Reform party

Every twist in the winding road of Britain's politics brings a latest thing to say. These wisdoms usually survive a season or two before succumbing to the new thing to say, which often asserts the opposite. This summer we have “Britain is moving into an era of multiparty politics.” Allow me, therefore, to leap ahead with my candidate for its successor: “Reports of the death of two-party politics are greatly exaggerated.” I don’t say our current governing party and principal opposition must always be the two parties in question. Labour may be dying. The Tories may be showing signs of life. In both cases I fervently hope so. But whether or not these remain our two options in elections to come, the tendency will always be for the choice to boil down to two.

While Britain is still reeling from the horrific murder of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak, an astonishing article has appeared in El País, Spain’s largest national newspaper. Rather than focus on the failures of the police officers, or the institutional bias within the force, the headline steers its readers away from the case and towards the outlet’s own obsessions. The headline translates as "Farage’s far right stirs up hatred in the UK after a young man is stabbed to death by a Sikh man." As Alejo Schapire (an Argentine journalist based in France) has pointed out, this is the first and only article produced by El País on the subject of the Nowak killing. Instead of an image of the victim, the newspaper has opted for a photograph of Nigel Farage.

As a sucker for any melody which relies heavily upon fourth and eighth notes hammered out on a piano, I was always going to fall for Billy Joel’s 1978 hit single "My Life." The lyrics were, as ever with Joel, awful, mixing his cringeworthy ordinary guy New York vernacular shtick with what I dare say he thought were original and profound psychological insights. He is such a hack singer-songwriter. He makes Neil Diamond resemble Wittgenstein. But the tune made me swoon, even its two predictable cod-Beatles middle eights. What to do? Obviously, I couldn’t buy it. There were four record shops in Middlesbrough back then and I was known in all of them.

What is the greatest threat to British democracy? Zack Polanski’s call for “building a society” that “doesn’t include” people who “identify as right-wing?” Labour’s efforts to flood the Upper House with party apparatchiks? Islamist extremism? The correct answer is Reform UK. That, at least, is the conclusion of a new book called What If Reform Wins by the Times reporter Peter Chappell. Before I get to its flaws, I should acknowledge it’s an enjoyable read, with plenty of deft, comic touches. It imagines that Reform wins a majority in June 2029, and then gives a blow-by-blow account of the constitutional crisis that follows, with the informal rules and conventions underpinning our democracy being stress-tested and found wanting.

Ann Coulter, an American author, lawyer and conservative media pundit, joined Freddy Gray on the Americano podcast last Friday to discuss why she backs the UK's Reform party, why she supports Trump in his second term, what's really going on with the Epstein files and more. Here are some highlights from their conversation. Why don’t politicians follow through on illegal immigration promises? Ann Coulter: Americans have been voting not to give illegals benefits, to deport them, to make sure they can't vote, for now almost half a century, and the politicians will never give it to us. That was what was so striking about Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Oh my gosh, they really seemed to mean it.