Anna Gross from the Financial Times asked a two-part question at the press conference: about whether Reform UK would create an Ice-style migrant deportation unit, and about all five of the people on the platform having been educated at private schools,Nigel Farage responded,He said sarcastically that he “loved” the FT; the day after the Mandelson story broke, its front page carried a story about a Reform councillor in Kent, he said,He said there was no point addressing Gross’s question,“Just write some silly story,” he told Gross.

Farage has got form for patronising and insulting female journalists in this way.(As well as patronising, Farage’s response was unfair.The FT pursued the story about Mandelson’s links with Jeffrey Epstein more aggressively than almost any other UK news organisation.)Nigel Farage has unveiled the first part of Reform UK’s frontbench team, saying it shows that the party is no longer reliant entirely on him – while also warning that he will not tolerate any dissent from his colleagues.Keir Starmer is facing a mass resignation of Labour councillors in one of England’s poorest areas over a “betrayal” of funding for children in care.

Unemployment in the UK has risen to 5,2%, the highest level in nearly five years, while wage growth continues to slow, raising the prospect of another cut to interest rates in the spring,A Cheshire council leader is being urged to resign after it emerged he had written a letter backing a new town of 20,000 homes for the area, which led to it being listed on the government’s list of proposed sites and has since sparked a huge backlash,For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog,Here is John Crace’s sketch of Nigel Farage’s press conference.

And here is an extract,Meet the Fockers,The shadow cabinet from hell,Rejects, losers and deadbeats,A freak show.

A tribute act,Reform have often been called a one-man band,The Nigel Farage party,So to counter this narrative, Nige took over Church House in Westminster and turned it into a tacky gameshow set,A remake of The Weakest Link.

All to parade his new top team.The lucky men and women whose one job is to try not to fall out with one another in the next few years.No chance.Farage took centre stage; despite pretences, this was still all about him.His team were here entirely at his whim.

Without him they would be nothing,The spotlight would remain on him throughout the 75-minute presentation,His appointees would only get their turn under lights for their five-minute introductions,Then they would be cast back into the shadows,Start as you mean to go on.

The Gorton and Denton byelection takes place a week on Thursday.Here is a round-up of some of the latest news and comment from the campaign.Owen Jones has written his Guardian column on what he learned on a visit to the constituency, and he says he found a mood of despair.Walk the streets of Gorton and Denton now and the resulting draining of trust is easily discernible.Labour took half the vote here in 2024.

Now its coalition is splintering in two directions at once: towards Zack Polanski’s Greens on the populist left, and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK on the Trumpian nationalist right …What should really frighten anyone invested in the future of democracy is the level of angry disengagement on display here,Some of those I spoke to made clear they had given up on voting: that they now had a solidified contempt towards any politicians,These are citizens that the Greens’ brand of populism has yet to convince,After so many years of living standards and public services in crisis, the hope that sustained so many people has shrivelled,There is frustration, some apathy, but most obviously despair – and if that despair hardens, it could carry this country into far darker territory.

Once trust has been eroded, as is evident here, no one can be sure what happens next.Hope Not Hate, which campaigns against the far right, says in a blog post those campaigning for Matt Goodwin, the Reform UK candidate in the constituency, include a former Britain First activist, a former Reform parliamentary candidate who promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories on social media, and the party’s interim campaign manager in Tameside who has used the n-word and minimised the Holocaust.In response to the report, Goodwin said he rejects extremism.The Green candidate Hannah Spencer has rejected a challenge from Goodwin to a head-to-head debate.She told him:Matt, we literally just debated in the BBC studio and last week at the Manchester Evening News hustings.

It’s not a game of the best of three.It sounds like you’re concerned you didn’t come across very well and want another go.I’m not sure anyone wants any more of your hot air and I’m focusing my time now on knocking on doors to talk about what really matters to the people of Gorton and DentonSamir Jeraj has written a report for Hyphen on the battle for the support of Muslim voters in Gorton and Denton.He found that “many local Muslims still hadn’t made up their minds, while others felt alienated by parliamentary politics altogether”.Here is an extract.

One notable political absence is that of the Workers Party of Britain, the populist party led by George Galloway, which won a council seat in the area and 10% of the vote at the last general election,The party has announced that it will not contest the by-election and will instead lend its support to the Greens,“I think Gorton and Denton is one of those grounds that are unpredictable at the moment,” says councillor Shahbaz Sarwar, who represents the Workers Party for Longsight,“That’s one of the reasons why I pulled back,“When we looked at the scenario, we thought: there’s so many of us on the left and there’s one on the right.

Are we going to divide our votes and are we going for the same pockets? And the answer was yes.”Paul Burnell has a write-up of the BBC’s byelection debate.Lord Ashcroft has carried out focus groups with former Labour voters in Gorton and Denton and he says the expect Reform to win.In his write-up, he says:Focus groups are clearly not a quantitative exercise, but it was notable that whichever party they intended to support (and with a couple of weeks of campaigning still to go) most of our participants expected Reform to win the by-election, possibly by some margin: “I don’t think it’s going to be as close as people think.I think there are going to be secret Reform votes as well.

” Some said this expectation actually made it easier for them not to stick with Labour: “Reform are going to win,That’s why I’m voting Green,I would rather fail and know I’d been true to myself than vote tactically,”The broadcaster Michael Crick says Channel 4 News will tonight be broadcasting a story based on material contained in his biography of Nigel Farage published some time ago,He says:When Nigel Farage tried to become a Tory MP.

On C4News tonight, Gary Gibbon tells the story - based on my biography - of how in 2004, while a Ukip MEP, Farage secretly met a senior Cons MP & a Surrey councillor, seeking their help to defect & get picked for a safe Tory seat,Uplift, a group campaigning to support the transition to renewable energy, has accused Richard Tice, named today as Reform UK’s business and energy spokesperson, of promoting a Trumpian fantasy,Commenting on Tice’s attack on net zero politicies, Uplift’s deputy director Robert Palmer said:Tice is peddling a Trumpian fantasy,The geological reality is that after 50 years of drilling the UK has now burned most of its gas,Government projections show our reliance on imported gas is set to rise from 55% today to more than two-thirds by 2030, and over 90% by 2050.

More drilling won’t make a dent in that,What will is, accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels,Reform continues to mimic Trump,Like the US president they are enthralled to the oil and gas lobby,The party is stuck in the last century - actively trying to block cheap renewable energy and denying that climate change is happening despite the evidence all around us.

Chris Osuh is a Guardian community affairs correspondent.Labour risks losing loyal Black voters for “not talking” about racial equality, Diane Abbott has said, paying tribute to the late civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.Abbott, the country’s first Black woman MP, told the Guardian that Jesse Jackson’s message of racial equality was still relevant to today, and yet the “Labour party and Keir Starmer don’t talk about racial equality at all.”She added:Jesse wasn’t afraid to talk about racism, and I think if we don’t talk about racism, if we don’t challenge it, then the danger is something like Reform, it will just get stronger and stronger.Abbott said former Downing Street chief of staff Morgan McSweeney “was very much of the opinion we had to chase the Reform vote” and that she hoped that his departure marked a turning point for the Labour party, at a time when it risks losing votes to the left.

Asked if she feared Labour risked losing Black voters, who were most likely to vote Labour in 2024, she said:I think so … If people can’t see the Labour party speaking up for them, they’re going to sort of move away from the Labour party,It depends where you are, but certainly in London, to the Greens,Speaking of Jackson, she added:He really is an inspiration to Black activists and politicians in the UK, certainly my generation of Black activists,What he taught us was to be brave – he had to be brave seeing his mentor, Martin Luther King, slaughtered in front of him,And to speak your mind – I’ve always spoken my mind, even when it gets me in trouble.

Here is our story about the death of Jesse Jackson by Melissa Hellmann and Martin Pengelly.At his press conference this morning Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said that a poll out later would show that Rupert Lowe, the former Reform UK MP who has now set up a new party, Restore Britain, has very low name recognition.(See 12.24pm.)Farage was probably referring to the figures in this story just published by GB News.

The report by Jack Walters says:Fewer than one-in-10 British voters can identify Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe, a new poll conducted exclusively for GB News has revealed,Polling firm JL Partners found Mr Lowe’s visibility has dropped from 14 per cent to just eight per cent in the 10 months after his expulsion from Reform UK in March 2025,Reform UK voters also struggled to correctly identify Mr Lowe when shown a picture of the former Brexit Party MEP, with the proportion jumping from 71 per cent last March to 86 per cent,GB News employs Farage as a presenter,The steep rise in universal credit (UC) claimants in recent years has been driven mainly by people moving from older benefits rather than brand new claims, figures show.

The Press Association says:The Department for Work and Pensions has for the first time published a breakdown of the proportion of claimants who have been switched to UC from so-called “legacy” benefits, such as income support and jobseeker’s allowance.The total number of UC claimants in Britain stood at 8.34 million in December 2025, up by almost a million from 7.36 million 12 months earlier.Data published today shows that more than three-quarters of this increase (775,790) was due not to new claims, but instead were people who moved onto UC from other benefits.

The government has said the roll-out of UC across Britain should be completed this year, with any claimants still on legacy benefits due to be moved to UC by March.Sam Freedman, the political commentator who worked as a policy adviser in the Department for Education when Michael Gove was secretary of state, is not impressed by the decision to make Suella Braverman Reform UK’s education spokesperson.He says:Giving Braverman the education brief is quite a choice for Reform.I was on an education commission with her once before she went completely mad and she knew absolutely nothing at all.Keir Starmer has paid to keep a personalised pair of cufflinks given to him by Donald Trump during the US president’s state visit last year, the Press Association reports.

PA says:The prime minister purchased the gift, which would otherwise have been held by Downing Street, for his teenage son, the Press Association understands,Details released by the Cabinet Office show Starmer received the cufflinks along with a personalised necklace and a golf club from the president, while his wife was given a pair of cowboy boots,He initially paid to keep the necklace while the other presents were listed as retained by No 10, but an updated register of ministers’ interests on Tuesday showed he had bought both items of jewellery,Starmer and his wife, Victoria, hosted Trump and his wife, Melania, at Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat, in September following the president’s stay with the King and Queen at Windsor Castle,They presented the president with a ministerial red box and gave the first lady a silk scarf.

Ministers must declare any gift they receive worth more than £140 and either hand it to their department, or pay the difference between the value and the £140 threshold to keep it.It is not hard to see why Nigel Farage reacted so badly when confronted with the question from Anna Gross from the Financial Times.(See 1.07pm.) She asked if British voters really wanted to see US Ice-style deportation units operating in this country