Best Of

Farage demands apology from Peter Kyle over his comments on Sky News and called them disgusting .

Farage is a touchy fucker. Come on Silk Cuts, do your job.

Is he a Silk Cut man? I had him down as a Dunhill man, or maybe Peter Stuyvesant.

No, Silk Cut. Like Robbie Williams.

I once spent a weekend with Robbie Williams (& entourage). In a 5 star hotel in Zurich

He got quite frisky one night, but I never saw him smoke

Chainsmoker - but perhaps he was on a 'giving up' interlude then.

Re Farage, the word is he's started to look after himself as he eyes Downing St. In a reverse of the usual MO for addicted politicians it could be that he's given up the vices but continues to drink and smoke in public so as to protect the brand. Opponents should get to work on busting him as a closet tee-total, non-smoking health nut. It would cost him a lot of votes.

In a long line of politicians who cultivated a different image, if so. Harold Wilson didn’t smoke a pipe, for instance.

But he did have simple tastes and took his holidays in the Scillies.

This fellow has been all over the links between Peter Kyle & Ivor Caplin for a long while. There can’t be many Labour MPs in a worse position to start trying to associate other politicians with paedophiles than Kyle. What a blunder

That looks like quite a deep rabbit hole, and several bees in several bonnets, with Ivor Caplin possibly being walk-on guilt-by-association.

https://greghadfield.medium.com/exclusive-how-labour-mp-peter-kyle-triggered-a-4am-police-raid-on-a-constituent-for-writing-to-dd012f23122e

Not going there.

The Farage vs Kyle spat looks a bit of a push to me. Kyle seems over the line, but his words seem quite careful with the Sky journo trying to create soundbites by particularising a general statement.

OTOH Kyle seems to be giving the mechanism from the Act more weight than it deserves, and gone for Farage style comms.

I think Farage's opposition has to do with his social media comms channels being made less effective. I wonder if he will start promoting VPNs on GB News ; it could be arms' length enough.

"Lee Anderson's Real World, sponsored by Nord VPN."

On other matters, I found Trump's interventions at his press conference with Starmer offensive. By what right does he denigrate our Government and its legislation? It's not helped the anti-Government UK media such as GB News feed questions which they know will provoke a response to embarrass Starmer. It's an unfortunate trait which started with Obama's stupid intervention during the Referendum in 2016 (and arguably before that).

A visiting foreign leader has no place intervening in UK domestic policy. If it's a global question, yes, of course, but not about our Inheritance Tax legislation.

It's also for the people of London to decide whether Sadiq Khan is a good mayor, not Donald Trump and while I recognise it irks some on here Khan has beaten the Conservatives three times that's democracy and he won even when the Conservatives changed the electoral rules to try to defeat him (that failed because of the appalling candidate the London Conservatives chose).

However, to provide some balance, it's not Khan's place to carry out ludicrous anti-Trump publicity stunts - it's unnecessary and a waste of public money. When Trump as POTUS visits London, he's here as a guest and should be afforded that courtesy.

Plenty don't like Starmer and what he's doing but without belabouring the point he won a mandate at an election to govern and we will all have the opportunity to pass judgement on that in 2028 or 2029.

Is Trump here as our guest? Thought he was stiffing the US and UK taxpayer for a golf holiday. Tag a bit of business in the middle to justify not having to pay the cost yourself.