Nigel Jones

Ten Reform party councillors in Derbyshire have resigned in protest at Nigel Farage’s ‘autocratic’ control of the rising party and its direction of travel. Farage has dismissed the revolt as the action of what he calls a ‘rogue branch’ of Reform, but there are stirrings of discontent in the grassroots of the fast-growing party that may signal more than minor teething troubles. There are legitimate questions to be asked both about Reform’s structure and the way that Farage’s robust personality impacts upon it During the Reform UK East Midlands conference, a former Tory MP for the Dudley seat – Mario Longhi – defected to Reform and was introduced by Nigel Farage as, 'a loyal member of the Conservative Party for the last goodness knows how many years'.

Fresh from explosively disrupting the politics of the US and Britain, Elon Musk has now turned his attention to Germany. The world’s richest man has written an op-ed in the newspaper Die Welt, endorsing the hard-right populist AfD party, which he has called ‘Germany’s last faint hope’. By doing so, Musk has smashed the carefully constructed firewall which Germany’s old ruling centre-right and centre-left parties had erected against the rapidly rising AfD. The older parties have effectively refused to cooperate with it or join the AfD in local government coalitions.

There were two scenes from Syria last night screened by the BBC and Channel 4 News that should give the Panglossian optimists hailing the birth of a ‘new Syria’ a pause for thought. In one, filmed at the Assad family mausoleum in Qardaha, near the port of Latakia, armed members of the Islamist HTS who now control most of the country were joyfully burning the coffins of Hafez al-Assad, the ruthless dictator who ruled Syria from 1970 until his death in 2000, and that of his elder son and heir apparent Bassil, whose death in a car crash in 1994 opened the way for the second Assad son Bashar’s rise to power.

The late Henry Kissinger said of the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s that it was a shame that both sides couldn’t lose. Much the same is true of the current situation in Syria, where the long established regime of the brutal but secular Assad dynasty looks increasingly likely to fall to a sudden Islamist rebel offensive. Syria has been convulsed by a vicious and multi-sided conflict since 2012 when riots against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad turned into a full-scale civil war. Assad, a London trained ophthalmologist, had reluctantly become the heir apparent to his iron-fisted father Hafez al-Assad (the surname means ‘the lion’) after the death of his more political brother Bassel in a car crash.

The death of Labour’s former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott at the age of 86 also marks the passing of the old Labour party. Prescott was a bruiser both in the physical and the political sense. He was unashamedly working class, contemptuous of the effete intellectuals who had taken over Labour, and ready to hit out at the party’s enemies with both fists and tongue. Prescott will be most remembered for the moment during the 2001 general election campaign when his left hook connected with the jaw of a 29-year-old protester, Craig Evans, who had thrown an egg at him as Prescott arrived at an election meeting at Rhyl in his native Wales. Evans was not seriously hurt, and the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair laughed off the incident as ‘John being John’.

Austria’s mainstream politicians are combining to ensure that the winners of last month’s general elections, the far right Freedom party (FPO) are kept firmly out of power. The Alpine republic’s president, Alexander Van Den Bellen – aligned with the Green party – has invited the current chancellor, Karl Nehammer, whose centre right People’s party (OVP) came second in the elections, to form a coalition explicitly excluding the FPO, which topped the polls with 29 per cent, running on an anti-immigration, pro-Putin platform. Nehammer is now likely to form a ‘grand coalition’ Austria is the latest European ‘domino’ to propel a populist radical right party to the forefront of politics after the rise of the AfD in neighbouring Germany.

Labour marks 100 days in power tomorrow, but there is precious little for Keir Starmer to celebrate. It is a truism of modern politics that a government’s first three months or so sets the tone for everything that follows. If the newbies hit the ground running, all will be well; if not, disaster inevitably awaits.

The general elections in Austria have delivered a sensational result, with the hard right, pro-Putin Freedom party (FPO) coming out on top for the first time in the Alpine republic’s post-second world war history. Projections after Sunday’s poll give the FPO 29 per cent – a three point lead over their nearest rivals, the conservative People’s party (OVP) under Chancellor Karl Nehammer on 26 per cent. The result does not necessarily mean that the FPO will form the new government, as it lacks an absolute majority, and all the other parties have vowed not to form a coalition with the FPO’s victorious controversial leader, Herbert Kickl, a 55-year-old hardline former interior minister known for opposing lockdowns during the Covid pandemic.

Sir John Major has been sounding off. Again. The former Tory prime minister criticised his party's Rwanda asylum plan as 'un-Conservative and un-British'. In an interview with the BBC, Major said he thought Rishi Sunak's plan to send migrants to Africa was 'odious': 'I thought it was...if one dare say in a secular society, un-Christian, and unconscionable and I thought that this is really not the way to treat people.' Major is the man – let it never be forgotten – who led the Tory party to a landslide defeat in 1997. The former prime minister also presided over Black Wednesday in 1992 – the exchange rate debacle that shattered the Tories' reputation for economic credibility – and the era of Tory sleaze.