How decisions made by an orange-tinged, near-80-year-old man with dwindling power (and wits) may just move people to become pissed off enough to do some very idiotic things.

Now, I say apropos of nothing right at the top, but everyone will already know why I’m writing this piece today - and many of you will have had the same thoughts waking up to the multiple BBC notifications blinking on your mobile phone this morning.

Because it happened again.

Last night at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, there was, what may or may not be - another attempt on Donald J. Trump’s life. The details are still making their way through the news cycle, and the full picture will take some time to put together, but needless to say, there was an “incident.”

If it was another attempt, however, then let me be absolutely crystal clear about something:

The assassination of Donald J Trump would have been utterly catastrophic.

Not for the reasons Trump’s supporters would claim, nor in the way his enemies might privately calculate. It would have been catastrophic because there is almost nothing more perfectly designed to do a full resuscitation on his administration’s legacy, energise its base, and hand the MAGA movement a martyr that would even further radicalise them into madness.

Think about it for a moment.

Donald Trump’s approval numbers are in freefall. Consumer sentiment is at a 74-year low. The people who voted for economic competence are watching their grocery bills rise and their retirement funds stall. The coalition is fraying. And then - an assassination attempt.

Overnight, every legitimate grievance becomes noise. Every protest becomes suspect. Every critic becomes, in the telling of the movement, complicit in a culture of violence. The man who has done more damage to American institutions, global alliances, and the world’s most vulnerable people than any president in the modern era would be transformed, instantly, into a symbol - a saint, even, in the church of grievance politics.

It would be the greatest gift anyone could give him - and whoever considered giving it to him, is either a fool, a plant, or someone who has thought about this so little that they deserve the full contempt of everyone who actually wants things to change.

With that all said, however, let’s talk about why the fury exists - because the fury is legitimate, even if last night’s alleged expression of it was not.

We are fifteen months into this administration, and the scale of what has happened is so vast, so relentless, and so deliberately disorienting that most of us - even those of us who professionally or semi-professionally track it - have genuinely struggled to keep up.

Every week brings a new outrage. A new policy reversal. A new set of smokescreens designed to protect one man and one man alone. A new White House tweet about dismantling some federal agency that quietly kept things working.

By the time you’ve processed Tuesday, Thursday has already happened. This is, of course, not accidental - the Trump administration have become masters at “flooding the zone”.

That doesn’t mean that people aren’t holding a tally, and good god, that tally is rising rapidly - with the most obvious place for Americans being with the shelves and the bills.

The average American household is now expected to pay approximately $1,000 to $1,500 more per year as a direct result of Trump’s tariff regime. That’s the average. For lower-income families who spend more of their income on goods rather than services, the number is worse. Beef is up 16% since January 2025. Coffee - the one thing people are clinging to as a comfort in dark times - is up nearly 20%.

Nearly 40,000 supermarket products are affected, either directly or through the cascading effect of higher input costs across supply chains. Trump, ever helpfully, spent much of 2025 assuring Americans that grocery prices were “going rapidly down.” Except that they were not - and even his own Agriculture Department said so.

Consumer sentiment hit an all-time low in April 2026. And just to clarify, that’s not a pandemic low, or a since 2008 low - it’s the lowest in the survey’s entire 74-year history, with three of the worst readings ever recorded have all occurred in the past nine months. The auto industry, meanwhile, has been gutted by the very tariffs designed to protect it. Ford reported an $8.2 billion loss. Workers the policy was supposed to save lost their jobs anyway. You can almost hear the logic completing its own circle.

While the tariff wars dominated headlines, something even more insidious and destructive was happening inside the machinery of American government. The Department of Government Efficiency - which is neither a department, nor particularly efficient, nor in any meaningful sense about government - set about cutting the federal workforce with the enthusiasm of someone who has never had to call the Social Security Administration on behalf of an elderly parent. The SSA was already at a 25-year staffing low. DOGE cut it further. Field offices closed. Phone lines went unanswered.

As of mid-2025, nearly one million people were waiting for disability benefit decisions. In 2023 alone, 30,000 people died while waiting for those same decisions. You do not need to be a statistician to work out the trajectory. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau - which had quietly returned $26 billion to ordinary Americans cheated by banks and payday lenders since 2011 - was effectively shuttered. The CDC lost 10% of its workforce in a single day. The NIH received a proposed budget cut of $48 billion. Cancer research. HIV prevention. Clinical trials. Cancelled. A scientist quoted last December described it as “a huge rupture in everything.”

They were not being melodramatic.

The impact, as anyone outside of the United States knows, has also not been isolated to just America - it has been global.

On his first day back in office, Trump withdrew the United States from the World Health Organisation - its single largest donor, gone. He shut down USAID and terminated 90% of its programming. HIV treatment clinics in South Africa closed overnight. Malnutrition programmes across Africa and Asia stopped without warning. By early 2026, tracking models estimated that over 750,000 people - the majority of them children - had already died as a direct result of the aid funding cuts. That is 88 deaths every hour.

A Lancet study published in February 2026 projected that if current trajectories continue, at least 9.4 million additional deaths could occur by 2030. A child under five, according to Oxfam’s modelling, could die every forty seconds by that point. The initial White House response was that “no one has died because of USAID cuts.”

This is not a claim that is holding up to even the lightest of scrutiny.

The problem we have is that these numbers are so large they become abstract, but they describe real people. People who were alive in January 2025 and are not now, because a government on the other side of the planet decided that foreign aid was an indulgence it could no longer be bothered with.

Here in the UK, the experience has been different. Not catastrophic, but thoroughly, persistently unpleasant. The Special Relationship - that grand transatlantic fiction we’ve been polishing for 80 years - has taken a battering. Keir Starmer did his patient, careful, undignified best to remain on good terms with Washington. He was rewarded with a trade deal that reduced some tariffs while the US continued to treat the UK largely as a minor inconvenience in its broader economic war.

Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s emotional support billionaire at the time, spent chunks of 2025 opining about British domestic politics on his own platform in ways the Home Secretary and Prime Minister found it necessary to formally rebuke. The Iran war - which the UK had absolutely no role in starting - is now projected by the IMF to hit the British economy harder than any other major developed nation. 2026 growth revised down to 0.8%.

British households are experiencing what commentators have taken to calling “Trumpflation.” Energy bills. Food costs. Mortgage rates. All of these rapidly rising in the wake of a conflict Britain didn’t choose, driven by an oil price spike Britain can’t control. Around 25,000 UK jobs are at risk from tariffs on car imports alone. Aston Martin has already announced cuts. The irony - that a president who promised to put America First is managing to also put Britain Last - would be funnier if it weren’t costing people money they don’t have.

None of this is surprising if you were paying attention - the project was never hidden. The tariffs, dismantling of federal agencies, retreat from alliances and the abandonment of the world’s most vulnerable. Every single one of these were in the platform, the cabinet appointments and the rhetoric. People were warned - loudly and repeatedly.

No one should be surprised at the level of feeling, the protests and the outright fury. The sense, spreading across continents, that something profoundly wrong is happening. What we should also not be surprised by - and what last night, if the reports are accurate, illustrates with grim clarity - is that a small number of people will eventually decide that fury is not enough and that they should take matters into their own hands.

They will be wrong. They will be catastrophically, strategically, morally wrong.

Because the one thing that Donald Trump’s second term has not yet managed to produce is a unifying myth - a successful attempt on his life would hand him one. Fully formed. Wrapped in a flag. Ready for the history books he’s been angling to rewrite since the moment he came down that escalator.

The world is watching and keeping score, and the only reckoning that will actually matter is the one that arrives through ballots, through courts, and through the slow, grinding work of holding power to account.

Anything else just makes him stronger.

And yes, the receipts are included.

Nigel Farage is, unsurprisingly to anyone, all in a huff.

A terrible one in fact. I haven’t seen him this huffy since Beth Rigby asked him about his house, sorry, I mean, his girlfriend’s house in Clacton, which was met with a “How dare you?!” that was reminiscent of a Victorian Aristocrat accused of being a bore.

His new huffiness, however, is a rather different strain - he is terribly, terribly upset that Keir Starmer in his Keynote speech at the Labour Conference had the temerity, the audacity (and some might say the balls) to call Reform policies racist.

Shocking. I know.

The melodramatic performance of wounded dignity was, as expected when it comes to Farage, positively Oscar-worthy - a video posted on Reform where he bloviated loudly about how very unfair it all was. Zia Yusuf, Reform’s ex-chairman and now policy chief took it even further, claiming that Starmer in his speech was “inciting violence” against Farage by using the “R-word1”, because apparently accurately describing overtly discriminatory policies that mainly affect minority groups is now tantamount to putting out a hit. The victimhood was so thick you could spread it on toast.

The problem with Farage’s indignation is a big one though: it demands that we all collectively pretend that Reform does not, in fact, have a well-documented, extensively catalogued and repeatedly exposed problem with racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia running through the party like rot through timber2.

Which it absolutely does.

The Receipts

Between April 2024 and September 2025, Reform UK has been directly associated with twenty incidents of racist, xenophobic or Islamophobic behaviour by its members, councillors, candidates and activists.

Now I have to be emphatic about this - these weren’t rumours or allegations, whispered in shadowy Westminster corridors. They were documented, on the record and often caught on camera or preserved in the wonder that is social media screenshots that will haunt these people longer than a bad tattoo of a sexy bear on the inside of their left thigh3.

This is not a “few bad apples” situation, it’s a whole damned cider press ponging of rot with Farage standing next to it insisting very loudly that it smells like Roses.

In the interest of context, I will below walk through each and every incident, because that context matters when people are claiming they’re being unfairly maligned.

Method note: Incidents compiled from contemporaneous news reports, public posts, and watchdog investigations between April 2024 and September 2025.

1. On 26 June 2024, Andrew Parker, an activist for Reform UK was caught on Channel 4’s undercover investigation using racial slurs about then PM Rishi Sunak and describing Islam as “the most disgusting cult out,” and casually suggesting that the army should be using refugees crossing the Channel for “target practice”. This, according to Farage, was “ordinary folk” speaking, as if your average person down at the pub regularly advocates for using asylum seekers as live ammo practice. Parker was eventually disowned by Reform, but only after Farage made one of his favourite claims - that it was a “political setup.” Parker’s colleague, George Jones, a party volunteer, was also caught making offensive comments in the same investigation and was quietly shuffled out of the campaign with no formal censure or accountability.

2. On 29 August 2025, James Regan, a Reform Councillor in Epping Forest, described an asylum hotel as a “paedophile babysitting centre” and called Islam “an evil criminal cartel of evil pedo’s.” He was eventually suspended, but only after what was significant public pressure. The initial response from Reform? Silence that spoke absolute volumes.

3. On 24 August 2025, Darren Grimes - ex-GB News Presenter, Reform’s deputy leader of Durham County Council and newly minted elected member of Reform’s national board - posted a video that his brother had sent him on a boat in Scarborough alongside a family made up of, shockingly, brown people, including children. His caption: “I had to ask him if he was on a dinghy to Dover, but then I realised there are women and children on board.” North East Mayor Kim McGuinness accused him, rightly so, of “inciting racism and hate,” to which Grimes responded that he was merely “making an observation about demographic change” and that “love of country is not hate.4”

4. On 23 June 2025, Andrew Barry, a Reform UK councillor for Merthyr Tydfil, was recorded in a voicemail in which he described Pakistanis as “tribal” and claiming “they don’t just dislike us, they dislike Sikhs.” He talked about the “tens of thousands of them in cities” in tones that would make even Enoch Powell say “woah down a little there, boyo.” Welsh political leaders called the remarks “absolutely racist” while Reform, somewhat predictably, defended him by claiming that his comments had been “taken out of context.5” Barry, as of 1 October 2025 remains a Reform councillor.

5. On 29 May 2025, Mark Broadhurst, Reform UK councillor in Doncaster, was expelled from Reform for posting a meme suggesting that Adolf Hitler would have been “a legend” if only he’d chosen to exterminate Muslims instead of Jews - a sitting councillor posting Nazi apologia with an Islamophobic twist. Even though he was expelled by Reform, the fact that he felt comfortable posting this in the first place should be a good indicator of party culture.

6. On 26 August 2025 it was reported that Robert Bloom, Reform UK councillor for North Northamptonshire had allegedly used racial slurs against a black family while threatening to involve far-right extremists while telling them that they wouldn’t receive fair treatment from the council due to their race. A by-election will now be held on 9 October for the Lloyds and Corby village ward.

7. On 16 April 2025 it was reported that Ron Firman, a then candidate and Parish councillor Hunsbury Ward had posted multiple racist tweets, including that refugees should be ejected from aircraft mid-flight, made derogatory remarks about Grenfell tower victims and for good measure threw in a few KKK references. The parish council issued a reminder about conduct, Reform UK refused to comment. He remains a Reform member and parish councillor.

8. On 29 June 2024, three candidates were dropped simultaneously:

   1. Edward Oakenfull, the Reform candidate for Derbyshire Dales had posted comments on social media about the supposed IQ levels of sub-Saharan Africans.

   2. Robert Lomas, standing for Barnsley North stated that black people should “get off [their] lazy arses” and stop “acting like savages”.

   3. Lesley Lilley, the candidate for Southend East and Rochford took to describing people arriving on small boats as “scum” and added the delightful little sentiment that “I hope your family get robbed, beaten or attacked.” All three candidates were dropped by Reform, but it took media exposure to make them realise that these people were liabilities rather than assets.

9. On 10 May 2025 it was reported that Paul Harrison, a Reform UK councillor from Leicestershire County Council retweeted and voted “yes” to a Twitter poll asking the question whether the UK should conduct mass deportations with an accompanying AI generated picture of Muslim men holding Pakistani flags. As of 1 October 2025 he remains a Reform UK councillor for North West Leicestershire.

10. On 8 April 2025, the Sunday Times ran a story that featured a bumper crop of extremism that strongly suggested that Reform UK’s vetting was less “professional screening” and more “anyone with a pulse and a grudge.”

    1. Pete Addis, the candidate form South Shropshire made the comment a comment that “Bum sex, this is where brown babies come from!”

    2. Amodio Amato, standing for Stevenage, described London as “an Islamic State” and said there would be “a Muslim army run by Sadiq Khan.”

    3. Jonathan Kay tweeted that muslims could “never coexist with others” and should face deportation, while also claiming that Africans had IQs “among the lowest in the world.”

    4. Mick Greenhough was found to have posted that the government should “remove Muslims from our territory” and calling Ashkenazi Jews a “problem” who “caused the world massive misery.6”

    5. Ian Harris, candidate for Lewes had liked7 a tweet by Nick Griffin, former leader of the BNP, that had described the UK as a “bankrupt, crime ridden, LGBTQ-obsessed, multicultural shithole” and another tweet by Tommy Robinson (aka. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) that called for “mass deportations.” Reform at this stage promised more vetting. We are still waiting.

11. On 26 April 2024, Richard Brown, the Reform candidate for Harrogate and Knaresborough, was exposed for having shared Tommy Robinson content, promoted “Ban the Burqa” groups, circulated “Sharia Controlled Zones” memes and dabbled in Anti-Vaccine conspiracy theories. He was, truly, the full bingo-card of far-right talking points, all neatly packaged into one candidate profile. He was eventually dropped by Reform UK.

12. On 15 May 2025, Wayne Titley who had just two weeks before won the Eccleshall and Gnosall division for Reform UK, stepped down after a Facebook post from his account called on the navy to intercept small boats attempting to reach the UK and use a “volley of gunfire aimed at sinking them.”

13. On 27 August 2025, Paul Bean, a councillor for Durham County Council, and more worryingly, a civil servant who, as his job, processes asylum claims, was suspended by Reform for allegedly posting anti-asylum content including that “97% of asylum seekers are lying about persecution… Source: me. Guess what job I do.”

A big one worth adding, even though he was not connected to Reform at the time, is of course none-other than 30p Lee Anderson. In February 2024, while still a Conservative MP, he claimed that “Islamists had control” of Sadiq Khan and accused him of “giving the capital away to extremists.”

The comments were so egregious that even the Conservative Party, not a group of people known for their low threshold for discrimination, suspended him when he refused to apologise. He sat as an Independent MP for a short period, before catching the eye of Reform who looked at a man who had just been suspended for blatantly Islamophobic comments and said to themselves “Yes, that’s exactly who we want as our very first person to represent our party in the House of Commons.”

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Twenty incidents in eighteen months. A mix of elected councillors (including a deputy council leader and Reform board member, parliamentary candidates and one MP they actively recruited weeks after he was suspended on camera. Activists caught on camera.

There is a pattern here that is so clear that you’d have to be wilfully blind not to see it - or wilfully dishonest not to admit it.

Patterns of Discrimination: Islamophobia as Policy

If you’ve been keeping score while reading this - and you should be, because it’s clear that Reform is refusing to do so - you may have noticed something somewhat telling about the nature of these incidents.

When you start examining the incidents and their themes, even with minimal rigour, one thing becomes very apparent: Islamophobia isn’t just tolerated within Reform UK, it makes up the dominant strain of what appears to be an endemic issue of prejudice.

Where it becomes even more insidious though is that it isn’t just limited to grassroot bigotry, but becoming baked into Reform’s policy platform.

Sarah Pochin, Reform UK’s MP who joined the ranks as MP for Runcorn and Helsby after winning the by-election in May 2025 used her first question to Keir Starmer to advocate for a Burqa ban. Despite initially resigning in response to this, Zia Yusuf has since warmed to the idea by calling the Burqa a “huge impediment to assimilation.” This policy would specifically target Muslim women and seems designed to use the language of integration to justify what is, for the most part, religious discrimination.

The Reform-controlled Durham County Council made the decision to cancel all diversity training, with critics rightfully stating that it “reintroduces racism, sexism and discrimination.” The party’s manifesto explicitly commits them to eliminating all diversity, equality and inclusion roles across government, purposefully removing institutional protections against workplace discrimination.

Their recently proposed immigration policies that aims for the removal of settlement status for specifically non-EU migrants who are already in the UK legally - a position so extreme that even Keir Starmer, not exactly known for radical “leftism”, described it as “racist” and warned that it would “tear our country apart.”

Reform wants you to believe that any racism is accidental, that it’s isolated, the result of rapid growth and inadequate vetting, but when your official policies would institutionalise discrimination against specific religious or ethnic minorities, you can’t, in any way, credibly claim the problem is just a few bad actors gone rogue.

Not, of course, that they haven’t tried.

The Defences They Wheel Out (And Why They’re Nonsense)

Because, by God, they have tried.

Reform has developed a well practiced repertoire of defences of their racism problem, each one more threadbear than the last - and I think it’s absolutely working through them, one by one, because they absolutely deserve to be dismantled and examined a bit more closely.

“Ordinary Folk Speaking”

We saw this specific excuse rolled out in the case of Andrew Parker above when Reform was challenged. They tried to sell us the idea that the racism being spread by people connected to them as “ordinary people” speaking in non-political language and claimed that candidates and supporters are just “speaking like ordinary folks” and are not part of the “mainstream political Oxbridge speak.”

This defence is, to put it mildly, weapons-grade nonsense.

The documented incidents go well beyond what could be considered “political incorrectness” and veer perilously closely to incitement of violence.

In the cases of Parker, suggesting that migrants be used for “target practice” and James Regan calling Islam “an evil criminal cartel of evil pedo’s” isn’t a lack of polish, they’re explicit examples of hate speech.

Mark Broadhurst posting Nazi apologia memes isn’t in any way unfiltered authenticity - it’s Nazi apologia (the clue is in the name).

“Ordinary folk” don’t usually and casually advocate for genocide or for refugees to be shot in the Channel, and if your “ordinary folks” are doing so, you might want to examine just the kind of “ordinary” you’re cultivating.

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“Rapid Growth” Excuse

Another consistent excuse that has been used is rapid expansion has impeded their vetting attempts, with the argument being that they can’t possibly screen the massive influx of new members and candidates. Farage has claimed that Reform is a “fast-growing movement” and that they face challenges “working with many activists they may not have met before.”

Except that this defence doesn’t just fail because it betrays massive disorganisation on behalf of Reform - it also actively contradicts their own actions.

In July 2025, Reform deliberately started relaxing their vetting standards, telling their prospective candidates who had previously failed vetting to “reapply under new ‘common sense’ standards” that were “more proportionate than before” and gave more weight to “individual freedom of expression.”

Just read that again - they didn’t struggle to vet candidates because of rapid growth, they consciously lowered the bar and invited back extremists who had already been rejected once. That’s a deliberate choice to welcome back racists into the fold.

They have, in effect, admitted that it’s less a case of “we’re growing too fast to maintain standards” and more “we’ve decided that standards are terribly inconvenient.”

“Professional Vetting System” Claims

In contradiction to the “rapid growth” excuse, Farage has also previously claimed that Reform had implemented “a vetting system that was as good if not better than the other parties”, and boasted that “proper professional vetting” was in place.

Except that the evidence, including previous comments by Farage, suggest otherwise.

He admitted that Reform did “zero” due diligence had been performed on James McMurdock when he was suspended following questions COVID loans, stating explicitly that “there was no due diligence on him at all. Zero.”

This is despite the statements made by Farage in June 2024 that they had paid vetting.com £144k for candidate screening services but had received “absolutely nothing” in return.

Their stance on vetting makes my head spin - it veers from “we professionally vet all our candidates” to “well, we didn’t vet anyone at all” and then again to “well, we’re taking a much more common sense approach to vetting now, so everyone who had previously been kicked out, have another go.”

And when those clear vetting failures became public, Farage fell back on his favourite excuse of them all.

“We’re being stitched up”

“Being stitched up” is an excuse that has been used by Farage, for among others:

• The above mentioned Channel 4 Racism Investigation.

• The Coutts decision to “debank” him.

• UKIP Resignation Confusion.

In the particular context of a large number of candidates with openly racist views getting through vetting… yup. Stitched up.

The excuse here goes that Reform had been “stitched up” by their vetting company, with the specific allegation being that it was an “establishment stitch-up”, because the company’s chair had previous Tory connections.

This particular excuse, as with so many others, collapses under its own weight with even the most mild of scrutiny. Reform knew about the vetting owner’s Conservative background, but hired them anyway.

The company explained that they didn’t have time to complete checks due to the snap election timing - a perfectly reasonable logistical explanations.

All these points being thrown together again contradicts any claims by Reform being victims of sabotage.

“Individual Bad Actors”

Reform UK has in the past chosen to frame racist incidents as involving individual members whose views don’t represent the organisation, with officials claiming to disown problematic behaviour as soon as it’s exposed - except of course when that doesn’t happen.

When Councillor Andrew Barry made his xenophobic comments about Pakistanis, the party, instead of immediately disowning these comments, defended him and claimed his remarks were “taken out of context”, while Reform UK’s own official Facebook Groups, administered by party officials, contain extensive racist content that remains largely unchallenged.

When your “individual bad actors” include elected councillors, parliamentary candidates, activists and official social media administrators, you have moved on from having an “individual” problem straight into having an institutional one.

Reform UK is Racist

When we start considering both the incidents involving racism from people who are pretty directly connected to Reform and then weight it up against their responses and actions to these, I feel you can’t help but coming to the conclusion that, yes, Reform UK is, in fact racist.

And I am saying that directly - in complete contravention with a sudden norm that’s found itself into our discourse that calling something racist has suddenly become worse than the act of racism itself. Terming something “racist” has now come with a side of squeamishness that I find, to be very frank, gross.

Reform has over the past few years been one of the players who have weaponised this squeamishness rather brilliantly. When Keir Starmer called their policies racist (which they are), all hell broke loose.

This has parallels to when Robert Jenrick recently wrote in an op ed for the Daily Mail that he didn’t want his children sharing a neighbourhood with “immigrant men with backwards views who broke into Britain illegally.” When Dr Krish Kandiah pointed out on BBC’s Thought for the Day that this language was xenophobic, the BBC apologised. Not, of course to migrants who might be smeared by Jenrick’s rhetoric - but to Jenrick himself. For someone daring to accurately describe his words.

This is the environment Reform UK now operates in, and happily exploits - they can traffic in blatant racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia, but the moment someone dares to name it accurately, they’re suddenly the victim, shifting the focus from substance to etiquette and from prejudice to politeness.

Laurence Fox took this particular strategy to its logical extreme when he decided to sue two critics for calling him racist after he had called them paedophiles. To no one’s surprise whatsoever, the High Court ruled in favour of his critics, finding that while Fox’s accusations towards the claimants were “seriously harmful, defamatory and baseless”, his counter claim that “racist” was somehow more libellous was thrown in the bin where it deserved to live.

The fact that Fox’s case happened at all though tells you everything about how successfully the word “racist” has been weaponised and slurrified to a worrying extent.

About That Huff

We return ourselves now to Farage’s theatrical outrage at being called a racist - all that performance of wounded dignity, the claims of unfair treatment and media persecution, the suggestion that accurately describing Reform’s policies and membership is now, somehow, beyond the pale.

What Farage would dearly like you to forget is his own history of racist and xenophobic statements. Naming Enoch Powell as his political hero. Claiming parts of Britain “look like a foreign land” due to migration. Suggesting Muslims lack British values and all “loathe us.”

He’s very keen on you forgetting all the documented incidents that I point out in this piece - the councillors, candidates, members and activists caught on camera or in writing expressing their unveiled hatred of minorities. The Facebook groups full of racist conspiracy theories administered by party officials. The policies that he is pushing himself that would further institutionalise discrimination.

He would love for you to believe that the real scandal is that Keir Starmer used the word “racist” to describe racist policy - that the true victim, as ever, is Nigel Farage, with his TV show, his column inches, his handful of MPs, his growing membership, his many donors - not the minority communities targeted by his party’s rhetoric, membership and policies.

The farce of it all is that this strategy now so often works. We’ve become so squeamish about naming racism and xenophobia and Islamophobia that we’d rather engage in endless meta-debates about whether it’s appropriate to use the word than confront the monster it describes.

But here’s the truth that Farage’s huff is designed to obscure - when nearly half the British public perceives your party and it’s policies as racist, when 20 incidents in 18 months document systematic discrimination, when your policies would institutionalise prejudice against minorities - you don’t have a perception problem.

You have an accuracy problem.

The evidence of rampant racism isn’t being manipulated, and there is no large scale “stitch up”. The data isn’t being twisted and the quotes aren’t being taken out of context.

When Reform is being described as racist, that is accurate, and Farage’s huff is the sound of someone who wishes that reality will bend itself around his needs. Reality, as it turns out though, doesn’t much care about Nigel Farage’s wounded dignity or his performative victimhood - and neither should you.

The racism is real. The xenophobia is documented. The Islamophobia is systematic, and no amount of huffing and puffing will blow that house of evidence down.

This article is from our greatly appreciated regular contributor Claire Jones, and it’s a piece that asks some uncomfortable but necessary questions about how we’re engaging with politics right now. It doesn’t flatter, it doesn’t shout, and it feels particularly important as we head into the local elections.

If you have any ideas that you would like to contribute to Bearly Politics, please feel free to send those to iratusursusmajor@gmail.com.

Reform is still polling strongly, escaping mainstream media scrutiny, receiving absurdly large amounts of funding, and enjoying fragmentation and non-co-operation among left block parties. Hence, in the upcoming May council and Senedd elections, we, as progressive campaigners from the left and centre left, have a vital role in curbing Reform support. This, then, is a good moment to pause for some introspection.

The locked room

Progressives are good at intellectual navel-gazing. Imagine a room with many doors, each firmly locked but containing a letter box through which corroborating information pours daily – in-depth investigations of Reform’s questionable finances, new angles on Reform’s climate denialism and radical-right links, more Reform councillor revelations. Locked inside, we drown in an excess of supporting evidence, up to our necks in paper, unable to move outside and act where we could make the biggest difference.

Most viewers of this ever-replenishing corner of the political ecosystem are on the same ideological page. Faith is placed in the ‘outward ripple’ principle that some progressive content will somehow make it somewhere beyond the echo-chamber walls. But we have to question the efficacy of this supposed movement. If it happens, arguably, its influence is marginal.

Continuing investigative research and analysis is essential. But we should also go forth and communicate with Reformers, using our understanding of them and their perceptions of us to refine our messaging.

“Campaign groups need to be better at getting out into the community” Nick Lowles

The ‘persuadables’

Of the five voter types that emerged from Hope Not Hate’s research, three groups, together representing over 50% of Reform supporters, are persuadable: squeezed stewards, reluctant reformers, and contrarian youth. They share deep cynicism about establishment parties and want radical change.

Undecided voters are another key demographic. For brevity I’ll refer to all these ‘persuadables’ as ‘Reformers’.

Automatic barriers

But do we really understand how we’re perceived? Assumptions Reformers make about progressive campaigners are significant obstacles to communication. We are the ‘snowflake wokerati’- soft middle-class elites detached from the grinding existential coal face of life, a dodgy bunch of sandal-wearing, tax-hiking, motorway-blocking tree-huggers, contemptuous of people’s desire to restore cherished traditional values. Instead we favour crackpot ideas fed us by climate science quacks, and the deeply gender confused, whilst welcoming in alien invading cultures.

They perceive us, frankly, like we perceive them – as ill-informed, dangerously manipulated by propaganda, and a threat. This is a poor starting point for campaigning.

Polarisation

These preconceptions are amplified via relentless rage-baiting from press and social media that tips defensiveness into hostility. The left and right blocks are no longer two sides of one nation separated only by finer points of difference on economic strategy, state intervention, taxation, etc. Polarisation has shunted us into fundamentally different opposing universes.

It’s clear Labour lacks the will to tackle the media’s pernicious role in this process. The Levison Inquiry gathers dust whilst OFCOM continues pretending GB News is news. But, instead of railing from the safe confines of our echo-chamber about media toxicity, we have, for now, to work with it.

Elements of truth

Nor are the Reformer’s perceptions of us pure caricature. It turns out we are prone to self-righteous intolerance of opposing views and presumptuousness about the self-evident correctness of our own. Research by More in Common revealed that progressive activists grossly overestimated voter support for taking in more refugees, placing it 17% higher than the actual rate. We’re also more likely to believe our opponents have been misled by misinformation. 72% viewed Leave voters negatively, in contrast to “backbone conservatives” only 24% of whom viewed Remainers with the same contempt.

Labels like “judgemental and dogmatic” aren’t entirely unfounded. To deter Reformers we must recognise our own assumptions and prejudices and how they might influence our campaigns.

Complacency

In the meantime, these preconceptions add to the unsurprising feeling that facing Reformers is daunting and ‘sitting it out’ more appealing. We quietly hope events will step in and do our work – that some huge scandal uncovered by diligent investigative journalists will hasten Reform’s recent poll dip, or that, strained by the weight of Farage’s ego, the party will internally combust.

But it would be folly to rely on these outcomes. It’s how democracies get caught out by the sneaking creep of authoritarianism. We can’t afford to sit back with crossed fingers.

Immigration

Only some ‘persuadable’ Reformers, notably the ‘squeezed stewards’, are stridently anti-immigrant. Nevertheless, immigration remains Reform’s ‘go to’ rationale for Blighty’s woes. The party’s links with international radical-right organisations also creates conduits (from think tanks to local community groups), all pushing anti-immigration propaganda. The sheer quantity of St George’s flags draped around Britain is a measure of its effectiveness.

Given these points and the likelihood of immigration featuring on the doorstep, it’s difficult to sidestep and worth exploring. However, the rift between progressives and Reformers on immigration is particularly acute.

Sliding attitudes

Much progressive campaigning is premised on the view that our cost-of-living crisis generates a sense of unfairness and competition over scarce resources. If services and living standards are improved then resources will become more accessible and fairly distributed. Competition will ease and, with it, hostility to migrant competitors.

This economic solution can’t be the full story though. ‘Ethnic replacement’ anxiety is also a powerful cause, driving fear of being overwhelmed and the need for control.

These emotions complicate the narratives surrounding immigration. Views like ‘I’ve honestly nothing against black people. I just want my country to remain recognisable’ may be sincerely held. But, as easy prey for radical-right manipulators, they are a minute step away from outright racism.

Similarly, resource scarcity may be cited as a genuine reason for anti-immigrant sentiment or wheeled out as post-hoc justification – ‘my beef with migrants is that they’re threatening my white identity. Blaming them for my difficulties getting a GP appointment, house or job is just a handy excuse I read in my favourite news-rag that I’ve tagged on to help vindicate the hostile stance I’d already adopted’.

So, campaign messaging that resource scarcity isn’t caused by immigrants misses the point if the Reformer’s concern, whether explicit or concealed, is ethnic takeover of their white national identity. For them, immigrants in the care sector for example are a problem, not a positive. No amount of leafletting showing how valuable or long-standing they are, how much tax they pay, or that 95% of them are legal, will calm fears about ‘Britain becoming a multi-ethnic state governed by Sharia law, rife with Pakistani grooming gangs’.

This approach actually risks increasing anxiety by presenting the wokerati as bent on exacerbating the very problem these Reformers want to control. Campaign messaging therefore needs to, for example, be location sensitive. The ‘immigrants welcome’ posters that enhance a community-cohesion initiative in Lewisham will backfire on the walls of Epping or Brumby, Lincolnshire. There they’d act like therapeutic attempts to cure wasp phobias by ‘opening the window next to the patient and letting the swarm in’.

Of course, we want to convey that immigration enriches UK society in multifarious ways. But we should also recognise that, in certain contexts in our polarised society, some campaign messaging risks creating as much Reform support as it diminishes.

A broken promise too far?

Irrespective of their immigration views, Reformers rage at establishment politics for the cost-of-living crisis. We feel we know the solutions – reduce living costs through green levies, renewables, infrastructure investment and nationalisation, cut poverty, not tax, to stimulate growth, stop the ‘privatisation premium’ including the £2bn per year we hand to corporate profiteers.

To this end we want to show how Reform is not a voice of change ‘on our side’, but an unholy mix of yet more self-serving, neo-liberal elitism and sheer incompetence.

But we face powerful political ennui. ‘Starmer loathing’ stems from his personality, his mistakes, and the press’s long-standing penchant for ‘left-bashing’. But it’s also about timing – his arrival after 14 years of political broken promises and shredded public trust. Labour’s biggest failure was to ignore the pathological extremity by 2024 of this disaffection. The policy steps and comms management required to repair it were very different from even a few years earlier.

The Green Party is capitalising brilliantly on the principle that ‘hope springs eternal’. But others, particularly those for whom the cost-of-living bites hardest, view politics through a lens of protracted despair. And despair requires expectation management, seeking endless reaffirmation via confirming events. When Labour increases benefits and the minimum wage, it’s safer and easier to remember the bad press, potholes and rising energy costs - disillusionment protects itself by factoring out ‘the traitor’s achievements’.

But campaigns which seek to cut through this disillusionment by simply delivering facts showing ‘how Reform is not on your side’ fail because the source isn’t trusted or therefore believed. To get across that Reform policy actually endangers Reformers themselves, campaigners have first to counter the Reformer’s preconceptions. This involves, amongst other things, being genuinely receptive to their cynicism and sense of disempowerment, and showing willingness to grasp the Reformer’s viewpoint, including on difficult matters like race and Starmer loathing.

Two-way dynamics

Campaigners are also working against the penetrating flow of radical-right propaganda, constantly destabilising our neat voter categories. For Reformers caught in this current, beliefs still held on Monday about the value of net zero, raising taxes and immigration, may be tottering by Friday.

Beliefs mutate both ways fortunately. UK-wide initiatives to raise awareness about the economy, strengthen community bonds and promote values of tolerance and inclusivity are antidotes to despair that re-ignite a sense of individual and community empowerment and efficacy. But the two-way current is dynamic. To counteract degradation from radical-right influence, campaigns should be outward-facing, constantly widening their net beyond their comfortable left demographic to also draw in Reformers wherever possible.

Cutting through

For the May elections, we must be realistic about success. Only some Reform voters can be reached. We have to set expectations appropriately, toughen up, and aim for constructive interactions where possible. Also, the ‘preconceptions’ problem means that the most valuable campaign approach is to avoid being explicitly linked to left or centre-left parties. A non-partisan approach allows a clearer, more credible focus on deterring people from voting Reform.

The campaign group, Compass Oxfordshire has developed a range of themes, principles and methods to help counter some of the obstacles explored here and to encourage voters to recognise the dangers of voting Reform. For further information look out for our forthcoming presentation.

This morning, I’m having no trouble whatsoever finding the words to talk about the fall of a right-wing ideologue - and the first words that come to mind are almost certainly: “fuck yes!”

Because, my friends, today…

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So. The hawk-eyed among you may have noticed I didn’t write anything over the past week. Which is unusual for me, I know - I’m normally quite reliable about turning up to shout into the internet on schedule.

I’d love to tell you this was some carefully curated act of self-care. A mindful pause. A strategic retreat to recharge the batteries.

B…

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With everything feeling a bit… unhinged lately, Mark Braund returns with a piece that steps back from the noise and asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when politics forgets morality altogether? As ever, it’s thoughtful, rigorous, and well worth your time.

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I have to apologise again. This was supposed to be out yesterday, but I have been completely overwhelmed with new work - getting my head around things and getting used to the pace of things - and have not had time to sit down and do a proper catch up. It’s been a good week, though.

I did…

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Quick note: if you’d like access to the paid content on Bearly Politics (Friday chats and the full archive) but money’s a bit tight, just email me at iratusursusmajor@gmail.com and I’ll sort you out - no questions asked. Pensioners, students, journalists, anyone on Universal Credit, all included.

The full written version of this post will be published on 29 March at 08:00.

I have to apologise again. This was supposed to be out yesterday, but I have been completely overwhelmed with new work - getting my head around things and getting used to the pace of things - and have not had time to sit down and do a proper catch up. It’s been a good week, though.

I did make it up to Birmingham, though I can’t claim to have seen much beyond the NEC and a Travelodge that, for reasons still unclear, did not believe in running water in the shower. So I’ll reserve judgement on the city for now.

Aside from that, things have been chugging along quite nicely here. Life is getting back to normal after a pretty insane February and March with my dad passing away and flying back to South Africa. I’m looking forward to getting back to a more regular schedule. In terms of the news this week, it has been the same - war, the orange dictator lying, the usual thing - but something did pique my interest, which was political, but not necessarily in the way you might expect. That was the book Suicide of a Nation, published this last month, written by Matt Goodwin. There’s a lot of controversy around the book, not particularly around the contents so far, with most of it being focused on exactly how it was written.

Those are perfectly understandable critiques. I don’t disagree with them, but there is something else about the book.

Full disclosure: I have not bought it.

The last thing I’m going to do is put a couple of pounds in Matt Goodwin’s pocket. I bought Liz Truss’s book, I bought a bunch of books written by right-wing ideologues, and I always regret it because they’re always just a bit shit.

They’re always the worst polemics that are badly sourced and just not worth the pounds. I have not read the book. I am not going to read the book unless someone can give it to me for free, in which case I’ll grudgingly sit my way through it. But one of the standout bits in the book that has come through is the discussion around language, and very specifically, English as an additional language.

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At a time when the headlines are dominated by war, crisis, and increasingly ominous economic signals, it feels both necessary and human to occasionally step outside that cycle. One of my goals this year was to give more writers a platform here, and Claire has very quickly proven herself to be one of the most compelling additions. I hope you enjoy this read as much as I did, and if you have any ideas of your own, please feel free to email them to iratusursusmajor@gmail.com

The ‘music festival day 3’ state of Luton airport’s toilets doesn’t help the mental state of the nervous flyer. An unwanted thought snakes into my head that maybe they treat their aircraft maintenance with similar neglect. But I down the Propranolol anyway, prescribed, in my case, to control racing heartbeats triggered by even the slightest turbulence. With gritted fatalism I then press on to the departure gate.

Before anyone concludes that nervous flyers simply lack a basic grounding in aeronautical science, be assured that we do understand how 2 pods dangling under each wing of an Easy Jet Airbus A320 suck in enough air to support around 180 people and keep 80,000kg of metal suspended at 30,000 feet above the earth, pulling the craft forward at 550mph. We get all this. But, as any religious person will tell you, there is more to human experience than science; and as any psychologist will tell you, humans can entertain entirely contradictory perceptions simultaneously.

My own fear of flying has an additional layer of complexity I’ve no idea if others share. It has a flip side – a stubbornly Peter Panish state of intense awe and wonder that neither adulthood nor familiarity has succeeded in crushing. The philosopher Emmanuel Kant correctly spotted a link between awe and fear, but they make odd bedfellows in the nervous flyer’s head.

Falling

I was fortunate to have parents who took me on regular flights around the world. So, unfamiliarity isn’t the problem. In those days planes fell from the sky with alarming regularity. But it was also the time of the mighty BOAC VC10. Riding the later fat-bellied Jumbo Jets, we would hold our breath, willing them to stay up as they staggered unconvincingly into the thin air above Nairobi airport.

By contrast, the VC10, with its sleek, futuristic body and ‘go faster’ tail fin, took off with masterful authority like a rocket. Whatever its fate in the sky, there was no doubt about its determination to get there. Sadly, the racket made by this fuel-guzzling beast meant it had to be withdrawn. But I miss the reassuring confidence of its take-off performance.

Back in the present, as I pass the departure gate staff, I scrutinise them for any signs of controlled alarm we might share. But there’s nothing. Their workaday ennui only emphasises my own silent trepidation as I walk the final leg from safety to uncertainty through that ‘point of no return’ Nasa corridor clamped to the side of the craft.

Juddering

Even before take-off, the peculiar emotional conflict between terror and awe kicks in, and I arm-wrestle an urge to remind everyone present of the gravitas of our circumstances. As the plane creeps deceptively slowly to the take-off runway, the body of the cabin creaks and judders, a disconcerting reminder of the essential physicality of our situation and what’s about to happen. Knuckles clench.

Once positioned, with an announcing roar, the plane leaps forward. As it tears along the tarmac, the velocity pins us into our seats and the cabin contents begin rattling violently. It’s reminiscent of those news clips of astronauts during rocket launch when the crescendo of juddering seems about to shake the cockpit to pieces.

As we and the cabin also vibrate under the strain of the plane’s take-off efforts, I glance at the other passengers, convinced they must share my acute existential tension. But the guy next to me is playing Candy Crush, the woman across the aisle is doing her makeup, and the bloke next to her is sorting his paperwork. As far as they’re concerned, they could be on a bus from Tooting to Islington or a routine train ride in all its unexceptional ordinariness. Once again, I’m baffled and alone in my headspace of mortal terror.

Gliding

I resist the urge to shout at them as the plane plunges on. But as it reaches maximum judder, suddenly we leap away from the earth, the excruciating shaking replaced, like an orchestral mood change from agitato to pacato, with a serene upward glide. It’s like reaching outer orbit or the gates of heaven. I look around again but the passengers are unperturbed. The ground falls away and, with it, perhaps mercifully, Luton airport. The busy ribbon of the M1 rapidly shrinks to a thinning string across the miniaturizing landscape.

As we cross the M1 I recall something from my strange archive of flying sensations – I remember, whilst driving past Heathrow, experiencing chronic FOMO as huge metal birds with their human cargo destined for faraway places swooped across the M25 just above our heads, alarmingly massive in their proximity. From the safe gridlock of motorway traffic, I felt nothing but envy. And now I’m struck by the thrill that this time it’s our metal bird that could be the FOMO object for some wretched soul landlocked below on Blighty’s first motorway.

Bouncing

But then the yo-yo’ing begins. The plane’s serene upward glide is suddenly replaced by bouncing as it pursues a new less certain ascent into the clouds. The movement reminds my heart that I’m in a glorified metal toothpaste tube and the Propranolol needs to do its work. For anxious flyers the racing heart is a reflex response which bypasses all higher cognitive functions.

Believe me, I’ve tried thinking my way out of it. How many times have I closed my eyes and pretended I’m simply driving on a bumpy road? The sensations are frankly identical. But the heart will not have it. The heart knows we are bouncing in space with 30,000 feet of nothingness below us, not a road. Remember that game you played when you fall backwards and your friend catches you? Recall that split second as you fell when your gut was grabbed by a sense of vertiginous helplessness. Now imagine that feeling (agonisingly) triggered by the plane’s every movement during flight. It’s exhausting and why I avoid flying for more than my endurance limit of two hours.

Cruising

After bouncing upwards, planes tend to aim for a level where they can cruise more serenely. This search often leads them to an elevation where the sun always shines above an unbroken, billowing duvet of clouds. To oddballs like me, despite the anxiety, this arial, snowy world is unfailingly extraordinary, astoundingly magnificent.

But during this trip, we enter an even more spectacular world - a 3-D cloud mountain range where cumulonimbus pillars tower behind rolling cumulus hills. Smoky foreground shapes skirt huge distant peaks, unearthly white in brilliant sunlight, and persuasively solid.

I tense absurdly as our metal bird aims straight at the wall of one of these celestial masses and dives into its belly. Inside it is sunless, foggy and confused and we start bouncing again. But we escape, bursting back out into the blue air and, like a mountain eagle, glide on, dwarfed by the cloud mountains whose sides we traverse.

I glance around at my fellow passengers again. I’ve given the nearer ones names now – I feel this is important in case we crash in the jungle, survive, and decisions have to be made about who eats who. Frank has switched from Candy Crush to GTA, Janice is now asleep and Ron is still checking his papers. Should I draw their attention to the fantastical world we’re in? Perhaps they’d share my wonder if they could only look.

But I’m doubtful. Instead, I sharpen my jungle plans whilst pondering whether it’s actually imagination that prevents familiarity from deadening sensibility. Even during these elevated thoughts, the over-excited child in me wants to grab Frank, Janice and Ron by the ears and jam their eyeballs up against the windows. But I refrain.

Descending

The only advantage of the descent over the ascent is the prospect that the flight will soon end. Despite the arial thrills, my heart craves the safety of terra firma. We begin to sway perilously, zigzagging downwards, as tiny cubes and scribbles below transform into office blocks and roads.

The final moment arrives as we near the runway and the ground rushes up to meet us. We are so close to it now, the actual speed at which we are travelling suddenly becomes acutely apparent. At the same time, we are now falling so fast that crashing into the ground seems virtually unavoidable. I involuntarily brace, grabbing the sides of the seat in front in a futile attempt to absorb the dreaded moment of impact. And it comes. The rubber tyres of this massive metal beast slam into the tarmac and we bounce once more, this time heavily against real ground.

Landing

It’s not until the nervous flyer touches down and, flooded with relief neurotransmitter, punches the air with the gratitude of Buzz Aldrin or a shipwrecked sailor washed ashore, that they recognize the extent to which they’ve spent the last few hours ruthlessly micromanaging their core terror.

In this moment of giddy euphoria another concern strikes. Might the pilots, now reconstructed as valorous saviours, feel demoralised by the blithe indifference of passengers to their heroism in guiding us all through space at 550 mph 30,000 feet up? The prospect of Frank, Janice and Ron shuffling past with the token nod you’d give a bus driver feels intolerable to my euphoria-addled mind. To ensure our heroes are properly congratulated, I’m obliged to tell them myself. They look startled, then grin bashfully as we share a secret moment of knowing rapport.

The passengers hurry away, but I linger, glancing back to wonder at this huge,brooding metal bird now perched on the tarmac, its surprisingly small cockpit eyes peering above its great nose as its whirring engines wind down. There’s even a little grief, a dragging moment of loss, at parting. And sorrow that the ordinariness of flying means the powerful experiences this paradoxical, magical beast evokes are lost on 99% of its users.

I have, very honestly, taken my eye off the ball that is right-wing politics in the United Kingdom.

I do, of course, have good reasons for it - between travel to and from South Africa, a new job I’ve been wrapping my head around, and the looming threat of the third world war hanging over all of us, I have had precious litt…

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Good morning everyone.

It feels like a hell of a long time since I have done one of these, largely because it has been. As many of you know, life took a bit of a turn for me towards the end of last month with my dad passing away after quite a long illness, resulting in a very quick trip back to South Africa, which was absolutely worth doing.

It also meant pretty much a big disappearance from this scene for a good week and a half with just a post or two. On top of that, it was also my last week in the NHS. I actually missed my own farewell and my own last week, which is just one of those things, and you just sort of cope with it. But since then, I’ve also started a new job, which is based up in Manchester, even though I am very helpfully able to work from home. That said, it still has been a bit of a challenging period. So I appreciate everyone just bearing with me - see what I did there - whilst I still find my feet in this new world.

And good God, what a new world it is.

I mean, beyond the normal changes, there’s also been a bit of a week from hell. I attempted to do Manchester in one day for meetings and honestly it’s something that I would not really recommend. It is doable - but by the time I got on the train after having been up since four o’clock that morning I was just utterly exhausted and I still had a two and a half hour journey back to London before jumping on the Tube to get home.

It was chaos.

I was completely wiped out by Tuesday, and Tuesday started with an estate agent driving into our two-month-old new electric vehicle, causing not a lot of damage, but I will say a bit of significant damage nonetheless. And it did cause me to go running down from my office in what I was wearing, which was basically a pair of relatively short shorts. I am very sorry to give you that picture of my bright white thighs, as well as some slippers and a full collared shirt and tie, standing around my car negotiating with the man for his insurance details. It was an interesting scene and I do think it would have been fun to see from the outside. It was not fun whilst it was happening, but c’est la vie.

That led to me getting into a full-on war with our managing agent on Wednesday, and that sort of led into just a very large email exchange between 10 different flats, all wanting the same things and the antagonist being our managing agent who I now feel a bit sorry for, but they, to be honest, did fuck up. By yesterday, I was exhausted. But very luckily, I had my D&D night that I got to do, which has become this lovely thing that I do with three of my nearly middle-aged friends. So we’re all just playing pretend, and I cannot tell you how helpful that has been for the old mental health.

There are a couple of things that are happening in the world that are probably worth doing a bit of discussion about. The first and foremost being the war that Trump started towards the end of February. I was in South Africa at that stage and I was looking at things going, “Are we actually going to be able to get home?” Because flights all of a sudden seemed very tenuous. Very fortunately for us, we had booked through BA, so we did get home, rather uncomfortably. But it was definitely an anxiety that sat there for a while.

The whole thing kicked off when, between Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, they decided that now is the time to invade Iran. I would be the last person to defend Iran in any way or form. The regime has been pretty toxic to say the least. It’s one of the worst places in the world and I think the oppressiveness of the regime has just been getting worse over the past couple of years. So there is good reason to intervene, but you don’t do it like that. This was - it just felt like a one-man show going in. It is complete chaos.

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Dear Donald, whose beneficence knows no borders,

I am writing this letter today as a thank you to the all-Glorious Donald J. Trump - who we have been told multiple times, is not thanked nearly enough.

And I must confess, I feel a deep and personal shame that I have not, until this morning, properly expressed the true depth of my …

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1. This is a particularly long piece that will go well with a cup of coffee and maybe a ginger hobnob.

2. This piece is particularly American, but not exclusively so - because sadly we live in a world where the things being tested across the Atlantic have a nasty habit of travelling quietly and efficiently to our shores.

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There have been whole adversarial political campaigns launched on the basis of someone supposedly not having their finger on the pulse of the populace, and for the most pa…

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The potentially demented bright orange tyrant currently squatting in the White House, Donald J. Trump and his DUI hire Secretary of “War” Pete Hegset…

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