Nigel Jones

The much-vaunted German Leopard 2 tank – 18 of which were sent to Ukraine in 2023 after prolonged national debates and foot-dragging by the outgoing Olaf Scholz government – is reportedly proving a flop on the battlefield. According to a confidential assessment by Germany’s own defence ministry, and published by the Daily Telegraph, the Leopards have disappointed their Ukrainian army crews, as they are said to be over-complex to operate and vulnerable to aerial attack by Russian drones. So limited are the Leopards’ capabilities proving in real battle conditions that their range and mobility are restricted. According to the study, they are being used as little more than moderately mobile artillery pieces.

In just three weeks, voters in some 20 local council areas and in the Runcorn and Helsby parliamentary by-election go to the polls. It’s the first major test of voter opinion since the election of the Labour government in July, yet despite Labour’s increasing unpopularity, the official Tory opposition is braced for yet another thumping defeat. Far from anticipating victory, party leader Kemi Badenoch has warned of ‘difficult’ results ahead  – code for ‘defeats’ and the loss of Tory controlled councils and seats to Labour, the Lib Dems and the insurgent Reform UK party. The latter is fielding many former Tory defectors as its candidates, including at Runcorn and in Lincolnshire where former Tory minister Dame Andrea Jenkyns is Reform’s candidate to be mayor.

The University of Sussex, one of the leading temples of progressivism in academia, has been fined £585,000 for failing to safeguard free speech following the Kathleen Stock affair. Stock, a philosophy professor, was hounded out of Sussex in 2021 over her belief in biological sex. The Office for Students (OfS)'s investigation into the fallout from that debacle is damning: it criticised the university's policy statement on trans and non-binary equality, saying its requirement to 'positively represent trans people' and an assertion that 'transphobic propaganda [would] not be tolerated' could lead staff and students to 'self-censor'.

The death of Oleg Gordievsky at the age of 86 comes at a moment when relations between his native Russia and his adopted country Britain are just as fraught as they were in his heyday as the West’s most important double agent at the height of the Cold War. Gordievsky’s life story reads like the plot of a John Le Carre spy thriller, and it has indeed been written up as such by the doyen of espionage chroniclers Ben Macintyre. Gordievsky was born into the ranks of the Soviet secret state apparat. Like Vladimir Putin, his father was a member of the NKVD, the name the feared Soviet secret police bore under Stalin.

When Donald Trump ordered the declassification of thousands of secret government documents on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, it seemed like it would be a red-letter day for America’s conspiracy theorists. The reality has been quite different. The JFK files — along with other documents about the killings of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., which were released on Tuesday — have turned out to be a major disappointment. Around 2,000 documents were included in the release from the US National Archives and Records Administration. But despite Trump’s insistence that the files should not be redacted, many still have blacked-out passages. Others are so faded or poorly photocopied that they are illegible.

No two politicians could be less alike than Sir Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage. But it looks as though the Prime Minister is transitioning into the Reform party’s rumbustuous leader –  or at least stealing his velvet collared clothes. Consider the evidence. Over the past few days and weeks, Labour has adopted a raft of the policies advocated by the right-wing insurgents. These include: Abolishing NHS England, the bureaucratic quango that runs our failing health service Announcing coming swingeing cuts to the ‘corrupt’ benefits system that Reform claims means that money is currently going to cheats and people who are not working.

Nigel Farage is a curate’s egg of a politician: good in parts. The good part, at least for a Brexiteer like me, is that it was his tireless campaigning, more than any other’s, that freed Britain from the clammy grasp of the EU. No one else in politics can match his ability to fire up a crowd and put his finger on the popular pulse. But his fatal flaw is his inability or unwillingness to share power and lead a team. For Farage, it is his way or the highway. This dictatorial tendency has manifested itself at every stage of his turbulent career. Many have dared to challenge his authority or disagreed with him, and have then either been forced out or meekly submitted to the imperious Farage will.

One aspect of the furious row that has split Reform UK which has yet to receive the attention it deserves is the part the good old British subjects of class and snobbery have played. The row erupted last week after Reform MP Rupert Lowe voiced mild criticism of party leader Nigel Farage in a Daily Mail interview, accusing him of being a ‘Messiah’ and voicing doubts about whether he had it in him to become prime minister. The two men’s relative differences in wealth may have added to the animosity between them Farage promptly hit back by saying that Lowe was ‘completely and utterly wrong’. The row then escalated to toxic levels when another two of the five Reform MPs, Richard Tice and Lee Anderson, rallied around Farage.

It was so predictable as to be almost inevitable: a massive row has erupted within the leadership of Reform UK. Rupert Lowe, one of Reform’s five MPs and the Member for Great Yarmouth – an outspoken keyboard warrior on social media and popular with many grassroots party members for his outspoken online comments – kicked off the row after he launched an open criticism of party founder and leader Nigel Farage. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Lowe, a millionaire businessman, said Reform was still a ‘protest party’ and that it was an open question about whether his ‘messianic’ leader would ‘deliver the goods’ and become prime minister. He suggested that Farage would only do so if he surrounded himself with the ‘right people’.

The jaw-dropping contempt dripping from the reply suggested by Labour’s sacked health minister Andrew Gwynne to a 72-year-old lady in Manchester who had complained about her bin collections may seem shocking but is scarcely surprising. In a WhatsApp chat with Labour councillors, Gwynne proposed to respond with: 'Dear resident, F*** your bins. I'm re-elected and without your vote. Screw you. PS: Hopefully you'll have croaked it by the all-outs.' This is entirely symptomatic of the way that ‘the people’s party' now regard those who elect them. The ‘let them eat cake’ attitude by Labour’s finest towards ordinary voters first came to widespread public attention during the 2010 general election.

These are dramatic days in the usually dull world of German politics. Last Wednesday, midway through a fiercely fought federal election campaign, the Bundestag Parliament narrowly voted to close the nation’s borders and curb the legal rights of immigrants. Two days later, the same assembly reversed ferret and voted a similar measure down. So what on earth is going on? The bills to close the borders were the work of the man likely to become Germany‘s next Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, leader of the CDU/CSU Christian Democrats – the centre-right equivalent of our Tories. Hard pressed in the polls by the hard-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) populist party, Merz took the controversial step of stealing the AfD’s clothes and adopting its anti-migration agenda.