IN shocking news this week, we learned that Nigel Farage has a huge ego.
I know, I was as surprised as you to find out the leader of Reform UK doesn’t take prisoners when it comes to public spats with his own party colleagues who dare to take him on.
This week, we learned that Nigel Farage has a huge ego[/caption]
Reform MP Rupert Lowe publicly challenged and criticised Nigel Farage as a ‘messiah’ leading a ‘protest party’[/caption]
Instead, when fellow Reform MP Rupert Lowe publicly challenged and criticised his party leader as a “Messiah” leading a “protest party”, Farage went straight for the kill and booted him out amid a string of damaging personal allegations.
Lowe, for his part, insists he has been silenced by Farage over speaking out on deportations of illegal migrants, grooming gangs and much more.
He was forced to deny claims from the Reform leader’s allies that he has made violent threats and bullied staff.
Lowe also alleges that senior party figures briefed journalists that he had dementia.
It’s been an unedifying, nasty and bitter battle and no one comes out of it smelling of roses.
Instead, the thorns have left both sides bloodied and scarred — and Reform voters tearing their hair out over the feud.
What on Earth, they are left wondering, has got into these two men to start a public spat over the future of their party when Reform, with just four remaining MPs, is leading in the polls, bidding to win council seats in May’s local elections and the current favourite to win the upcoming Runcorn by-election after the sitting MP was convicted of assault?
The truth is that there is right (and wrong) on both sides. It is true that Farage runs Reform like a feudal lord and that, in order to appeal to a wider electorate and secure the extra votes he needs to become a serious contender for government, he will need to turn his one-man band into a party machine, with a broad range of policies and an array of party spokespeople to front their campaign.
It is also true that no party leader would be willing to put up with one of their own MPs criticising them in public, as Lowe did.
And it is likely that Lowe has allowed Elon Musk’s praise on X/Twitter to go to his head after the billionaire applauded the MP as a better choice of leader than Farage — despite him later admitting he had never met Lowe.
Yet this isn’t ONLY about clashing super-egos. It’s also about policy and the direction of the party.
‘Take on the big beasts’
Rupert Lowe believes that Nigel Farage is moving too far to the centre ground and isn’t radical enough on issues such as the mass deportation of the one million-plus illegal migrants currently living in our country with no right to be here.
Whoever’s side you are on, it doesn’t really matter who’s right and who’s wrong. It matters who can win.
Because, in politics, that is the only thing that really matters.
As Westminster obsessed over the internecine warfare, a poll revealed that most voters don’t actually know who Rupert Lowe is — and that includes Reform voters.
Yet EVERYONE knows who Nigel Farage is.
Many party activists and members may not want to hear it, but the Reform party without Nigel Farage is nothing.
For the pragmatists in Reform, there is no real alternative to Farage
He’s not just the founding father, he is also the face and the name of the party.
If people don’t like that, they are free to set up their own party, which is precisely what Ben Habib, a former deputy leader of Reform also ousted by Farage, has now urged Lowe to join him in doing.
While the right-wing purists online who have been cheering on Lowe might welcome such a move, Monty Python fans will be tempted to recall the scene in Life Of Brian, when the anti-Roman protest group the People’s Front Of Judea blasted their rivals in the Judean People’s Front.
Yet another splinter party will achieve precisely nothing except fragmenting the right wing of British politics still further and ensuring that Labour will be in power with yet another loveless landslide for many years to come.
For the pragmatists in Reform, there is no real alternative to Farage.
If there is one thing he is good at, it is reading the mood of the British people — and he remains the most influential politician of his generation.
With Ukip, he successfully forced David Cameron into promising an EU referendum.
And with the Brexit Party, he was instrumental in Boris Johnson’s 80-strong majority to “get Brexit done”.
This time, though, the stakes are much higher for Farage personally — and for British voters, too.
Now Farage is asking voters to do more than protest with their ballot paper.
He’s asking them to elect him to government as a viable alternative to Labour and the Tories.
If he really wants to take on the big beasts of British politics, then Farage needs to show he can take on all comers, whether from his own side or not.
As we pick ourselves off the floor after the shock of seeing his peacock-like ego, we now know one thing for sure: the Reform party IS Nigel Farage and Nigel Farage IS the Reform party.
And woe betide anyone who forgets that in a hurry.
With UKIP, Farage successfully forced David Cameron into promising an EU referendum[/caption]
GOOD RIDDANCE, NHS
Sir Keir Starmer has announced he is axing the NHS[/caption]
SO farewell then, NHS England.
Keir Starmer has announced he is axing the central bureaucracy that controls more than £190billion a year of funding for healthcare in England.
Up to 10,000 of the organisation’s 15,000 staff are set to go as the PM insisted the “flabby, unfocused and over- cautious” state must get smaller and management of healthcare must be brought back under “democratic control”.
Three cheers for that news!
But why on earth does NHS England have a staff of 15,000, many highly paid, and not one of whom actually runs a hospital or GP surgery, let alone treats a single patient?
That’s one bureaucrat for every nine NHS doctors in England!
Goodbye and good riddance to the NHS paper pushers who are happy to spend our money – while patients are left lying on trollies without the care that they need.
TRUMP THREAT
DONALD TRUMP has threatened to devastate the Russian economy if Vladimir Putin refuses to agree to a Ukraine ceasefire.
Meanwhile Putin’s henchmen insisted any pause in hostilities would only help Kyiv and made impossible demands in return for laying down Russian arms.
Although Ukraine’s president was left with little choice but to agree to a peace deal, Volodymyr Zelensky has cunningly called Putin’s bluff.
The Russian leader somehow managed to convince Trump that it was Zelensky who is the aggressor in this war.
But if Trump fails to punish Putin for refusing to back down, it is the US President who will look like a weak chump for believing Putin’s lies.
The world is watching.
