Standing Strong?

As I await the twelfth Prime Minister of my lifetime, and probably the second to be younger than me, I have been unable to confirm the story about a member of Zack Polanski’s family. But never having been a spokesman for the British Red Cross, and never having been a full member of the National Council for Hypnotherapy, Polanski also turns out never to have worked for the Ministry of Justice, much less for its “justice assessment committee”, which has never existed.

Meanwhile, Reform UK needs to explain how it secured the signatures of subsequently successful council candidates who were either dead or had never been alive, but there is nothing new about councillors who thought that they were MPs or even Cabinet Ministers, even if I had never previously heard of one who had stood down within hours of election because of the shocking discovery that that was not literally the case. As for quitting immediately because the position had turned out to be unpaid, there is a basic annual allowance of £13,300 here, with extra for additional responsibilities, or no one would do it.

Alongside Kemi Badenoch, Richard Tice addressed the Standing Strong: Extinguish Antisemitism rally hours after he had refused to condemn Reform’s Councillor Glenn Gibbins of Sunderland, who has called for Nigerians to be melted down and used to fill in potholes, and whom the party has still not suspended. Badenoch did not call Tice out on that, and nor did anyone on Reform’s Councillor Jay Cooper of Bootle, who has branded the Holocaust a hoax on the grounds that there were not six million Jews in Europe at the time. Again, I can find no record of Councillor Cooper’s suspension from Reform.