Patrick O’Flynn

The Reform schism, which the party’s many establishment detractors hoped would prevent it securing a breakthrough at the local elections, is nearly played out. A leak to the BBC of private WhatsApp messages from Nigel Farage about Rupert Lowe, apparently designed to put Farage in a bad light, has in my view done just the opposite. In the messages, which certainly increase suspicions that Lowe was suspended from Reform in part due to a newspaper interview in which he was critical of his party leader, Farage is nonetheless shown to have had one overriding factor in mind: giving his party’s candidates the best platform for winning council seats on 1 May. In his exchanges with a sympathiser of Lowe, Farage declares: ‘He is damaging the party just before elections.

After a spectacular week of feuding, opinion polls appear to show support for Reform UK remains unscathed. Reform somehow still sits at level-pegging with Labour – perhaps even a point ahead – with the Tories several points further adrift. Yet anyone who thinks that the fall-out between Rupert Lowe and Nigel Farage can be dismissed as a little local difficulty which is now safely consigned to the past is liable to be disappointed. Reports reaching the party hierarchy of recent branch meetings say that many grassroots members are ‘raging’ at the treatment of Lowe and seething at the treatment of him by Farage and party chairman Zia Yusuf. Lowe does not seem to be bluffing in his claims to have put ‘teams’ of lawyers on the case.

Sometimes politics throws up a happening of quite exquisite irony. Lee Anderson suspending the whip from Rupert Lowe, his party’s most outspoken MP, a year after the very same thing happened to him is such a moment. Poacher turned gamekeeper indeed. Anderson will of course know that Rishi Sunak’s casting of him into outer darkness did not go well – for Sunak or the Tories. The question we must wrestle with now is how the exile of Lowe is going to go for Reform. In an article written for the Sunday Telegraph today, Nigel Farage himself has admitted there is likely to be a cost, observing: ‘If the last general election taught us anything, it is that the public does not like political parties that engage in constant infighting.

On no issue are Britain’s established political parties so compromised as on efforts to stop illegal immigrants gatecrashing our borders via the English Channel. For half a decade the Tories told us they would stop the crossings and yet the volumes of arrivals kept increasing. Rishi Sunak has just declared that the biggest regret of his premiership is not that he failed to ‘stop the boats’ but that he promised to do so in the first place, showing that his reverse electoral Midas touch is very much intact. Since July, Labour has been peddling a different three-word promise, ‘smash the gangs’. Yet so far the gangs have remained resolutely unsmashed – illegal arrivals via the Channel are at record levels.

Ten years ago the idea of a British prime minister announcing a cut in foreign aid to 0.3 per cent of GDP would have been unthinkable. David Cameron’s Tories had exempted the Department for International Development from austerity, repeatedly declaring that it would be wrong to balance the books on the backs of the world’s poorest people. Naturally, Cameron’s coalition partners the Lib Dems supported this stance, while Labour revelled in having been the party that raised aid spending to this level and legislated to create a legal duty for subsequent governments to maintain it. The case for radically cutting the aid budget only saw the light of day in the 2015 Ukip manifesto, to which I contributed. We suggested a reduction from 0.7 per cent of GDP to 0.

Keir Starmer is just the latest in a long line of prime ministers who says that immigration has been far too high in the past and needs to be greatly reduced. He berates Tory leader Kemi Badenoch constantly on this point, pledging to get a grip on migration volumes and accusing the Conservatives of having presided over a ‘reckless, one nation experiment in open borders.’ It’s a wounding blow to which Badenoch is yet to devise an effective answer. And let’s face it, being outflanked on migration scepticism by Starmer, a man who once declared that ‘a racist undercurrent… permeates all immigration law’, ought to hurt.

Who in Westminster is ‘right-wing’ on immigration? Which parties are actively propelling the Overton window to the right? If you listened to some mid-wit urban leftists you’d think all three parties jostling to be top of the polls – Reform, Labour and (least successfully) the Tories – are engaged in a mad political arms race on the subject. Clive Lewis, the left-wing Labour MP, this week accused ministers of ‘enabling the mainstreaming of racism’ by putting out a video of people being deported. Certainly, we have travelled a distance from the days when even attempting to create a ‘hostile environment’ for illegal immigrants was deemed unconscionable.

Voters simply haven’t taken to the party leader and that’s becoming impossible to ignore. Presenting the public at the next election with a figure they don’t like, rate or agree with would be madness. So at some stage a new leader will have to be installed. There are certainly some mutterings to this effect in Tory circles, about Kemi Badenoch. But the die is not cast on that. Instead, we must look across the aisle to find the leader who has reached the point of no return. Cold, aloof, po-faced and priggish, the PM has set about alienating vast swathes of the electorate at breakneck pace Perhaps this sounds counterintuitive given that Keir Starmer sits at the head of an army of more than 400 Labour MPs?

Can we trust the Conservatives to deliver – or even to try to deliver – on whatever migration-sceptic policy pledges they unveil for the 2029 general election? It would be wrong to say that the party’s record on this issue is chequered or that it has been unreliable in the past. Because during the 21st century it has been 100 per cent reliable – reliable in letting us down. The Tory party has never delivered on its immigration promises and never put much effort into doing so either. In 2010, 2015 and 2017 it promised voters that annual net migration would be cut to 'the tens of thousands'. In 2019, when it was handed a bumper 80-seat majority, it pledged that 'overall numbers will come down'.

British politics is in a new place: the combined polling score of Labour and the Conservatives is below 50 per cent for the first time in living memory. The latest polls have Labour averaging 26 per cent and the Tories 23 per cent. This is a nine point reduction on the terrible combined score of 58 per cent that the two traditional main parties obtained on polling day last year – the lowest ever recorded at a general election. The picture becomes even worse for the traditional duopoly if one drills down to public perceptions of them on the main political issues. Looking at YouGov’s regular series of 'which party would be best at…?' questions emphasises the point.

This morning Keir Starmer implied but did not categorically say that Islamist ideology was not the motivation of the dreadful Axel Rudakubana. The Prime Minister referred several times to the 18-year-old’s heinous crimes as constituting an example of ‘a new threat’ from ‘loners and misfits’, and to Rudakubana having viewed ‘all kinds of material’ online. Much else was left unresolved. Was the man who murdered three little girls in Southport and maimed many others motivated in any way by an Islamist agenda? Are claims that he attended the mosque in Belmarsh prison while held on remand true or false? Whether the material Rudakubana viewed included ‘extreme jihadi videos,’ as Nigel Farage claimed on GB News last night, was also left unanswered.

Conventional wisdom says the Tory leadership of Kemi Badenoch is close to crisis. This is perhaps because the prevailing political mood is much more heavily influenced by hindsight than by foresight. The manufacture of almost every opinion that gains the status of conventional wisdom depends on a time lag to allow its repetition and dispersal among mid-wit cadres. The polls seem to at least back up the view that Badenoch is in trouble; most aggregation sites put Reform above the Conservatives in terms of average ratings. Yet patterns of opinion recorded in polls are also based on a time lag, capturing the impact of events that first came to public attention a couple of weeks previously. Badenoch had a bumpy December There is no doubt that Badenoch had a bumpy December.

When the anti-corruption minister is accused of corruption by a foreign government and has no prospect of being able to shut the story down any time soon, it is perfectly obvious that her position is untenable. Yet Keir Starmer allowed the furore over Tulip Siddiq to run for several weeks before the obvious resolution – that she must step down from her ministerial role – was implemented.  The Tulip Siddiq furore may drop out of the headlines but it could return in a more virulent form Siddiq was named as a suspect in a corruption investigation by Bangladesh back on 19 December.

Is Reform about to become the most popular political party in Britain, overtaking both Labour and the Tories in national opinion polls? The rise of the light blue peril in opinion surveys since the general election at the expense of both major parties has certainly caused jitters in Westminster. MPs from more established parties know that Reform hitting the front would be a major story in itself and could generate a ‘feedback loop’ that could further stretch its lead.  Following a bumpy Christmas for Kemi Badenoch, the latest Spectator poll tracker which aggregates surveys up to 8 January, has Labour averaging 27 per cent, the Tories just over 23 per cent and Reform just under 23 per cent.

The refusal of western elites to admit the failings of multiculturalism, and their ongoing molly-coddling of minority vested interests, is giving birth to white identity politics. That’s the troubling big picture takeout from recent events across the West – the Trump landslide, England’s summer riots, the reluctant dribbling out of statistics showing some foreign national groups are vastly over-represented in criminality (including sex crimes) and now the clamour for a specific public inquiry into rape gangs formed by Pakistani heritage men. A long-running and concerted attempt by the political class to sustain a framework that depicted minority groups always as victims and never as victimisers has run its course.

British politics can only be understood right now if one realises that Keir Starmer is presiding over a “landslide minority” government: two thirds of the seats on one third of the vote. On the parliamentary maths, things are about as rosy as can be for Labour. It has more than 400 MPs and the Tories just 121. The Lib Dems – in effect Labour’s reserve fuel tank – have a bumper crop of 72 MPs from last July. No other party grouping gets into double figures. None of the main planks of Labour’s programme enjoys much public support This is the sort of dominance which traditionally betokens an administration fully in charge of the zeitgeist and able to implement radical change with justified confidence. Think Thatcher post-1983 or Blair post-1997.