I genuinely believe we have now passed Reform UK’s high-water mark. Usually, you can’t keep Farage off the airwaves, but he has seemingly gone to ground during the high-profile by-election in Makerfield, which Reform needs to win to maintain a sense of forward momentum. The reasons for the deafening silence are obvious. The self-declared man-of-the-people is having difficulty in explaining an undeclared £5 million ‘gift’ from a cryptocurrency billionaire, a £10,000 County Court Judgement against him, and it now seems he will be investigated for contempt of court over comments he made after the two juries in a case involving two Muslims fighting with police in Manchester Airport failed to reach a verdict. A man less fitted to be prime minister would be hard to find.
Farage is in the strange position of leading in the polls while being seen as less popular than Kier Starmer. It simply can't last.
If he'd declared the £5 million at the time in 2024, it would have been embarrassing, but at least he would have been credited with being open about it. Having it dragged out of him by The Guardian has made it far worse.
His claim that the Russians hacked his mobile phone and released the information about the money to a British left-wing newspaper is laughable, but it does show why it’s important to declare these potential conflicts of interest. He left himself open to blackmail which is precisely what the rule are designed to prevent.. He says an unnamed cybersecurity expert has examined his phone and suggested the Russians did it.
Nobody believes the hacking story is true. If it were, Farage would have appeared on every news outlet, telling everybody how he has been unfairly targeted. Labour has now reported the incident to the authorities for investigation, rightly suggesting that a foreign power hacking the phone of a potential PM is worthy of some forensic work. Farage will either have to admit it was just another lie, or hand over his phone to be examined the the National Cyber Security Centre.
The Guardian broke the original story of the £5 million and presumably knew exactly where the information came from.
Farage's candidate in Makerfield deserves to lose. His social media posts are incredibly sexist, with a lot of far-right racist undertones. Robert Kenyon isn’t an ideal candidate, but he stood in 2024, coming second with 31% (Labour held with 45%). He was just one of 609 candidates who stood for Reform, most of them first-timers with little experience and even less hope of winning.
Reform had little choice in the by-election. They couldn't parachute some high-profile candidate in after Burnham, a local man who knows the area well, said he was standing.
Kenyon went unnoticed outside the constituency in 2024, but now he’s the centre of national media attention and he’s clearly well out of his depth, as this clip from his interview shows:
Reform UK's Robert Kenyon for Makerfield has NO idea what his own party's flagship policies actually are — and he admits it live on camera! "I'd have to have a real deep look into that..." This is an absolute car crash interview. youtube.com/watch?v=z3as...— Bremain in Spain (@bremaininspain.com) 30 May 2026 at 09:56
He admits he doesn’t know what Reform’s policies are (he needs to have a "real deep look into that"). He’s no different, of course, to most Reform members because policy is simply whatever pops out of Farage’s mouth at any given moment. Farage himself has casually dismissed the entirety of at least two of the manifestos he stood on after the elections, so the idea he would follow any written pledges or that Reform policy is thought through is for the birds.
Also note that Kenyon didn't vote for Brexit, which he said at the time was a bad idea. Amazing, eh?
Reform is just a one-man band playing whatever tune pops into Farage's head. His latest proposal is to eliminate income tax on overtime, which is likely to cost The Treasury billions as workers reduce their normal contracted hours and increase overtime hours. It’s just silly. Watch out for it being quietly dropped.
Last week, Farage's party chairman Zia Yusuf publicly rebuked Robert Jenrick for getting Reform's policy on deporting illegal immigrants wrong. They intend to deport 600,000 people over five years, including those in social housing.
I'm not sure how much more damage Reform can take before it all falls apart.
Blair's essay
Tony Blair’s 5,000 word essay, The Labour Party Is Playing With Fire Over Its Future and the Future of the Country, has been badly received, and it’s not surprising. The paper has been summarised as abandoning net zero, pursuing AI and sticking close to Trump’s America, which might be slightly unkind, but it’s not far off the mark. His institute - The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change - is benefiting from well over $300 million thanks to Larry Ellison, the US tech billionaire, and it looks as if Blair is now singing from Ellison’s playbook.
The essay contains gems like this one:
"The best political space from which this [radical change] can be achieved is what I call the Radical Centre.
"The centre – properly defined – is where you put policy first and politics last. So, you begin with the question: what is the right answer? And only once you have that do you engage in the political task of persuading people of it."
I'm not sure who he thinks starts off solving national problems by asking what the wrong answer is.
If he thinks he’s got the right answers, I’m afraid he’s badly mistaken. He says Labour won in 2024 simply by being the “acceptable default option” to the Conservatives, apparently forgetting that was what he was in 1997, when he inherited a fast-growing economy courtesy of John Major and Ken Clarke. The last time we ran a budget surplus was in 1999 after he stuck to Major’s spending plans for the first two years, and Thatcher’s privatisation plans for his entire term of office. That wasn’t radical; it was simply carrying on while pretending to be radical.
No, his essay is not the solution to today’s problems. Burnham seems to understand the current issues far better. His response is HERE.
Burnham says Blair is "right about the vital need for higher economic growth as the enabler of greater social justice" and of course, that's right, but more growth that benefits those already extremely wealthy is not the answer.
In fact, I would suggest most people wouldn't notice the difference between higher total growth and simply sharing the proceeds of what we have a bit more equitably. Moreover, if we manage to get higher growth through AI and Larry Ellison gets even richer, while unemployment rises because of it, I think we will be in even more trouble.
Blair, like Farage, has sold out to money and greed.
I don't know if Burnham would make a decent PM or not, but he has some interesting ideas. The voters of Makerfield should support him.
