Luke Campbell: From boxing champion to Reform's mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire
Luke Campbell has crossed over from the boxing ring to the political sphere after being elected the first mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire.
It is an unusual switch of careers for the first Briton to win Olympic bantamweight gold in more than a century at London 2012 and two-time world lightweight title challenger but is not without precedent.
Manny Pacquiao juggled huge fight nights with his commitments in the Philippines Senate, while Vitali Klitschko has been a spearhead in Ukrainian resistance as mayor of Kyiv following the Russian invasion.
Campbell, a married father of three boys, told the Daily Telegraph this week he only committed to running for Nigel Farage's Reform UK five days before his candidacy was officially rubberstamped.
The 37-year-old was emboldened by his zeal for his local area, having been born and bred in Hull, where he fought seven times in his professional career, including a debut at Craven Park in July 2013.
'This community shaped me, supported me through my journey in boxing and helped me achieve success,' he wrote to his prospective constituents. 'Now it's my turn to give back and fight for a better future.
'I'm not a career politician, I'm a fighter. I know what it takes to succeed and I know how to get results.'
That much is true, irrespective of the backlash he has faced since aligning with Reform, with Campbell having to defend himself against accusations of racism as well as explain a couple of alleged homophobic social media posts in 2011 and 2012.
Behind the cherubic features that belie over 200 amateur and professional contests is an iron will, typified by him ignoring mother Jill's plea to 'find a safer sport' when he first started boxing, aged 12.
Jill was 'shaking from head to foot' following Campbell's Olympic triumph, after which he was awarded an MBE and had a phone box in his home city repainted gold to commemorate his achievement.
A stint on ITV's Dancing on Ice was followed by Campbell winning his first dozen professional fights in style.
More of a technician than a knockout specialist, his blurring hand speed helped him gain regular stoppages, while a fan following, especially in Hull, was assured after the Olympics.
He rebounded from a shock defeat to Yvan Mendy by winning his next five fights to earn a shot at lightweight king Jorge Linares in 2017.
Unbeknown to anyone outside his inner circle, his father Bernard died two weeks before the bout, but Campbell pushed on ahead and produced a stirring display, only to come up fractionally short on the judges' scorecards.
He again showed tremendous heart and grit two years later when fighting for several 135lb world titles but was ultimately outclassed by generational great Vasiliy Lomachenko.
The writing was on the wall when he was stopped for the first time in his career by rising star Ryan Garcia and he retired in 2021 with a record of 20 wins and four defeats, declaring he had 'lived his dream'.
Since then, Campbell has turned to business and still occasionally body spars. Having emerged from the murky world of boxing relatively unscathed, he now enters the equally chaotic and unpredictable realm of politics eager to make his mark.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
British politics is in a loop and it's Farage's vision that's stuck on repeat
As so often happens, what Nigel Farage said on a recent visit to south Wales deserved endless pejoratives. It was ludicrous, condescending, half-baked, opportunistic and plain stupid. Even he didn't seem to know exactly what he wanted. At a Reform UK press conference in Port Talbot, he seemed to make the case for reopening the town's steel-making blast furnaces, before admitting that 'it might be easier to build a new one', though he also acknowledged that it would 'cost in the low billions' to do so. But he had even more dizzying visions of reopened Welsh mines. 'If you offer people well-paying jobs … many will take them,' said Farage, 'even though you have to accept that mining is dangerous.' The climate crisis, predictably enough, was not worth considering. He also did not offer any opinions about coal-related issues such as slag heaps, land slips, rivers that run black, and unimaginable underground disasters. When he was asked where new pits might be located, he blithely offered the opinion that it 'comes down to geology'. That is true, up to a point, but he would surely also have to think about the housing developments and business parks that often sit atop all those disused coal seams. The whole thing was – of course – politics on the level of pub bullshit, but Farage and his people presumably knew that. What mattered was the resulting spectacle: Britain's foremost populist proposing to 'reindustrialise' Wales, in the face of entirely reasonable doubts, mockery and outright opposition from voices easily maligned as the usual distant elites. In that sense the visit was a win, repeating a formula that has been working for a very long time. Besides Farage's own enviable political skills, there are obvious reasons for that. The first is to do with the fact that the basic social and economic conditions that fed into the rise of the UK Independence party and the Brexit referendum remain unchanged. It seems, in fact, to be 2016 for ever: Britain is still a country of anaemic growth and productivity, ongoing local austerity, stagnant wages and fear of the future. Those conditions explain people's ever-deepening disdain for mainstream politicians, and their sense that as life constantly goes round in circles, Westminster does not seem able or willing to break the pattern. Every grim rotation, moreover, seems to be accompanied by ever-more extreme manifestations of the country's dysfunctionality. Our passage to a new political era used to be marked by the results of elections and referendums. But of late, it feels as if more vivid proof of where we are heading is provided by civil disturbances. Last year's summer riots were an obvious example. In the same week that saw massed violence in Salford, we have just seen horrific outbreaks of racist violence in the Northern Irish town of Ballymena, and Farage has offered opinions that follow his usual slippery script: 'I just wonder whether it is not a deeper, broader problem we saw something of after Southport last year. You know what? If they'd listened to me, none of this would have happened.' A question not asked enough in political journalism is what life in contemporary Britain feels like. The answer in part comes down to a profound sense of tension and a constant, latent fear that something awful is about to happen. Farage attracts supporters by offering himself as an answer to that feeling – but to those who recoil from him, he is the source of it. Like Donald Trump, that combination makes him a very zeitgeisty politician. So does his presence on social media – which, even if most politicians do not yet understand it, has changed what is required to be a successful public figure even more radically than TV once did. Farage has 1.3 million TikTok followers, as many as every other Westminster politician combined. Particularly since Elon Musk turned Twitter into X, he is regularly cited and praised in the parallel news universe that millions of people now take their information from – full of scurrilous rumours and explanations for events rooted in QAnon-like conspiracies. That ecosystem blurs into the nightmarish version of reality X offers as a kind of mood music, represented by endless videos of violence and hostile altercations between members of the public. All this suits Farage – and Farage-ism – just fine. His key asset is a diagnosis of people's problems that gets simpler and sharper by the week: you are scared and struggling, he and his allies tell the public, because the government spends too much money on foreigners and is full of privileged and snobby people who know nothing of your pain. The Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham recently gave an interview to the centre-left journal Renewal, in which he mused on what effective political communication now entails. The governments led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, he said, operated in 'a world of nuance', but social media 'just ended all of that'. What he said next sounded like a brisk answer to why Farage is winning: our modern means of communication, he said, 'changed politics, and politics hasn't changed enough to reflect that … people want instant opinions from elected representatives. They want authentic opinions'. Six weeks ago I watched Farage do a walkabout in a neighbourhood of Scunthorpe, surrounded by crowds of people jostling to take pictures of him on their phones. Not long after he had been presented with an Airfix tank, he commented that all the attention was 'the benefit of just being real, you know what I mean?' Clearly, just like Boris Johnson in his pomp, a great deal of his persona – the clothes, the pints, every calculated pronouncement – is actually affectation and pretence. But politics is now so low on charisma and the common touch that simply being comfortable in your own skin looks like a kind of spectacular normality. In that sense, Starmer and Labour's other high-ups might be Farage's ideal adversaries. With the possible exception of Angela Rayner, they are mostly bloodless and hesitant. They cling on to a presentational style that is 20 years out of date, built around pre-ordained news themes on the proverbial 'grid', set-piece interviews, and complicated and chronically abstract rhetoric: 'missions', 'renewal', the constant chase for growth. Of late, the prime minister has tried his own occasional approximations of Farage's approach, putting up such blunt and boastful online posts as: 'I've already returned over 24,000 people with no right to be here. And I won't stop there.' But that style rings hollow, because he doesn't have Farage's swaggering confidence nor any understanding of how to bring such directness to the way he talks about Labour's fundamentals: the economy, jobs, public services. There is also something to be said about how the government intends to change the country. After a wasted year, last week's spending review contained a surprising amount of good news, not least on housing. But it was all about the kind of investment that will not start to become visible until 2028 or 2029. Everyday life, it seems, will continue moving in ever-decreasing circles for another three or four years. That is a long time for Farage to carry on making mischief, as he illustrates an aspect of modern Britain too little understood – that, to an extent that vividly illustrates other people's colossal failures, he looks like the only front-rank figure who understands how 21st-century politics actually works. John Harris is a Guardian columnist
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
What will Iran do next?
'They are scared. You can hear it in their voices,' someone wrote to me on Friday from Tehran. And in this case the 'they' is what's left of the Iranian military and intelligence commanders. And perhaps Khamenei, too (strikingly absent from the air waves since a speech on Friday morning). Israel's strikes, yet another show of tactical brilliance from the ever-resourceful Mossad, stunned the Islamic Republic in a brutal display of military and intelligence superiority. Iran is quite simply reeling, and the only question now is how far will Israel go, and to what end? Who, if anyone, will pick up the pieces of a broken Islamic Republic? For now, more than ever, the Islamic Republic faces internal splits, a crisis of confidence and a relentless Israeli military and intelligence machine with all the cards, to use a Trumpism. But as has been the case since October 2023, as Israel struts its hardware over the region, the most important question is, 'How does this all end?' Tactical geniuses are not always strategic masters, as Israel has shown us repeatedly. Whether the US knew about the attack in advance or not (they did) will, I feel, be a footnote in the history of this story, which begun many years ago with Netanyahu banging a large drum on the international stage, and telling everyone one day he would do something about Iran's nuclear ambitions. And now he has done something. Perhaps not as conclusive as he'd have liked, for Iran may still stun the world and announce they have a nuclear weapon. Yet given everything we've seen and heard from Tel Aviv and Washington, it's clear that these strikes are about so much more than yellow cake and centrifuges. This is about crippling the Islamic Republic, bringing it to its knees and destroying its capability to strike back and threaten Israel ever again. This is about regime change, or rather regime destruction. But what can Tehran do? The (relatively) fictional nature of the Islamic Republic's deterrent was exposed throughout 2024, with Tehran's responses to Israeli attacks being calibrated to save face, and avoid war all at the same time, a conjuring trick that Israel quickly rumbled. Iran knows it must do the same here; it needed to strike back to show the world it can't be bullied, but it also knows that its missile defence systems are comparatively weak, that its military senior leadership is in disarray and that its intelligence services are at war internally, playing the ultimate blame game. It could strike at global shipping through the Houthis, sending energy prices through the roof (and saving the Russian economy), and in an act of total desperation, it could also hit Saudi oilfields. But would any of this help its cause? Would any of this save the Islamic Republic? Unlikely. Its best, and riskiest, option would be to speed towards a nuclear weapon. Smart guesses suggest this could take many weeks. And from what we've seen so far, Israel can inflict a lot of damage to Iranian buildings, installation and psyches in a matter of hours. A number of weeks might just be too late. Of course, Trump is saying publicly that he wants Iran to come to the table to talk, but it seems as if the time for talking might well be at an end. But the wildcard in all of this will be Persian nationalism, a force so potent and with such a selective memory that it's entirely possible for large sections of the Iranian population to rally behind a hated regime as they all gather together to resist Israeli bombs. This is why Israel's attacks have been carefully calibrated to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. Having to rely on your enemies to save you from your own people, however, is a damning indictment of an exhausted revolution.
Edinburgh Live
5 hours ago
- Edinburgh Live
Man who made complaint against former Edinburgh Council leader Cammy Day speaks out
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info A man who complained about former Edinburgh council leader Cammy Day has slammed the Labour party, after he was allowed to rejoin. The man claimed that he was being sexually harassed in 2022. The Labour party allegedly told him his complaint would have to go through a formal process to progress, which he declined, reports the Daily Record. Now the man, who is being kept anonymous, had criticised the decision to allow Day back into the party. This comes after it was alleged that he bombarded Ukrainian refugees with inappropriate messages. The man said: 'If a senior leader in the Labour Party can act in a sexually inappropriate manner with impunity, what message does that send to victims of sexual harassment? Sign up for Edinburgh Live newsletters for more headlines straight to your inbox "Scottish Labour have given the green light to misconduct by re-admitting Cammy Day and have sent an unequivocal message to victims about whose side they are really on. 'I believe this will significantly undermine the whole system and processes that are meant to protect victims of sexual harassment; and decrease the likelihood of victims coming forward in future. Shame on them.' Join Edinburgh Live's Whatsapp Community here and get the latest news sent straight to your messages. A Labour Party spokesperson said: 'The Labour Party takes all complaints seriously. "They are fully investigated in line with our rules and procedures and any appropriate action is taken.'
