Patrick O’Flynn

Can it just be a coincidence that most of the leading figures of the Tory left lost their seats, while the coming women and men of the right largely held on? Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman all made it back to the Commons while whole phalanxes of would-be leadership contenders from the ‘One Nation’ wing of the party fell by the wayside. Penny Mordaunt, Grant Shapps, Alex Chalk and Gillian Keegan were among the biggest casualties. The coming civil war for the soul of the Tories is shaping up to be a humdinger Perhaps having anti-woke and mass-migration sceptic credentials helped those on the right minimise the Reform vote in their patches and thus avoid a bloodbath that Nigel Farage had far more to do with than Keir Starmer did.

Dry wit is a much under-appreciated quality in this age of high-impact sledgehammer communication. In an election full of sub-standard soundbites and slogans signifying almost nothing, there is an especially strong case to be grateful for the occasional appearance of wit. There was the moment when Nigel Farage mocked the Plaid Cymru chap who was opposing a crackdown on foreign students bringing in dependents by telling him that if you had got a place as an overseas student at a British university it didn’t mean that you should be able to bring your mum. But the gold medal for LOLs must go to the retiring Conservative ex-minister Tim Loughton, who was asked on Sky News what he thought of the Tory campaign and replied with devastating under-statement: 'I’ve seen better.

Today's hot topic for the Rishi Sunak-is-terrible-at-politics club is the foolishness of suspending candidates mired in the election betting scandal a full week after Keir Starmer called for that to happen. It certainly makes Sunak look slow and weak and the Labour leader the safer bet, as it were, to be running the affairs of state. But this is just bog-standard tactical incompetence in the face of an unexpected event. Those of us who have been active in this club for longest know that it is at a strategic level where Sunak’s political cluelessness produces the most dire consequences for his party. Consider the point of attack that Sunak and his lieutenants have been pushing hardest against Labour as we approach the final week of this campaign.

Are you beach-body ready? Boris Johnson, who has always projected a joyously uninhibited confidence about his physical form, clearly thinks that he is. The blond bombshell has been basking in Sardinia and is now reported to have a second summer holiday already in the diary which will keep him away from these chilly shores until Wednesday 3 July. So all the speculation about him helping the Tories out on the campaign trail, being a secret vote-winning weapon and reaching the parts that Rishi Sunak cannot reach, turns out to have been nonsense: he hasn’t offered and he wasn’t asked. Seldom have so many column inches been expended so pointlessly.

Nigel Farage’s tail is up. The Reform party election campaign has gone better than he dared hope and its poll rating is up by several percentage points since he re-entered the fray. Today he went to South Wales to launch what he insisted was not a manifesto, but a ‘contract’ with the electorate over its campaigning priorities for the next five years. He also tacitly acknowledged that its contents were not quite as honed as he might have wanted, owing to the election happening in early July rather than the autumn. Farage has admitted that Reform can’t win this election, but is mainly expecting to secure a Commons bridgehead to assist it in 2029. He probably hopes to nullify criticisms by manifesto nit-pickers from the bigger parties and the media. He is likely to succeed in this.

The great British public seems to have got over its feelings of anger and disillusionment towards the Conservative party. It is mainly just laughing at the Tories now. The descent into outright ridiculousness brought about by the centrist 'sensibles' who currently run the Tory show came across loud and clear in last night’s seven-way ITV debate. Twice the audience responded with spontaneous giggles at the answers given by Penny Mordaunt. The first burst of titters came when she described our education system as world class. In fact, there is much international data to back this up, at least for England where Conservative reforms have paid dividends in rising standards. But such is the extent of public derision for the Tories that almost nobody seems prepared to believe this.

Keir Starmer and the Labour party today launched a manifesto that’s good enough to win this election and presented it in a commensurate manner. If that comes across as damning with faint praise then this is what your author intended. After all, there was – as Beth Rigby of Sky News noted in her question to Starmer – no new policy and no discernible retail offer for voters in the entire manifesto. Starmer made a virtue of that, stressing that all Labour’s ambitions to provide better public services and build a fairer society depended on economic growth picking up to provide the funds to make them happen.

Everyone is finally noticing that Rishi Sunak is rubbish at politics. Given the scale of his faux pas in bailing out of D-Day commemorations early to get back on the campaign trail, it is hard not to. As a longstanding member of the ‘Rishi is Rubbish’ club, I find it difficult not to feel the kind of proprietorial irritation that fans of cult rock bands suffer when their heroes become mainstream. In fairness, this theory of Sunak’s ineptitude – now so validated by evidence it could almost be referred to as ‘the science’ – was first aired not by me but in a New Statesman blog before Sunak even became PM.

The one thing that had gone right for Rishi Sunak in the election campaign to date has now gone wrong. Nigel Farage has been so energised by the first ten days of the election that he has taken back the leadership of the Reform party and decided to stand for parliament in Clacton after all. Tory staffers who had expected to be running a ‘Stop Farage’ operation but were then stood down will now have to be stood back up again. Farage has discerned that this time round, the Tories are truly there for the taking. They have drifted so far from their base on immigration, taxation, crime and net zero as to ignite white hot hostility among parts of it.

To turn Keir Starmer, of all people, into someone who can credibly promise to bring immigration down is an act of perverse genius by the Tory party that is unparalleled in the modern political era. Presented with an open goal, the Labour leader has today stuck the ball in the net by telling readers of the Sun that his changed party will prove it is back in the service of working people by 'not just talking about sky-high migration but acting on it'.  A pledge by Starmer to cut the immigration levels seen under the Tories has got past Labour’s activist base on the grounds of being pitched as a policy to protect British workers from being undercut by unscrupulous bosses.

In the classic comedy Blackadder II the late, great Rik Mayall was responsible for one of the most memorable cameo appearances in television history. As the swashbuckling adventurer Lord Flasheart, he gatecrashed Blackadder’s wedding, declaring himself 'flash by name and flash by nature'. Leaving female guests giddy and male ones open-mouthed in admiration, he then eloped with the spellbound bride. This left Rowan Atkinson’s Sir Edmund to contemplate the horror of a substitute marriage to the bridesmaid, Baldrick. A week into this election, I found myself scouring YouTube for the relevant footage after observing Nigel Farage’s performances to date.