It’s lunchtime on St George’s Day and the Royal pub in Runcorn is a festival of flags, fags and Farage. “I’m sorry,” says Mike Kneale, a painter, as he explains which party he will back in this week’s crucial byelection: “But it’s Nigel Farage.”
The Reform UK leader’s Cheshire cat grin leaps out from billboards and doormats all over this constituency, where his party is odds-on to win its fifth MP and deliver a blow to Keir Starmer. It would be the first time in half a century that Runcorn has elected a non-Labour MP.
