Swansongs?

The swans were in rude health in Durham yesterday, no doubt thanks to the fact that the council was now controlled by Reform UK.

Reform was already ahead in the polls before Nigel Farage proposed to abolish indefinite leave to remain. Compulsory repatriation of people who had come here legally and led law-abiding lives is the stuff of the National Front in the 1970s. Everybody knows somebody with indefinite leave to remain, and that is often a Reform voter with an Antipodean or Anglo-African accent. Farage has overplayed his hand. And now, he is indulging Donald Trump on paracetamol and autism.

Medical quackery is one of the many similarities between the Reform voting bloc and the one that is partly Liberal Democrat and partly Green. Ed Davey is right that the BBC gives too much coverage, and none of it critical, to Reform. But like Farage, he has gone too far this week, in his case by suggesting that a Reform Government would lead to American-style school shootings. Yet the Lib Dems were already on course to become at Westminster the Official Opposition that they already were at County Hall, Durham. There was no need for Davey to overshoot. Nor for his party to go soft on opposition to digital ID. That is enough to cede many of its previously core voters to the Green Party.