons, elderly people with no teeth on mobility scooters, huge cannabis farm in the disused old Co-op store which has just been busted by the Old Bill. It almost became a ghost town after the pit closed in 1991, but they built a largeish retail park on the outskirts so people could spend money they didn’t have on useless shit and bad food. Its north side has one of the lowest average incomes in the county (£34,400) and a much lower than average life expectancy. Benefit take-up somewhat high, above 50 per cent. I hope, in these few sentences, I have brought the place to life for you.

There is an old joke about Nigel Farage, put about by former colleagues. ‘Why is Nigel like a beech tree?… Because nothing grows under him.’ The comparison to this acid-leafed tree which stifles all beneath it is one the Reform UK leader has never accepted. ‘I don’t fall out with people,’ he once said. ‘They fall out with me.’ Like Tintin, Farage has enjoyed many different adventures in different guises: ‘Nigel in America’, ‘Nigel in the Jungle’, ‘Nigel in the City’. This week, we got another: ‘Nigel and the Gang of Four’, the leader who seeks power only to yield it to others. Four names were unveiled as part of Reform’s new ‘shadow cabinet’ to show he is building something bigger than himself.

Westminster, London Donald Trump might be determined to acquire more US land – here in Britain, however, our leaders are determined to give it away. A deal to hand over control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is in the final stages of parliamentary approval. Trump initially backed the deal, yet U-turned after his Greenland overtures were spurned. “The UK giving away extremely important land is an act of GREAT STUPIDITY,” he declared online. “NO REASON WHATSOEVER.” Bemused, he later asked a British reporter in the Oval Office: “I don’t know why they’re doing it. Do they need money?

Those pondering why Robert Jenrick defected to Reform UK have focused on the political momentum of Nigel Farage or the performance of Kemi Badenoch, but the key conversation was the one he had with his father on Boxing Day. ‘He’s a very straight talker,’ Jenrick explains when we meet at Reform’s headquarters on Tuesday afternoon. ‘He said, “If you weren’t in politics and there was a general election to-morrow, which party would you vote for?” I said, “Reform.” He said, “If you weren’t in politics, weren’t a candidate, had no particular loyalty, who would you want to be prime minister if the choice was Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage?” I said, “Nigel Farage.” He said, “Well, be honest with yourself and become a Reform MP.

"Better late than never." That’s how Reform party leader Nigel Farage has described Donald Trump’s sudden and dramatic repudiation of the United Kingdom’s Chagos handover. "This should be enough to sink just about the worst deal in history." Early this morning, Trump used his Truth Social account to lay into "our 'brilliant' NATO ally, the United Kingdom, over Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s decision to "give away the Island of Diego Garcia, the site of a vital military base, and to do so FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER.