Patrick O’Flynn

It’s been a busy Christmas in the English Channel. The small boat arrivals have continued at a startling pace through the start of winter. Nigel Farage is nonetheless a credible champion for the wronged masses There were 451 arrivals on Christmas Day, 407 on Boxing Day, 305 on Friday and 322 on Saturday. Yesterday we know at least three more people drowned in the Channel near the coast of France, taking the number of migrants who have died or gone missing attempting the crossing this year to at least 77. As the Mayor of Sangatte, Guy Allemend, told the French news agency AFP: ‘It’s crossing after crossing, without any let-up.

Throughout the last parliament, Labour leader Keir Starmer and Lib Dem leader Ed Davey did not have a bad word to say about each other. In fact, they hardly even acknowledged the existence of each other’s parties. Neither did they shake hands on a formal Lab-Lib electoral pact. They just both kept pounding away at the Conservative government’s weak spots and allowed it all to happen organically. Anti-Tory voters in every constituency congregated behind the ‘progressive’ party best placed to oust sitting Conservative MPs. It worked like a dream for both.

Everyone is talking about Reform: Rachel Reeves complains that Nigel Farage ‘doesn’t have a clue’ how to make the economy grow. Kemi Badenoch says Reform is offering ‘knee-jerk analysis’ rather than thought-through policies. The obvious rejoinder is that Reeves doesn’t have any growth and Badenoch doesn’t have any policies, so these criticisms are a bit rich coming from them. Reform supporters can also fall back on the old adage of public relations that there is only one thing worse than being talked about and that’s not being talked about. Incredibly, given its struggles to achieve any cut-through at all until a year or so ago, Reform is currently the most visible brand in British politics.

At the start of a roller-coaster ride, a motorised chain pulls the carriages up to the highest point of the circuit, emitting a clanking sound as a ratchet takes effect. When the clanking stops those in the cars know they are about to go over the top. The canniest politicians across the western world are hearing such a clanking sound right now. In just a month’s time, the second term of President Donald Trump will get underway and those with the closest connections to it are promising us all a wild ride. According to Steve Bannon, Trump’s former senior adviser and continued confidant, we are going to see 'as aggressive a first 100 days as any administration going back to FDR’s first 100 days'.

It would be an exaggeration to say that in politics conventional wisdom is always wrong – but equally it’s not a bad rule of thumb. The prime mid-wittery of the moment concerns housing policy. We’re told that we’ve been building far too few houses. The way to help frustrated young adults escape the repressive confines of their childhood homes is, according to various newspaper columnists, to expand the general housing stock rapidly. Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner’s mission to build 1.5 million new homes, riding roughshod over local objectors – the hated 'Nimbys' – is routinely praised as bold and overdue. One Tory former housing secretary told Fraser Nelson: 'I can’t admit it, but I love it. She is doing what we should have done years ago.

It was quite possible that Kemi Badenoch could have proved an instant hit with the British public and taken the Tories straight into a sizeable opinion poll lead. External factors could have fallen in her favour, enabling her not only to capitalise on the unpopularity of Keir Starmer and Labour, but also to win back support from Nigel Farage and Reform. There are several combinations of circumstances which could have led to such an outcome. These versions of the future would have seen Badenoch swiftly become regarded by voters as the obvious Next Big Thing that Britain needs to lift it out of the doldrums, Thatcher-style. But it hasn’t panned out like that.

Some political disasters take a very long time to live down, as the Tories will discover over the coming years. One thinks of Labour’s winter of discontent during which, as folklore records, rubbish piled high in the streets and bodies went unburied. Or Black Wednesday, subsequently renamed White Wednesday, when the pound sterling crashed out of the European exchange rate mechanism, shattering the entire economic rationale of John Major’s Tory administration. Long exiles to the naughty step followed each of those disastrous episodes for the party that oversaw them. This week we were presented with another: the true scale of immigration presided over by the Conservative party between 2019 and 2024.

Does it matter that a petition calling for another general election has gone viral online and garnered more than two million signatures within a few days? Millions of voters have simply had enough of the entire centre-left paradigm Conventional analysis would say not. After all, there are always a good few hundred thousand keyboard warriors who detest any government. Millions of bitter Remainers signed petitions calling for a second referendum to overturn Brexit for all the good that did them, as Sam Leith points out. And yet it is the very artlessness of the way a man called Michael Westwood has set out his cause which tells me that his petition on the official parliamentary website does betoken something significant. “I would like there to be another General Election.

Tony Blair spent much of his time as prime minister projecting a persona that most people of a conservative mindset found quite reassuring. But Keir Starmer is no heir to Blair. The New Labour leader removed a commitment to nationalisation from the party’s constitution. He pledged to keep the tax burden under control. And he seemed to put himself on the side of those who were making a success of their lives. Starmer has done none of these things since taking office, alienating Labour voters and making life harder for millions of Brits. It is hard to see Keir Starmer’s administration finding such a path back to electoral safety It's not true, of course, to say that Blair never slipped up.

Labour’s approach to tackling the small boats crisis is based around a dichotomy so overly simplistic that it should not fool even an averagely intelligent child. Keir Starmer set it out in an article for the Sun newspaper in July: the people in the boats are innocent victims, the people arranging for the boats to be there for them to get into at the appointed hour are evil and must be hunted down. Starmer pledged to 'smash the vile criminal gangs that profit from illegal immigration'. 'Every week vulnerable people are overloaded onto boats on the coast of France. Infants, children, pregnant mothers – the smugglers do not care. They’re making a fortune, breaching our borders,' he wrote.

If Peter Mandelson is confirmed as our next ambassador to Washington there will be an outcry among swathes of both the right and the left of British politics. There always is when Mandelson lands a plum position. On the left, the resentment began over his transfer of allegiance from Gordon Brown to Tony Blair more than 30 years ago. But it really gained momentum after Blair parachuted him in to be Northern Ireland secretary in place of Mo Mowlam in the autumn of 1999. Grassroots Labour mythology sprung up around the idea that Mowlam was being punished by Blair for being too popular and that Mandelson had been manoeuvring for her job. He had been sacked from the cabinet late in 1998 over his taking of a secret loan from fellow Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson.

Hold the front page. The government may have finally smashed part of a people-smuggling gang, or as word-mangling Keir Starmer put it in a piece to camera, a ‘people-smaggling gun’. The details are as follows: a 44-year-old Turkish national was arrested at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam in an operation involving the UK National Crime Agency and its partner bodies in Belgium and the Netherlands. Good news that a man suspected of being a significant supplier of small boat equipment has been arrested.I want to thank @NCA_UK and their Dutch and Belgian counterparts for their work on this investigation.Our approach to smashing criminal gangs is already having an impact. pic.twitter.

There was a cranky call doing the rounds online last week suggesting veterans should turn their backs on Sir Keir Starmer as he laid a Remembrance Sunday wreath. Naturally I opposed it, alongside many other conservative-leaning commentators. We argued that honouring our war dead is something we should want all the main strands of political opinion to unite behind. More than one in five people who voted at the general election in July were unrepresented Of course, this scheme didn’t happen: the vast majority of armed forces veterans would never politicise a service of remembrance for fallen colleagues in that way. So all the main party leaders joined together to lay wreaths at the Cenotaph and protect an important non-partisan and near-universal social norm, right? Wrong.

Never has there been a politician to have fallen so foul of the Eric Morecambe mistake of playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order, as William Hague. The former Conservative leader spent the first years of this century as a hardline EU-sceptic and telling voters that lax immigration policies were turning swathes of the country into ‘a foreign land’. The electorate at the time proved largely impervious to these arguments, perhaps because Tony Blair and Gordon Brown seemed to be delivering better living standards and most of the country had not yet experienced the community-shredding delights of hyper-migration.

Here is a sign of how weak Keir Starmer’s relationship is with the new leader of the free world. Nigel Farage has repeatedly offered to act as a bridge between the UK Labour government and the incoming Donald Trump administration. And for the second time, Farage is celebrating a Trump presidential election victory with the man himself, while the entire British political establishment is out in the cold. Last time round the relationship’s low point occurred when a disobliging assessment of Trump by the then UK Ambassador to Washington, Sir Kim Darroch, was leaked. Thereafter Trump refused to deal with him and Darroch ended up resigning. This time, things are far worse.

The shiny new Downing Street operation that has come into being since the departure of Sue Gray has decreed that this is going to be 'small boats week'. They have created a media grid with the aim of promoting the idea of Keir Starmer as a strong and authoritative leader busily coordinating measures to accelerate Labour’s plan to 'smash the gangs'. Rather comically, the Sun newspaper was briefed that Starmer will declare the border crisis a 'national security issue', announce a crack new team of investigators, hold talks with Giorgia Meloni and vow to end 'gimmicks'. So that’s three gimmicks followed by a promise not to indulge in gimmicks. It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.

Kemi Badenoch could probably already have served a truncated term as prime minister had she made different choices. Back at the turn of the year, key figures inside the secretive group behind the commissioning of giant MRP polls that indicated how badly the Tories would lose under Rishi Sunak hoped she might indicate her willingness to take over in response. Instead, she played things safe, staying resolutely loyal to the then prime minister and not ‘playing the game’. So the bid to replace Sunak before the election ran out of steam and those involved cast around for an alternative right-wing champion, which they found in the form of Robert Jenrick.

A year ago, the Reform party had an average poll rating of six per cent and was as good as invisible to that large majority of the electorate which does not obsess about politics. Its then leader Richard Tice was showing impressive reserves of stoicism in keeping the show on the road, but there was no sign of lift off. In two parliamentary by-elections, held in Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire on October 19, 2023, Reform scored vote shares of 5.4 per cent and 3.7 per cent respectively. The traditional Tory tactic of trying to depict Farage as not respectable has run its course When Rishi Sunak marks his second anniversary as Tory leader this coming Thursday – and, by the way, no celebration seems to be planned, perhaps he will reflect on his role in transforming its fortunes.