Best Of

The thing about Farage's girlfriend is that the BBC article, when read in detail, contradicts the claim that her family was not rich enough for her to own the flat.

Her parents own a 300,000 euro flat in Strasbourg, but a family company owns a very valuable building that is estimated to generate an income of 95-110,000 euros a year. That building must be worth 2-2.5m euros. And, if they've been getting a rent like that for several years, the company should have hundreds of thousands of euros in its accounts.

That wasn't the figures I've seen about that building previously - it was a factor of 10 out with rent being 9,500 to 11,000 euros.

Equally it's the parents money so why suddenly is it being used to buy something in a poor part of the UK..

Kruger was a big beast inasmuch as there were any left in the Cons party. Good thinker, not my cup of tea but I get it.

Perhaps he thinks he can shape Reform around himself and the "drunken sailor spending" comment was one thing that made Reform approach him to define their spending plans rather than criticise them.

I doubt Nigel gives a flying fig about spending plans. His voters are all convinced that the mass expulsion of immigrants will rectify every financial problem. When that particular panacea fails to work under a Reform government, its leadership (as they did with Brexit) will just move on to something else.

(Guardian)
..The last question at the press conference came from my colleague Aletha Adu.

Q: [To Kruger] Do you take back your claim that Reform UK would spend money like drunken sailors?

Kruger said he was confident that the party would be able to come up with fully-costed, workable plans.

He said when he criticised Reform’s spending plans recently, he was referring to their welfare plans. But at the Reform conference, Farage committed the party to welfare reform, he said.

...

Farage ended by saying there would be a press conference next week where “we will show you how we propose to save huge amounts of money”.

Nigel needs to be careful there. What stops Labour from nicking his ideas?

Kruger was a big beast inasmuch as there were any left in the Cons party. Good thinker, not my cup of tea but I get it.

Perhaps he thinks he can shape Reform around himself and the "drunken sailor spending" comment was one thing that made Reform approach him to define their spending plans rather than criticise them.

I doubt Nigel gives a flying fig about spending plans. His voters are all convinced that the mass expulsion of immigrants will rectify every financial problem. When that particular panacea fails to work under a Reform government, its leadership (as they did with Brexit) will just move on to something else.

(Guardian)
..The last question at the press conference came from my colleague Aletha Adu.

Q: [To Kruger] Do you take back your claim that Reform UK would spend money like drunken sailors?

Kruger said he was confident that the party would be able to come up with fully-costed, workable plans.

He said when he criticised Reform’s spending plans recently, he was referring to their welfare plans. But at the Reform conference, Farage committed the party to welfare reform, he said.

...

Farage ended by saying there would be a press conference next week where “we will show you how we propose to save huge amounts of money”.

Nigel needs to be careful there. What stops Labour from nicking his ideas?

This is not the header I was expecting.

The pb Tories who did not bark in the night time. Is it just me who noticed that of all our party leaders, it is only Kemi who had a good week?

Keir Starmer – under attack from his own side over his lack of political judgement or even plain common sense when appointing and then backing up to the last moment Lord Mandelson who has now had to resign three times for what was, at least to a first approximation, the same pattern of behaviour, being entranced by men considerably richer than him: Geoffrey Robinson, the Hindujas, Jeffrey Epstein. (On second thoughts, who better to inveigle himself into the inner circle of a billionaire property developer and cryptocurrency grifter?)

Ed Davey – the honourable member for falling in the water is being criticised by his own side for irrelevant stunts.

Nigel Farage – stamp duty obviously but also risks being outflanked by Tommy Robinson who attracted somewhere north of 100,000 largely peaceful protestors to London, along with squillionaire cheque-writer Elon Musk.

Kemi Badenoch – widely praised for an excellent PMQs and now can lay claim to two top Labour scalps.

And where were pb's Conservatives? Arguing about crowd sizes and frantically trawling the interwebs for a culture war about the assassination of a man who this time last week they could not have picked out of a police line-up even if he wore his MAGA hat. Poor old Kemi.

I've written to Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, urging them to join me in condemning Elon Musk's dangerous remarks inciting violence yesterday.

As leaders, we must stand together and make clear Musk will face serious consequences for these actions.
https://x.com/EdwardJDavey/status/1967294733643829750

Student politics from the LibDem leader.

@DavidTWilcock

In July, Mr Kruger used a speech in the Commons to warn that Reform would 'spend money like drunken sailors' if they went into Government.

Is there on the record any sensible lengthy discussion between a proper economics journalist and a Reform economics/finance spokesperson about their current policy on tax/spend/debt/deficit?

I noticed recently Tice being allowed to get away with saying that they couldn't say now what their 2029 policy would be on these matters. If they are a potential party of government the voter is entitled to be interested in how they would do the hard stuff differently now.

No reform voter is going to like the answers that come out when reality is applied to that 2029 manifesto so no Reform Spokesman is going to provide details because they would be laughed at.

As I said a while back the best plan to deal with the boats would have been to offered Farage some control over the approach used so we could watch him flounder the way everyone else does. Some how or other he needs to be brought into things in a way that he can no longer scream from the sidelines..