Good afternoon, and welcome to Election Edition, where I’ll be bringing you all the news and analysis you need to stay on top of the campaign every weekday at 5pm. Here’s what you need to know about the day Nigel Farage caused a monumental political freakout – and then actually followed through. Also some fun stuff. But not that fun, this is still a newsletter about politics, when all’s said and done.
PS: For yet more Farageism, if you can bear it, do listen to our daily podcast Today in Focus, which will be bringing you an Election Extra mini-episode every weekday evening throughout the campaign. I’ll be scurrying off to record that with Lucy Hough as soon as I hit send on this email.
What happened today
Reform UK | Nigel Farage is to stand as a Reform UK candidate after all – and has returned as the party’s leader. More below.
Diane Abbott | The longstanding MP will be reselected to fight her seat when Labour’s National Executive Committee meets on Tuesday, the Guardian understands.
Labour | Keir Starmer tried to emphasise his party’s credentials on defence by appearing with 14 ex-military candidates and saying he would be prepared to use nuclear weapons.
Analysis: Nine Nine Nigel
Last week, Nigel Farage said he wouldn’t be running for election for Reform UK because he had decided that the US election was more important, and Donald Trump needed his help. But it’s devastating news for America: this afternoon, after muttering about his “huge regrets” about his decision in recent days and blaming the establishment, Farage changed his mind, in what he rather grandly described as an “emergency general election announcement”. Somebody call the police!
Not only is he running, in Clacton: he’s taken over as party leader from the presumably disgruntled Richard Tice, who has loaned the party £1.4m over three years and has now had to enthusiastically introduce the man who’s giving him the boot. (Since Reform is, unusually for a political party, structured as a private company with Farage as the majority owner, he can basically do what he likes.)
As well as going on about D-day for quite a long time, Farage said he thought the race needed “gingering up”. And even before he finally broke the suspense, the day has proven one of the iron rules of modern British politics: his unerring ability to make everyone talk about him non-stop, even if it’s only to say that he’s failed to become an MP seven times.
This claim of his unpopularity always seems wildly overdone to me, for what it’s worth – especially when it comes from people who probably also wish we had proportional representation. The truth is that Farage has shaped British politics as much as anyone for the last decade, and arguably deserves the sought-after giant squatting toad designation more than Boris Johnson ever did.
In any case, today’s chatter only intensified after Christopher Hope, the GB News political editor who is very well-sourced on the right, said that a friend of Farage had told him “it will either be an electoral pact with the Tories (unlikely) or an about-turn on standing at the election (more likely).” Then Tice said unequivocally that there would be no deal with the Tories, but refused to rule out Farage standing. (There were reports this afternoon that Farage only shared his plans this morning.)
As for Clacton: the coastal Essex seat has been a rumoured target since at least January, when a Survation poll commissioned by Arron Banks found Farage beating the Tory candidate, the unfortunate Giles Watling, by 10%. What will his leadership mean for Reform’s wider chances at the election? In raw numbers, maybe not that much. It is still very unlikely that anyone other than Farage or maybe the defected former Conservative Lee Anderson will win their seats, and even they aren’t sure things: the party simply doesn’t have the campaign machinery to make up for the average candidate’s lack of name recognition.
But it does help them with their ambition of pushing their percentage across the country as high as possible, building the kind of base that might help them win more seats next time. (The party is currently on 11% in the Guardian’s poll tracker; maybe he can heave them to 15%.) And, much more consequentially for this year, it is terrible news for the Conservatives, whose chances of a catastrophic wipeout are genuinely higher this evening than they were this morning. You may have noticed that broadcasters need very little excuse to put Farage in front of a camera – and now they have a very large one.
While you personally may not expect to be swayed by seeing him on every news bulletin for the next month, swing Conservative-Reform voters are a different story. For that reason, and in part because both Labour and the Conservatives have been so thoroughly underwhelming, this is probably the most significant moment of the campaign so far, and the first with genuine potential to change the dynamic of the race.
State of the race
Voting intention over time: Latest average of all polls over a moving 10-day period, showing Great Britain voting intention
Winner of the day
Greg Smith, who has a better of being named as an MP at this election than most – because the Tory candidate Greg Smith in Mid Buckinghamshire is facing off against a Green opponent who may seem familiar: also named Greg Smith. Congratulations Greg!
Loser of the day
Giles Watling, the Conservative candidate for Clacton, who started the day thinking he was a surefire winner. (Also, the other Greg Smith.)
Most irritable interviewee of the day
It’s Kemi Badenoch, who accused the Today programme’s Mishal Husain of “trying to trivialise what is a very serious issue” by asking her for details of how proposed changes to the Equality Act would work, and said “it is trivial, it is unserious” to ask if Liz Truss should have gone on a podcast whose host has joked about whether he would rape Labour’s Jess Phillips.
She also accused Times Radio host Stig Abell of bringing her on his show under “false pretences” because he asked her about social care.
The mystery of her absence from the Tory campaign until now continues.
Quote of the day
This is just another small boat Rishi Sunak can’t deal with.
A Liberal Democrat source after deputy leader Daisy Cooper motoreds past a Rishi Sunak campaign stop in Henley-on-Thames. They love the banter!
Number of the day
***
46%
The proportion of GB News viewers supporting Labour – ahead of 25% for the Tories and 18% for Reform UK – according to a new poll by JL Partners.
Dubious photo opportunity of the day
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, picking a potato.
Listen to this
Politics Weekly Westminster: Ahead of the TV debates
The Guardian’s Pippa Crerar and Kiran Stacey discuss how Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak will be preparing for the first big leaders’ debate on Tuesday. Plus: can Starmer recover from the internal politics plaguing his last week of campaigning?
Read more
What’s on the grid
Now | YouGov just released their first MRP poll – or multilevel regression and poststratification poll, producing constituency-level predictions on the basis of a very large national sample – of the campaign. You’ll find it here.
9pm | Scottish leaders’ debate on STV, with Scottish national party leader John Swinney, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross and Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton.
Tuesday | Labour’s national executive committee meets to consider candidate selection, potentially including Faiza Shaheen.
Tuesday 9pm | Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer in Manchester for their first debate, hosted by ITV’s Julie Etchingham. Leaders of the SNP, Liberal Democrats, Greens and Reform UK invited to participate in live programme immediately after.
