Last December I predicted that the wheels would soon fall off the Nigel Farage project and boy is that prediction now starting to pan out.

Last night Reform UK lost the Greater Manchester by-election by a landslide 30-point margin against Labour.

This is the fourth previously winnable by-election that Farage’s party has now lost in a row and it is by some margin the worst of the lot.

Their latest heavy defeat comes as polls this week also showed a collapse in both Reform and Farage’s ratings, amid multiple investigations into his personal finances.

So is the Reform leader now done and dusted as a political force, or could there still be a route back for Britain’s great political survivor?

Here’s what I predict will happen next.

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I spent the past two days at the Womad Festival in Wiltshire where Byline Times were running the ‘World of Words’ tent.

One of our speakers was Green Party leader Zack Polanski.

For the past year Polanski and the Greens have been locked in what he described as a “toxic” fight with his Labour opponents, who he has insisted he will “replace” as the main party on the left of British politics.

Yet with Andy Burnham now in Number 10, Polanski appears to be subtly shifting his approach.

In an expansive and personal interview with our editor Hardeep Matharu, Polanski said he now has “hope” for a better and less “toxic” relationship with a more left wing Labour party under Burnham.

“I do think Andy Burnham is on the left of Keir Starmer, and I think it would be churlish to pretend any other way…” he said strikingly, adding that he now believed there could be a “reset” in relations between the two parties on issues like electoral reform and the cost of living.

So is Polanski right to sense a shift in our politics under Burnham, or are we all being set up again for another great disappointment?

Here’s why I believe there are now at least some good grounds for optimism.

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A new Survation poll out this week put Labour level with Reform for the first time in over 14 months.

It comes as a series of expanding scandals continue to engulf Nigel Farage and as a much more popular Labour Prime Minister prepares to enter Downing Street.

So is this the beginning of the end for the Farageists, or could a decision about to be taken by Andy Burnham mean that Labour somehow clinches defeat from the jaws of victory?

Here’s why the coming days are set to be the most consequential in British politics since the general election.

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Nigel Farage’s entire political career has been based on what is essentially a confidence trick.

This trick has involved convincing a certain section of the population that he alone has the interests of “the people” at heart.

In reality the complete opposite is the case.

Far from working on behalf of the common man, Farage has always put his own interests first.

Instead of representing his constituents in Parliament, where he has taken part in just a handful of votes this year, we now learn that Farage has instead been personally enriching himself, whilst seeking to hide the sources of that enrichment from the public eye.

So will Farage’s desperate by-election gambit work, or has the confidence trick he has long pulled over the people of Britain finally run its course?

Here’s what I now expect to happen.

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They say all political careers end in failure and after more than 30 years in politics, many in Westminster are starting to question whether Nigel Farage’s own career might soon meet a similar fate.

Questions about the Reform leader’s future are becoming common currency in SW1.

Whispers about his health, combined with fears about the ongoing parliamentary investigations into his finances have added to growing suspicions that he could soon be looking for a route out of politics altogether.

So is time really running out for the Reform leader? Here’s what I’m hearing.

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What kind of Prime Minister will Andy Burnham be? That’s the question being anxiously asked in Westminster right now by people who stand to either gain, or lose, a lot depending upon the answer.

At the heart of the question is the issue of who he will choose as his Chancellor.

For a long time it had been accepted wisdom that Burnham would appoint the former Labour leader, and current Energy Ed Miliband, to the job, should he ever become PM.

Miliband is a former Treasury staffer and a highly effective operator, who has pushed through controversial, but transformative plans, for a clean energy revolution in the UK.

His appointment as Chancellor would signal that Burnham is genuine about his pledge to transform how politics works in the UK.

Yet ever since Burnham won the Makerfield by-election there has been a concerted campaign to prevent Miliband’s appointment.

This week the Times - the Westminster establishment paper of choice - gave a full account of what they describe as the “battle” to block Miliband.

“It is an unholy alliance. Bankers, union leaders and some of Andy Burnham’s most senior allies have joined forces with a single objective: stopping Ed Miliband becoming chancellor” they reported.

So what’s really going on here and is Burnham really going to give into those forces now fighting to stop Miliband from entering Number 11?

Here’s what I now expect to happen.

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Peter was almost alone among election experts to predict a big Burnham win in this contest, suggesting that the pollsters and pundits could have been greatly underestimating the scale of his support in the constituency.

Unfortunately we suffered some technical problems meaning we lost our host Adrian Goldberg for most of the discussion, but Peter provided some fascinating insights into what is really happening with the big shifts we are now seeing in British electoral politics.

You can listen to our full discussion by clicking the video above, or read my full take on the result here.

Regular readers of this newsletter will know that I have been predicting for some time now that the wheels would soon fall off the Nigel Farage project.

Reform’s heavy defeat last night in the Makerfield by-election, which follows similarly heavy defeats in Gorton and Denton and Caerphilly, shows that when offered a choice between the politics of rage and riots, and the politics of hope and unity, voters are increasingly tending to pick the latter over the former.

Of course the fact that more than 40% of the electorate in Makerfield still backed parties of the far-right should alarm us.

That so many British people are prepared to back a party which just encouraged and defended racist pogroms on our streets, shows the danger that Farage and his fellow travellers still pose.

But after a long period in which the consensus in Westminster has been that Britain is inevitably heading towards a Reform Government, today’s result is another reminder that an alternative future is still there for the taking.

Here’s what I think the result tells us about what now awaits.

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This week hundreds of masked men took to the streets of Belfast to burn down houses and terrorise the families of ethnic minorities and migrants.

The attacks were highly organised, with prominent public figures, including the richest man in the world, openly promoting and glorying in the violence online.

Yet despite all this widespread criminality and terror, just 19 individuals have so far been arrested, with multiple politicians and commentators openly defending those who took to the streets.

By contrast a largely peaceful demonstration outside Woolwich Crown court on Friday, against the conviction of four Palestine Action protesters, led to a total of 107 arrests.

In all cases those arrested had merely held up a placard, worn a t-shirt, or delivered a chant in support of the group.

They did not burn down a building, they did not throw a brick, they did not terrorise a family from their home.

Yet all of these people have been arrested and branded as terrorists, with barely a whisper uttered in their defence.

The contrast between how these two groups are now being treated is stark.

Here’s what it tells us about where the real “two tiers” in British justice, politics and journalism now really lie.

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Since Nigel Farage called for “pure cold rage” in response to Henry Nowak’s murder, we have seen Nazis riot in Southampton and an actual racist pogrom on the streets of Belfast.

As I wrote for Byline Times today, none of this should surprise us.

The global far-right have spent the past two years desperately trying to incite violence on the streets of Britain.

Now they’re finally getting what they’ve fought for.

Yet while both the Government and opposition today condemned the violence, and insisted that it will “not be tolerated”, neither of them appear to be doing anything to actually stop it from spreading further.

Asked by this newsletter whether the Prime Minister plans to take any action against Elon Musk or his X platform, for helping to incite the violence, his spokesman was unable to point to any plans to do so.

Asked again whether the PM even plans to stop posting on X himself, his spokesman told me that there were “no changes” to the Government’s existing social media policy.

So what’s really going on here and why does the Government appear so unwilling to actually act against those seeking to literally set our communities on fire?

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Last year I revealed the BBC’s plans to alter its “story selection” in order to win over the “trust” of Reform voters.

All the evidence from this week suggests that this plan has now been fully implemented.

As Nigel Farage called for “pure cold rage” on the streets of Britain, and far-right thugs responded by lighting fires and assaulting police officers in Southampton, our national broadcaster has also stepped into line.

Across a series of on-air discussions and articles, the BBC sought to examine and “debate” Farage’s claims of institutionalised anti-white “two tier policing” in the UK.

To be clear these claims are completely without evidence.

As official figures and external inquiries have repeatedly shown, if there is “two tier policing” in the UK then it is non-white people who are firmly in the second tier.

Three years ago the Baroness Casey inquiry found overwhelming evidence of institutional racism towards non-white people in the Metropolitan police, whilst in Hampshire, where Henry Nowak was murdered, official statistics show that the police are over five times more likely to stop and search black people than white people.

On every measure it is overwhelmingly clear that non-whites are much more likely to be stopped, detained, disbelieved and mistreated by British police officers than white people.

Yet out national broadcaster has spent the entire week giving oxygen to the far-right fantasy that the complete opposite is the case.

So what is really going on here, and why is the BBC playing right into Nigel Farage’s hands?

Here’s what I think is going on.

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Has anyone seen Nigel Farage? I only ask because the normally omnipresent politician appears to have gone to ground.

The Reform UK leader claims to be campaigning for the party in the Makerfield by-election yet the last promoted campaign activity by him there was now ten days ago.

During that time he has taken part in no major media interviews, or public appearances, other than a series of self-filmed interactions with his by-election candidate Robert Kenyon.

Meanwhile his last appearance in Parliament was 17 days ago, for the King’s Speech, yet it appears to have only been a fleeting visit.

A quick look at parliamentary records reveals that it has now been almost 11 weeks since he last voted in the House of Commons, with Farage reportedly still yet to hold a single in-person surgery for his constituents, some two years after being elected.

The man who said that you could “bet your life” that he would take his job as MP for Clacton seriously, appears to have gone completely absent without leave.

So what’s really going on here and what is the Reform UK leader hiding from?

Here’s what I think has happened.

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“British politics is tired,” Andy Burnham told his supporters on Friday, as he launched his campaign to become MP for Makerfield.

“It needs a new script.”

It’s hard to disagree with this assessment. Unfortunately it’s becoming just as hard to work out exactly what he wants to change about it.

Because, despite repeatedly promising major “change” from the agenda of the current Government, Burnham has so far:

• Backed Keir Starmer’s red lines on Brexit

• Backed Shabana Mahmood’s hostile immigration policies

• Backed Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules

• Backed the Government’s illiberal trans policies

Now it is perfectly possible to argue for, or against, each of these positions.

But what you can’t argue is that they in any way resembles a new “script” for British politics.

So does Andy Burnham actually plan to meaningfully change how our national politics is done, or is he just planning to be Keir Starmer, but with a Northern accent?

Here’s where I think we are.

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“I cannot be bought,” Nigel Farage told The Sun this week.

As political lies go, this has to be right up there as the biggest.

In recent years Nigel Farage has received more funding from big corporate interests than any politician in our history.

Just last week it was revealed that he had secretly trousered £5 million from the crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne, on top of the more than £9 million he had already handed Reform UK.

Harborne is not the only one filling Farage’s coffers.

Earlier this year the Reform leader was reprimanded by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner for failing to declare more than £300,000 of payments from GB News, Google, X and the Cameo app.

This was on top of the more than £2 million he had previously banked for corporate speeches, hospitality and his work promoting gold bars.

Because the truth is that, despite his many denials, Farage is by some distance the most bought and paid for politician in the UK.

And as he crawls ever closer towards power, his funders are starting to get more than their money’s worth in return.

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Last month I sat down inside City Hall to interview London’s mayor Sadiq Khan.

Our interview, which we publish in full today at Byline Times took place almost ten years to the day since the last time I had sat down with Khan during his first campaign to become mayor.

Back then Khan was facing what he described as a “dog whistle” campaign from the Conservative party, which sought to play on racist fears about electing a Muslim man as the mayor of London.

Ten years and three elections later and in some ways little has changed. The Conservative party is still trying to profit from anti-Muslim sentiment about Khan, recently launching an attack on his hosting of Iftar celebrations in Trafalgar Square, whilst at the same time gradually losing public support in the overwhelmingly liberal city that London remains.

During our conversation Khan spoke about the racist attacks he has received from among others the US President, and how Big Tech algorithms are transforming our politics for the worst.

We also talk about his record as mayor and whether he’s actually succeeded in governing as quite the bold city-defining mayor that he claims.

As I’ve written on these pages before, I believe Khan has been underestimated by his political opponents. There are good reasons why he has won three terms as mayor and it is not because, as the Conservative party appears to suggest, that the capital city has become lost to ‘dominating’ Islamist forces.

As I wrote shortly before Keir Starmer became Prime Minister, there is much the Labour leader could and should have learnt from his London counterpart.

Perhaps if he had followed that advice, rather than that pushed by his former chief adviser Morgan McSweeney, the party would not have just suffered one of its worst ever results in the capital and the country at large.

You can read my full interview with Sadiq Khan here.

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If you want to know the root cause of Labour’s defeat in the local elections you only need to look at some recent remarks by the Home Secretary.

Speaking to Labour right podcaster Matt Forde last month, Shabana Mahmood boasted about how she had told “white liberals” heckling her about her immigration plans to “f*** right off”.

As I commented at the time: “let’s see how this strategy of telling “white liberals” to “f*** right off” works out in the local elections.

Well now we have the answer.

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“I would argue not a single politician in public life today, certainly no British political leader, has done more to highlight these issues [of antisemitism] than Nigel Farage” Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf told the BBC this week.

In some ways he’s right.

Farage has done a huge amount to highlight these issues. Just not at all in the way that Yusuf suggests.

To take just a few examples, over recent years the Reform leader has:

• Suggested that the “Jewish lobby” has too much power in the United States

• Pushed what Jewish groups described as anti-semitic “dog whistles” about the Jewish billionaire George Soros

• Engaged in conspiracy theories rooted in anti-semitism about “cultural marxism”, the “new world order”, “great replacement”, “globalists” and the “global government”

• Repeatedly dismissed allegations of anti-semitism against other Reform politicians

And that’s before you even get to the multiple accounts of Farage’s own anti-semitic bullying of his former classmates - something he has neither admitted to, nor apologised for.

In short, while there is lots that we could now learn from Farage about the evils of anti-semitism, the truth is that it is an evil that he has long been a perpetrator of, rather than a defender against.

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I first started covering London politics almost twenty years ago now and back then it was still big news. A visit to London’s City Hall, which then sat proudly on the South Bank, was to take a trip into the beating heart of the city’s political life.

There was something almost theatrical about covering London politics in those days.

Sitting inside City Hall’s vast glass chamber to watch Ken Livingstone, and then Boris Johnson, face questions in front of the looming financial towers of the City was to play a minor part in its drama.

I wasn’t the only one drawn to its stage. Sitting in the gallery beside me each month were big name journalists from the BBC, ITV and all the major national newspapers, drawn in by the drama of Johnson’s rise to power, as well as a band of so-called ‘citizen journalists’ taking advantage of the pre-social media boom in ‘blogging’ about politics.

Social media as we now know it was then in its infancy, with the only way to Tweet updates about what was happening in the Chamber, being to send an actual text message to Twitter HQ, which was then relayed to their website.

Yet looking back it was remarkable how accessible everything then was for a young aspiring freelance journalist. After every session of Mayor’s Question Time, I would immediately jump into a briefing with Johnson’s spokesman, before descending into the basement cafe where London Assembly members, members of the public and even the Mayor himself would share coffees, sandwiches and plates of curry.

I will always remember the image of Johnson fumbling in his pockets in the queue ahead of us, before turning to ask another blogger and myself to lend him a fiver to pay for his lunch. Some things never change.

Declining Standards

Lots of things have changed in that time, however.

After Johnson left office, the national attention given to London politics gradually drifted away to other stories, before Sadiq Khan ultimately sold up shop and decamped City Hall to a lonely windy spot in the city’s eastern docklands.

The old central London building is now in a process of being dismantled by its private owners and turned into luxury shops and restaurants.

However, it wasn’t just the national attention to our capital’s politics that has drifted away since then, but the very means of holding it.

The Evening Standard, whose screaming sandwich boards dominated political life in the capital for so long, was sold for just £1 to a Russian oligarch who understood little about its journalism, or its city. When the Lebedev family first took over, the Standard printed multiple editions each day and employed almost 400 journalists and staff. By last week that number had been reduced to just 16, with the print edition itself long since shuttered.

Ross Lydall, a vastly-experienced Evening Standard journalist who had covered London politics on and off since the start of the London Mayoralty, was among those to leave. The paper is now in the process of being subsumed into another Lebedev purchase - the Independent.

Broadcasters cut back too. BBC London, which was a constant thorn in multiple Mayor’s sides under its great former Political Editor Tim Donovan, faced swingeing cuts, with Donovan himself taking redundancy last year.

Blogging about London has somehow survived, thanks to the economics of Substack, and the brilliant work of a committed few, both locally and city-wide, yet it no longer feels at the heart of political life in the capital in the same way that it once did. In an era of Tiktok and Instagram, the big stories about London are being told in different ways and by different people, many of whom are based in different countries and even different continents, while the actual local politics of the city has taken a step back into the shadows.

Of course the focus on London is still there in some ways. The fact that the US President and his hangers on still devote so much time and energy to attacking Khan and his city shows the importance London still has on the international stage. Yet the far-right fantasy version of it portrayed in reels, shorts and Tweets is completely detached from the actual politics of a city where eight million people live and work each day.

I was thinking about all this as I visited London’s new City Hall in the Eastern docklands to interview Sadiq Khan this week. Gone were the pulsing crowds of eccentric protesters and tourists that used to buzz around its old central London base, and in its place were a handful of lonely looking figures, taking a break from their desk jobs inside, to sit on a bench, eat a sandwich and stare at the empty docks outside. It felt, in short, like both a literal and metaphorical backwater.

This is reflected inside its chamber. Where City Hall once drew in politicians who went onto become major national figures, like Johnson, Kemi Badenoch and even James Cleverly, the closest the Assembly now has to a big name is Zack Polanski, who will surely not be sticking around for much longer. The Conservative party, which held the City’s mayoralty for almost a decade under Johnson, now appears to have all but given up on the city and its politics, aside from joining in with the MAGA-driven fantasies about its Islamisation.

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Leading the Conservative group on the Assembly now is their failed former Mayoral candidate Susan Hall, who is perhaps best known for losing her purse, and any remaining credibility the party still has in London. At next month’s local elections, the party is forecast to lose control of all but a handful of local authorities in the City. Meanwhile Nigel Farage and Reform UK loom in the wings, with plans to hold referendums for outer London boroughs to divorce from the city.

Of course City Hall still plays a significant part in Londoners’ lives under Sadiq Khan. Khan’s decision to push ahead with the expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone to outer London caused huge amounts of controversy, and even an actual act of terrorism. Yet London’s air, which was once the dirtiest in Europe, is now significantly cleaner than it once was, cycling infrastructure has significantly improved, and the opening of the Elizabeth Line has been a triumphant success.

Yet in other ways things have undeniably gone backwards. The pipeline of big future transport projects that was put in place under Livingstone and Johnson has mostly dried up thanks to a decade of austerity, whilst bus routes are gradually being scaled back.

The cost of living in London, which was already high when I first started out, has become completely unsustainable for all but the lucky few. Of the friends I grew up with, most have since moved out of the city to raise their families. Primary schools, which were once full to bursting, are now increasingly closing down thanks to a Londoners feeling they can simply no longer afford to live here and raise kids.

Despite the AI-driven stories told about the city on the new forms of global social media, violent crime is actually significantly down in the city. Yet this still feels to me as being as much about rising security as it is about a city whose social life is gradually being hollowed out from within. When the average cost of a pint is almost £7, it pays to stay out of trouble at home.

I’m conscious here of not falling into a middle aged trap of ‘it was better in my day’. Much has improved in London since I first started covering politics in the city and the constant drumbeat of social media clickbait trying to portray it as an Islamist crime-ridden hellhole are as far from reality as it is possible to be. London is still a great city, albeit one that has many problems.

Yet there was something about the city, its politics and its media back in the mid-noughties that definitely has been lost over the past twenty years. Long before Covid, before Brexit and before austerity, London felt like a city whose political story was at the very centre, not just of the nation’s life, but of Europe and the world.

That feeling has now passed.

What has replaced it bears little relation to the city most of us who still live here experience every day.

The full interview will be published next month, but we today publish the first section, in which Khan talks about the upcoming local elections and why he fears the party is set to be punished for a series of “mistakes” made by Keir Starmer.

The fear in City Hall, and across the Labour party, is that they face a generational collapse of support in their Welsh and London heartlands, thanks to natural Labour voters switching en masse to the Greens and other parties.

This switch is thanks in large part to the strategy taken by Starmer towards Labour’s left flank.

The damage caused by the so-called ‘Blue Labour’ strategy, which concentrated on winning over Reform voters, at the expense of Labour’s own core support, has been compounded by Starmer’s dismissive approach to Zack Polanski’s party.

In the wake of the Gorton and Denton by-election, Starmer urged voters not to embrace the “extremism” of the Greens - something Khan believes was a mistake.

“Don’t call Green voters extremists. They’re not,” Khan told me.

“They’re people who are progressives. They may not agree with us on all these issues, but we should try and court them and win them over.”

Yet despite growing discontent within Labour about the Prime Minister and his strategy, there still remains little chance of an imminent Leadership challenge.

As I told the Byline Podcast this morning (which you can watch in full above) while there is now a consensus in the party that Starmer will ultimately have to go, nobody wants to be the person charged with actually getting rid of him.

The result is that as Labour heads into a set of local elections that could be the beginning of a catastrophic collapse of support for the party, which if left unchecked will result in Nigel Farage becoming Prime Minister, nobody in the party yet seems willing to do anything to stop it.

The public have made their minds up about the Prime Minister.

According to the latest polls Keir Starmer has a favourability rating of minus 48 - the worst of any party leader by some distance.

It’s not all bad news. There is one other senior politician who is even more unpopular.

Unfortunately that politician is his own Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, who has an even worse rating of minus 51.

I only set these facts out because whenever I criticise this Government I am accused by Starmer’s supporters of pushing a false media narrative about its unpopularity.

However, the truth is that you don’t actually need opinion polls to work out what the public really thinks about this Prime Minister and his Government.

All you need to do is to look at the results of actual elections that have taken place over the past year.

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