Tom Jones

Tom Jones is the Deputy Online Editor at The Critic

Wednesday

Tom Jones

Sydney Sweeney is hot. Who cares?

From our UK edition

When I was asked to write this article, I was told that I shouldn’t make it ‘too horny’. Some writers have strong personal brands; apparently, I have acquired one. Sydney Sweeney has hit the headlines, again, for an advert, again. In what may seem like a tedious re-run of the last round of Sydney Sweeney discourse – because it is – she has appeared in an advert with no clothing. I wish there were something meatier to the story – careful now – but that’s it. Yet, as Paul Burke has written in The Spectator, ‘In so doing, she’s driven some men wild and some women even wilder – but for very different reasons.

Tuesday

Tom Jones

What Labour’s Jimmy Savile attack on Nigel Farage reveals

From our UK edition

Nigel Farage is on the side of sex offenders like Jimmy Savile. That's the verdict of Labour Technology Secretary Peter Kyle, after the Reform leader criticised the government's Online Safety Act. Kyle, is of course, speaking nonsense: opposing a law that fails to protect children and cracks down on free speech doesn't put you in the same group as Savile. But Kyle's comments do make one thing clear: Labour is seriously rattled about the rise of Reform. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQsA9OdEtEI Farage has demanded an apology from Kyle, who has so far refused to back down. Instead, having told Sky News 'make no mistake if people like Jimmy Savile were alive today he would be perpetrating his crimes online – and Nigel Farage is on their side', Kyle has doubled down.

Tuesday

Tom Jones

Does David Bull know why people vote Reform?

From our UK edition

In a week of high drama, in which Reform lost its chairman and then saw him return 48 hours later, the party could have hoped for a quiet news day. Slim chance of that. After Zia Yusuf returned as party chairman, Reform held a press conference to announce that Yusuf would head the party’s DOGE unit to uncover waste at councils – and would be replaced as chairman by Dr David Bull. A former Conservative, Bull is better known than his predecessor was when taking the role, having formerly presented Newsround and Most Haunted, becoming an MEP for the Brexit party in 2019 and the co-host of the TalkTV weekend breakfast show in 2022. As James Heale notes, he is also popular with members, being both ‘a gregarious character and a longtime Farage loyalist.

Thursday

Tom Jones

Inside the Conservative clubs that are turning Reform

From our UK edition

My first job was working behind the bar of the Richmond Conservative Club in North Yorkshire. The place was as you might expect: dark blue doors, no women in the bar – other than on Fridays – and a ban on red ties. There were portraits on the walls of Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill. The local MP, William Hague, sometimes held his surgeries there. The Richmond club is still open, but many others have closed since the 1950s, when more than a thousand clubs offered cheap beer, snooker and bingo to almost three million Tory members. The party’s membership is now a fraction of what it once was; only 95,000 people voted in last year’s leadership election. Last month, in the run-up to the local elections, Nigel Farage visited the recently closed Frodsham club in Cheshire.

Saturday

Tom Jones

Crying ‘fascism’ didn’t work before, and it won’t work now

From our UK edition

‘Could we get a precise definition of fascism before all this kicks off today?’ So asked Merryn Somerset Webb, a senior columnist at Bloomberg, just before polling day in America. It was – and is – a question worth asking. The election of Donald Trump was inevitably going to draw the comparison, particularly after Kamala Harris (remember her?) said that she believed Donald Trump ‘is a fascist’. There is even a Wikipedia page on ‘Donald Trump and fascism’.