Comment
Kenyon and Farage in Makerfield on Thursday. Ryan Jenkinson/Getty
Can Reform recover?
Before Andy Burnham’s big win in Makerfield, says John Harris in The Guardian, Reform UK seemed to be in with what their deputy leader called a “cracking chance”. Makerfield is reckoned to be 97% white British and “replete with the kind of grievances that Reform feasts on”. In May, when eight council wards in the constituency voted in the local elections, Nigel Farage’s party received more than 50% of the vote, to Labour’s dismal 22.7%. But after a campaign in which the party looked “disorientated and incompetent”, Reform have suffered their third by-election anti-climax in less than a year. Momentum matters in politics, and Farage seems to be losing his.
What should really worry Reform, says Jawad Iqbal in The Spectator, is that they are losing on their own chosen ground: “change”. Fed-up voters in Gorton and Denton plumped for the Greens, and in Makerfield Andy Burnham’s vaguely optimistic pitch was enough. It doesn’t help that they keep choosing terrible candidates. Anti-Islam obsessive Matt Goodwin probably wasn’t a wise choice to win hearts and minds in Gorton and Denton, with its sizeable Muslim minority. In Makerfield, Robert Kenyon – a plumber with a history of stupid and occasionally bizarre sexist social media activity – looked “hopelessly out of his depth from the start”. Was Kenyon really the best Reform could muster for a political battle of national importance? If so, how can they be expected to fare at the next general election? And all the while there’s the threat of Rupert Lowe eating Reform’s support from the right, forcing Farage into the same quandary he created for the Conservatives: tack further right, alienating the middle, or accept the loss of the rightward ground. With the “whiff of defeat” hanging over him, Farage will have to come up with answers – “and quickly”.
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Heroes and villains
Villain
A cat that gatecrashed a production of the Prokofiev ballet Romeo and Juliet in Turkey during its tragic final moments. As Romeo lay motionless, the ginger stray wandered across the stage and curled up next to him, licking itself and pawing at his hair. Juliet moved her dead lover’s limp body away, only for the feline intruder to bound across and continue playing with his hair. Both (human) performers kept a straight face; the audience found it hilarious. Watch the whole clip here.
Heroes
Japan’s football fans, who have continued their tradition of clearing up the stadium after games. Supporters stayed behind after their team’s 2-2 draw with the Netherlands in Dallas on Sunday, putting food trays, plastic cups and other rubbish into blue bags. “For Japanese people this is just a normal thing to do,” said Hajime Moriyasu, who has coached Japan since 2018. “When you leave a place, you have to leave it cleaner than it was before.”
Heroes
Two Peruvian police officers who arrested a suspected drug dealer by dressing as World Cup mascots. Knowing their target was a “diehard” football fan, the canny coppers approached his house during the tournament’s opening game disguised as “Clutch” the bald eagle and “Maple” the moose. It’s a common trick in Peruvian policing, with previous costumes for undercover agents including the Grinch, Freddy Krueger and Father Christmas.
Instagram/@KitBirks
Hero
A former NHS nurse who has become the first known person to have walked from Europe’s northernmost to southernmost point. Kit Birks, 30, completed the almost 5,000-mile journey from Nordkapp in Norway to the isolated Greek island of Gavdos in 343 days, spending 210 nights in a tent and enduring temperatures as low as -15C. She returns home with a book deal, more than £100,000 raised for suicide prevention charities, and a stray dog she picked up along the way called Peanuts.
Life
The physicist John Trump, in a high-voltage research lab at MIT. Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty
Donald Trump’s uncle really was a genius
Donald Trump has described his late uncle, John Trump, as a “great, brilliant genius”. For once, say Timothy Chu and Drew Endy in The Washington Post, the US president isn’t exaggerating. John, the younger brother of Donald’s father Fred, was instrumental in the development of radar for D-Day, hailed at the time as “second only to the atomic bomb” in helping the allies win World War Two. He helped fine-tune the technology at MIT, then led a “secret field lab” in England ahead of the British invasion of Nazi-occupied France. Radar not only enabled American bombers to “see” through clouds to destroy German oil and aircraft factories ahead of the mission, on the day itself it helped guide planes to deploy “one of the largest successful paratrooper drops in history”.
That was just the start. When a vengeful Hitler responded by attacking Britain with V-1s, the world’s first cruise missile, the MIT radar system helped detect them. The tech was also deployed in the Pacific, most notably on the Enola Gay in its mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. General George Patton, after discussing the technology with Trump in 1945, said: “This is the way wars not only can but must be run from now on.” Trump, who later helped Nasa with their space programme, was fêted for his work. He had lunch with George VI and Queen Elizabeth (the Queen mother), and was honoured by two presidents, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. When his nephew calls him a “super-genius”, it’s probably an understatement.
The Knowledge Crossword
Inside politics
Meloni aged 21 in 1998
What Lord of the Rings taught Giorgia Meloni
Three and a half years into her five-year term, Giorgia Meloni is on track to be longest lasting Italian prime minister since the fall of fascism, says Nicholas Farrell in The Critic. But her path to power wasn’t without struggle. Shortly after Meloni was born, her rich father abandoned the family, sailing to South America on his yacht before settling in the Canary Islands. When Meloni and her sister visited, he largely ignored them. Eventually, they refused to go back. Meanwhile, their mother had moved from the affluent La Camilluccia area of Rome to the working-class La Garbatella, and Meloni took various jobs, from babysitting to working in a nightclub and running a market stall. Today, she still speaks with the Italian equivalent of a cockney accent. “I grew up convinced I didn’t deserve anything,” she wrote in 2022. “My reaction was to strive relentlessly to prove otherwise.”
Her political journey began aged 15, when she joined the neo-fascist MSI party. At the time, JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings enjoyed “cult status” among Italy’s neo-fascist youth. Seeking a new mythology distant from Il Duce, they instead idolised Il Piccolo – “the little guy in his old-fashioned rural shire assailed by a faceless far-off industrialised evil force” – and Meloni, who put on Hobbit plays in the park with her MSI youth group, called it their “bible”. She played Sam Gamgee on account of being “short and fat” and points out that without him “nothing could be done”. Until she became prime minister, Meloni marked Tolkein’s birthday with an annual Facebook post. “He brought up so many of us with his stories, so rich in values and meanings,” read one message, “which taught us to believe and to dream.”
Weather
Quoted
“Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.”
Phyllis Diller
That’s it. You’re done.
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