Nigel Jones

Nigel Farage's indecision continues. Despite being hyped in advance as a major unveiling of the rebel party’s programme, Reform UK's press conference yesterday was something of a damp squib, not least because Farage failed to actually show up. Reform leader Richard Tice said the ex Brexit party leader is ‘still assessing’ the ‘extent of the role he wants to play in helping Reform UK’. It's about time Farage decided whether he's in or out.

Whatever position people take on the long-running dispute over the ownership of the Elgin marbles, there can be little doubt that Rishi Sunak’s last-minute cancellation of a scheduled meeting with visiting Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis over the issue is an unnecessary, foolish and snippy snub to one of Britain’s few friends in Europe. It is thought that Sunak was irritated by Mitsotakis going public with Greece’s case for returning the marbles during an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. But even if that is the case, scrapping a bilateral meeting with a fellow centre-right elected premier is a rude and gross overreaction.

After days of speculation, Nigel Farage has finally confirmed that he has accepted ITV’s invitation to go into the jungle and join Ant and Dec and eleven fellow contestants on I’m a Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here!. It's a decision he may come to regret. Farage says he has been stoutly resisting offers to appear on the show since 2016, but has at last succumbed to their blandishments, chiefly because of the huge fee offered – reported to be up to £1.5 million. But this isn't just about money: like many politicians, Farage is a showman and he says the show will give him a chance to ‘connect’ with the millions of young people who watch I’m a Celebrity but don’t watch TV news or read newspapers. There's no doubt that Farage has a chance to win over critics.

Conservative parties everywhere have traditionally been identified with maintaining law and order and cracking down on crime. As part of his successful campaign to appeal to right-of-centre voters, even Tony Blair before his 1997 election triumph famously vowed to be ‘tough on crime – and tough on the causes of crime’. So, in yet another sign of the approaching election, it was unsurprising this week to see Rishi Sunak doing his belated best to scramble on board the law and order bandwagon. In a series of announcements on the topic, the Prime Minister pledged a judge-led public inquiry into the crimes of Lucy Letby, convicted of the murders of seven babies who were in her care.

Bulgaria is a country that doesn’t often feature on Britain’s radar – beyond being a location for cheap package holidays and even cheaper wine. But the arrest of three Bulgarian citizens who have lived in Britain for a long time and are being charged with spying for Russia may change that. For the country bordering the Black Sea has long been Russia’s closest ally in Eastern Europe, and Moscow has a history of outsourcing its dirtier espionage operations to its Slavic sister state. During the Cold War, Bulgaria was the most reliably compliant of the Kremlin’s Warsaw Pact vassal states.

Rishi Sunak’s government is sometimes compared to that of John Major, the man who succeeded Margaret Thatcher in 1990, went on to win an unexpected election in 1992 – and then went down after a landslide defeat at the hands of Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997. On an episode of The Rest Is Politics, a podcast hosted by former Tory MP Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, Blair’s media chief and an architect of New Labour, Sir John, now 80, looked back at his seven years in power. Major reflected on the lessons that time may hold for Sunak’s similarly embattled administration.

Today is the 79th anniversary of D-Day, 6 June 1944, when Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy to begin the liberation of Nazi-occupied Europe and the end of the Second World War. Despite the fears of prime minister Winston Churchill and others that the Anglo-American and Canadian landings would be a bloody fiasco, victory was achieved. A beachhead was secured, and the minutely planned Operation Overlord eventually secured a peaceful Europe, albeit at a fearful cost: 4,414 Allied servicemen died on that day alone. Naturally, the steady subsequent attrition of the years means that there are hardly any survivors left from that historic day.

These days our sex scandals seem like another symbol of Britain’s national decline. They are diminished, petty and tawdry, certainly compared to the grand affair that took its name from its main actor: John Profumo. Sixty years ago today, on 5 June 1963, Profumo rose in the House of Commons to admit that he had lied to his wife, his cabinet colleagues, and the nation, about an affair with a 19-year-old model, and was therefore resigning and retreating into obscurity. In the early 1960s Profumo was a rising star in the durable but tired Tory government of that eminent old Edwardian Harold Macmillan. He had enjoyed an exceptionally good war – serving in North Africa and landing in Normandy on D-Day, exactly 19 years before his spectacular fall.