Good afternoon. Try as the Tories and Lib Dems might to inject a bit of urgency with their “10 days left to save the country/the NHS” messaging, the truth is that this election campaign has entered a strangely languid phase. Significant policy announcements are behind us; the Institute for Fiscal Studies keeps making the same point about the main parties’ conspiracy of silence, only to be met by, predictably, silence; even the Tory betting scandal feels like a nail in the coffin rather than a dagger in the heart. Nothing changes. All that’s left is to complain about polls, or, if you’re Kemi Badenoch, start dropping hints about a leadership election.
Except! Here comes Nigel Farage, edgelording his way through a Nick Robinson interview on a Friday night with some dubious comments about Ukraine and somehow still making the same point three days later. Which is weird – because it seems like exactly what the Tories would like him to be talking about. More on why Farage is so determined that you keep thinking about whether or not he likes Vladimir Putin, plus the mysterious disappearance of Keir Starmer’s favourite novel, after the headlines.
What happened today
Manifestos | The hard choices on tax and spending that will face Britain’s next government are being ducked by Labour and the Conservatives, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said. In a withering assessment of the party manifestos, the IFS said the leading parties had “singularly failed even to acknowledge some of the most important issues and choices to have faced us for a very long time”.
Gambling allegations | The Conservatives have launched their own inquiry into whether politicians or officials gambled on the timing of the election, Rishi Sunak has said. Sunak told reporters he was not aware of any further candidates being looked into and was not himself being investigated.
Conservatives | The party is rerouting resources to defend at least three seats held by cabinet ministers with majorities of more than 20,000. Tory activists and candidates have been diverted to campaign for home secretary James Cleverly, deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden and environment secretary Steve Barclay.
Analysis: Three guesses at why Farage keeps talking about Russia
As you can see from the photograph above, Nigel Farage decided that the best use of his energies at a hotel outside Maidstone today was to stand on top of an open-top, union jack-decorated bus in front of a blown-up front page of the i newspaper, and to tell the assembled Reform fans that it proved Boris Johnson was the “worst prime minister of all time”. (“Flattering product placement,” i’s editor Oly Duff said, a little doubtfully. “We hoped for Taylor Swift but maybe next time.”)
The point appears to have been that while Johnson is now saying that Farage is guilty of “nauseating ahistorical drivel” and “Kremlin propaganda”, he had once agreed with Farage about EU and Nato being to blame for Russian aggression in Ukraine – albeit before the full-scale invasion in 2022.
Farage has also posted a video accusing the Daily Mail of “collaborating with the Kremlin to protect the dying Conservative party”, in response to the Mail and Mail on Sunday’s coverage of the story. He said he had instructed libel lawyers Carter Ruck to write to the MoS over their front page, which made a thinly sourced claim: “Zelenskiy: Farage is infected with ‘virus of Putin’”. (Impressively, this is the second set of lawyers he says he has engaged in the last week, after his previous falling out with the brains behind vetting.com.)
This all seemed pretty eccentric, so I thought I’d better check with Ben Quinn, who went along to the Maidstone rally for the Guardian, about whether Farage’s obsession with this subject is as intense as it seems. There were some elements of the usual stump speech, he said – but then there was that gigantic front page. Farage “seemed eager to hammer home his insistence that he was in the right when it came to his Putin remarks,” he added. The crowd “chuckled and booed at the requisite moments, but it was hard not to come away with the feeling that Farage has been particularly irked.”
People close to Farage insisted to Ben afterwards that a fight with Johnson was “a good one to pick”. The pollster James Johnson, of J.L. Partners, is less sure. “Why is Farage keeping the story alive?” he asked on X. Unambiguous support for Ukraine is not a controversial position among voters wavering between the Conservatives and Reform, he elaborated on WhatsApp a bit later. “Just a poor decision, I think,” he said. “If he thinks the Maga playbook will work here then he is mistaken.”
As this poll from January shows, just 8% of the UK blames the EU for the invasion of Ukraine, against 87% who blame Russia. And whatever Farage’s people say, it seems particularly weird to set up Boris Johnson as your enemy when the exact Tories who love him are the ones who might be prepared to abandon their loyalties and change sides.
So what’s going on here? These are the possibilities I can think of. First, Farage has a hunch about his supporters that transcends what the polls appear to show: that they are Putin-curious, Ukraine-sceptical, and sick of spending money on the whole thing. As James Johnson suggests, he may be looking at the US political environment – where Trump-supporting Republicans frequently call for an end to support for Kyiv – and imagining that a similar faction will help him higher in the polls here.
Second, that although they might be ambivalent about the issue itself, he thinks they will take umbrage at the perception these comments have been leapt on by the Conservative party and their supporters in the press as a way of “cancelling” him, and this will drive more people to his flag. He may be thinking of his fight with Coutts, and how wildly unlikely it might have seemed as a way of bringing eyeballs and sympathy to his cause.
The third option is that he is very committed to the argument that he was ahead of the pack with his view that Russian aggression was the fault of Nato and the EU. He just thinks this stuff, spends a lot of time looking at social media posts from highly committed fellow-travellers for whom scepticism about Zelenskiy comes as standard, and has a blind spot about what ordinary people think.
I know this will shock you, since Nigel is so deeply in touch with the real world, but the third seems the most likely. And while all this might still win him hearty applause among the sort of people who will turn up to see him standing on a bus, it might also be a reminder of where the limits to his popularity lie.
What’s at stake
In the first of a series of pieces looking at what it will take to deliver Keir Starmer’s stated political missions, Heather Stewart looks at the scale of the challenge on housing – and the obstacles to the planning reform which Labour has promised. Starmer has been more combative on this than he has on most issues, Heather notes, but most experts agree radical reforms are overdue:
Since the mid-1950s, when the Conservative housing minister, Duncan Sandys, issued historic planning guidance aimed at limiting the sprawl of cities, the country’s green belt – or more accurately, green belts – have rarely been questioned by politicians.
But Labour wants to allow local authorities to earmark more green-belt land for homes, beginning with brownfield sites and then a new category of “grey belt” – pockets of green-belt land that are not nature-rich and beautiful, but scrubby and unloved.
‘Hopefully, it’s the beginning of a sensible conversation about what’s the purpose of the green belt and how restrictive should it be,’ says Ant Breach, a housing and planning expert at thinktank the Centre for Cities.
But while the plan is relatively bold, there are still those who are sceptical that the political will it would take to complete the task is there.
The political calculation is that the crisis has become so severe that the risks of infuriating local opponents of new development are outweighed by the potential gains in being seen to tackle the issue ...
Not everyone in Labour, however, is convinced that the politics of housebuilding has swung as far against nimbyism as Starmer and his colleagues clearly hope.
After the leader’s ‘bulldozing’ conference speech, one senior party adviser privately expressed astonishment that this was the particular fight with some voters that Starmer was prepared to pick (and not, say, the argument over a wealth tax).
They recalled knocking on doors in a recently built housing estate where residents were up in arms about the potential for another new development up the road. Such concerns are likely to be amplified if Labour wins a large number of seats in areas earmarked for rapid housing expansion – and hopes to hold on to them.
Winner of the day
Punting politicians, after Keir Starmer ruled out a ban on MPs betting on politics.
Loser of the day
Count Binface, who finds himself viewed favourably by 16% of people, according to Ipsos – only nine points ahead of Liz Truss. (Many more view her unfavourably, though.)
Mysteries over Keir Starmer’s cultural hinterland of the day
Why he told a group of schoolchildren Dennis Bergkamp was his favourite Arsenal midfielder when he was definitely a forward; why he told the Guardian’s Charlotte Edwardes he did not have a favourite novel when four years ago he said it was James Kelman’s A Disaffection.
Number of the day
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35
The number of serving cabinet ministers to lose their seats since 1900, as Rupert Neate points out in this piece about Jeremy Hunt’s constituency of Godalming and Ash. Recent polling suggests that around 10 serving cabinet ministers are at serious risk this time, with another eight in constituencies viewed as too close to call.
Dubious photo opportunity of the day
We haven’t had Ed Davey in ages! Here he is washing an ambulance.
Quote of the day
The Tories in office were gamblers, shaggers, nutters and clowns, but at least they were funny … brace yourself for a war on joy.
The Daily Telegraph’s Tim Stanley looks forward to a Labour government
Read more
Five European journalists who cover the UK write on how the election is seen in their home countries
Listen to this
Today in Focus: New towns and old ideas – Labour’s housing plan
What are Labour’s proposals for fixing the housing crisis? Robert Booth reports from Hitchin, North Hertfordshire
What’s on the grid
Today, 5.30pm | Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak in back-to-back interviews for the Sun’s YouTube channel.
Today, 7pm | Reform’s Nigel Farage, the Greens’ Carla Denyer, SNP leader John Swinney and Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorwerth on ITV1’s Tonight.
Today, 7pm | Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay interviewed by Nick Robinson on BBC One as part of Panorama’s pre-election series.
Tomorrow, 9am | James Cleverly and Yvette Cooper in immigration debate on LBC.
