Politics: the writing on the wall

By Richard North - July 11, 2026

The murder of Ann Widdecombe has rather turned the news agenda on its head today – and rightly so, even if the effect is unfortunate. Any murder is awful but there is something especially horrible about the slaughter of an elderly woman living on her own in a remote part of the country.

We do not have enough information from which to draw any conclusions but, had this been a less famous person, the news doubtless would have been just a footnote in the local media. Whether Ann’s murder is in any way related to her politics remains to be seen, and although a 26-year-old man is in custody, speculation at this time about his motives is inappropriate.

Despite the saturation coverage in the media, however, life goes on. We are on the cusp of seeing a new prime minister walk into No 10, uncontested, without a clear (or any) manifesto and certainly without any personal mandate. This may be in accordance with our extremely flexible constitution but there are many (including myself) who are uneasy about this event.

There will be time enough to assess the actions of The Replacement, as the likelihood is that he will be with us for the next three years – unless he too so sours the nation that his own party decides that they will need a new leader for the 2029 General Election. This is still likely to be the first opportunity we get to vote.

In constitutional terms, of course, we not only have his majesty’s government. A functional system requires that we also have “loyal opposition”, which in its own way is every bit as important as the party in office. Notionally, it falls to the Conservative Party to perform the task, but its prominence in the polls also gives Farage’s Reform UK a special status.

With the prospect of an untested and – from the looks of it – an overly ambitious prime minister taking over, there has rarely been a time when we have been in greater need of an effective opposition, yet the weakened Tories have yet to make a mark and, for the duration, Reform have gone AWOL, buried in their own private grief of a by-election in Clacton.

With parliament going into its summer recess, starting on Friday next week, that takes the politics out of Westminster, but largely the nation takes a break from party politics, and the media goes to sleep until parliament returns on return on Tuesday, 1 September.

This time round though, Burnham is aware that he has a narrow window in which to capture the political high ground and, according to the Guardian, is planning a summer tour of the UK in order to win over voters in Labour’s “danger zones”.

Burnham’s strategists, we are told, will aim to start his premiership in the opposite tenor to Starmer’s first few months. His predecessor used an early speech to emphasise how the next few years would be “painful” and that he did not expect living standards to increase quickly.

The summer months in 2024, we are reminded, were dominated by the fallout from the unexpected decision by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to cut the winter fuel allowance, and the donations scandal where clothing for Starmer and other cabinet ministers was revealed to have been funded by the donor Waheed Alli.

But, the Guardian tells us, strategists believe another big mistake was Starmer and Reeves’s decision to attack the Conservatives for the “£22bn black hole” in their economic plans when voters were tired of hearing politicians blame one another.

We thus get one source telling the paper that: “Andy intends to completely change this. You will not hear him blaming any other parties and you can see that from his rhetoric already. He will say it is Labour that will be the change”.

With that in mind, key allies of Burnham are saying that he will need to “dominate the summer” much like Farage did last August when Reform organised press conferences and stunts while the government did little.

One senior MP – expected to be in Burnham’s cabinet – says that this was a key part of the reasoning not to take part in the Clacton byelection, which Farage will fight in early August, in order to take the oxygen away from Reform.

Says another source, “We need to get out to the country, all guns blazing, real positivity and lots of big announcements focused on hope. I would be very worried if we got distracted by a Clacton sideshow. A new prime minister needs to be the main story the country is hearing about, not Nigel Farage”.

If this looks to be sound strategy, it also represents a significant failing on the part of Farage who has got himself locked into a fruitless and ultimately sterile contest with a cartoon figure count Binface, while Burnham makes the running elsewhere in the country.

Instead of taking on The Replacement on his own turf, Farage has chosen to retreat into “grievance mode”, abandoning – as Alister Heath remarked – the role of “a professional yet truly radical Right-wing government-in-waiting”.

The victim status ill-behoves Farage. He has been round the block a few times and should have enough sense to smell out and avoid obvious political minefields, such as questionable party and personal financial arrangements.

As it is, though, he has walked into obvious traps, eyes wide shut, and now in Kenneth Williams Carry-on style, is shrieking “infamy”, everybody’s got it “in for me”.

When it comes to his supporters, loyalty is a fine thing, and it is clear from the polls that they are standing behind their leader. But, if right-wing politics is to have a future, they must now decide whether they want a personality cult or a functioning political party. If they want the latter, Reform with Farage at its head is not the answer.

Some, in his defence, might argue that he is a skilled politician – but to assume so is a mistake. People, and especially the media, have been confusing form with function. Farage is not a politician – he is a showman masquerading as a politician – and he’s very good at it. But as he gets closer to power, the cracks are showing.

What people (and especially the media – wedded as it is to the soap opera) need to realise is that the words “politician” and “policy” share the same etymological root, stemming from the Greek “polis”.

The relationship between the two words is one of agent and action. Politicians are the actors: they are the individuals who engage in the administration of the polis (the state). The Policy is the instrument: It is the specific plan or rule created by the politician to govern that polis.

In short, a politician is a person who creates, debates, and implements policy for the community. Without credible (or any) fixed policy, Farage cannot rightly call himself a politician – he is an actor without a script, hamming it for the laughs, the applause and the prestige.

Exploring his intellectual vacuum, Pete takes a hard look at Reform’s inadequacies. The party, he says, is proving adept at social media engagement farming, but it’s now conclusively proven that popularity in a small corner of X and pandering to American audiences does not translate into polling success. The little policy development they’re doing is little more than a tick box exercise. It doesn’t inform their communications, and it doesn’t shape their strategy.

While the voting public might not express their concerns in such precise terms, an Ipsos poll suggests that the Reform bubble, if not bursting, is slowly deflating.

Asked about Farage’s Clacton by-election, 1 in 3 British adults (33 percent) prefer Count Binface to win, while only 21 percent opted for Farage. Worryingly for Farage, 32 percent chose neither and the “don’t knows” amounted to 13 percent.

There is a light-hearted aspect to this polls which has 69 percent supporting count binface’s policy of restoring the price of a 99 flake to 99p, and 53 percent capping croissant prices at £1.

More serious though, is another YouGov poll, with 73 percent of Britons describing Farage as “sleazy”, including 56 percent thinking he is very sleazy.

This includes 40 percent of Reform supporters, who see Farage as sleazy. And the situation is deteriorating. Belief that Reform UK as a party is sleazy has increased by 18 points over the last two years, so much so that the public is now likely to consider them to be “more dodgy” than Labour.

Where Farage and Reform fare worst, though, is looking at just the proportions opting for the description “very sleazy”. A majority of Britons (52-56 percent) feel this label applies to them, compared to 44 percent putting the previous Conservative government in this category, and no more than 31 percent believing this is true of any other party or party leader.

This takes Farage and his party into territory where they don’t want to be and, without the corresponding gravitas of credible positions on key policies, risks triggering a slide in the polls which could quickly become irrecoverable.

As it stands, it is not entirely inconceivable that Farage could lose to binface at Clacton, in which case Reform’s parliamentary contingent would be comprised of Tory defectors, Richard Tice and Sarah Pochin – a hopeless rabble. It is unlikely Farage could stay on as leader, precipitating a collapse of the party.

However unlikely that scenario might seem, it still exposes the fragility of Reform – which is entirely a consequence of Farage’s poor leadership and his inability to get to grips with the essence of politics.

That is the writing on the wall.