Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice, was fuming about fish on X last week.
“Fury as foreign fisherman [sic] break rules in UK waters hundreds of times per year,” he posted, linking to a Daily Express story. “Only @reformparty_uk will protect and promote British fishing.” If this was true, they might have done well to attend a Commons debate on fishing which was taking place at the exact same time Tice was firing off his post. The debate on the fishing industry ran on Thursday from 1.30pm-4.27pm. Tice posted at 3pm. He, like every other Reform MP, failed to take part in the debate.
Meanwhile Nigel Farage’s new star signing Andrea Jenkyn was in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, last week supporting Reform’s candidate Wajid Ali in his bid to win a council by-election seat on December 12. “Let’s send a message to this awful Labour government that we have had enough of their lies and that Britain wants Reform,” she said.
Ali certainly wants reform – of the city’s taxi system. And what has posed it such challenges? ‘Former Brexit Party candidate Wajid Ali blames Brexit for helping to ‘cripple taxi industry’ in Wakefield,’ ran a headline in the Wakefield Express in 2021.
In an online petition, the paper reported, he said: “Covid-19 and Brexit effect has already crippled the taxi industry and Wakefield Council must act now to safeguard our future.” Another fine example of the high-quality candidates the party is attracting!
Last week Rats in a Sack reported how, just two months after the launch of its new weekly edition – and the accompanying loss of half of its editorial staff – the team of the newspaper formerly known as the London Evening Standard were facing another loss: that of its editor, Dylan Jones.
The editor’s chair will now be filled in an acting capacity by Anna van Praagh, who has already made a blinding start. Freebie newspapers tend to wear their politics lightly, so as to appeal to a broad readership – especially important when your demographic is Labour-voting London.
But the very next day after being plonked into the Standard’s revolving editor’s chair, van Praagh posted on X: “So the PM was perfectly happy his transport secretary had committed this criminal act over a falsely declared stolen phone, just not when the public know about it? #TwoTierKeir.”
A particularly weird advertisement appeared in the Times last week for its sister radio station with a picture of presenter Andrew Neil suggesting the French air is knocking decades off him, he’s been airbrushed to within an inch of his life or it’s been created by our future robot overlords. Is This The Way To AI-Brillo?
Incidentally, the ad came just as Neil announced he was taking a break from the station. Staff wonder when they’ll see him next: the last time he did so – at GB News, shortly after the channel’s launch – he never returned.
Finally, how goes the Daily Mail’s bid to secure its future by attracting in a new generation of younger readers? The headline on Quentin Letts’ sketch of the assisted dying bill at the weekend was ‘After a doleful day to see the assisted dying bill pass its second reading… Kim Leadbeater was weirdly chirpy, gabbling… with shades of Jimmy Clitheroe’.
Clitheroe, for the uninitiated, was a shorts-wearing comic entertainer known for his radio show The Clitheroe Kid, which ran from 1956 until it was cancelled in 1972. No one under the age of 52 will have heard it live. Even fewer know what it was. Clitheroe himself died in 1973. Just the thing to pull in the TikTok generation!
