Meet the mother and daughter who ditched the Tories to join Reform
Now the two women, born and bred in the red wall, have been voted in as Reform councillors in the same ward in County Durham. The story of how they became disillusioned with the two major parties is a cautionary tale for Kemi Badenoch and Sir Keir Starmer.
They are also part of a new cohort of councillors that Nigel Farage hopes will prevent his party being disparaged as a band of 'fruitcakes and loonies', as David Cameron referred to his Ukip contingent in 2006.
'My dad and his side are from Consett, my mum is from Sunderland, we were all massive Labour supporters,' Miss Hunt, 24,
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The Guardian
9 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Judge urged to shut down hotel housing asylum seekers in Epping
A high court judge has been asked to shut down a hotel housing asylum seekers amid concerns about violence and disorder seen at far-right protests at the site. The local council applied for an urgent injunction against the owners of the Bell hotel in Epping, Essex, that would immediately prevent them housing asylum seekers – having repeatedly called on the Home Office to close it down. A series of protests have occurred since an asylum seeker was charged with sexual assault against a 14-year-old girl in July. A second asylum seeker has since been charged with sexual assault. During a hearing before Mr Justice Eyre on Friday, Epping district council's lawyer Philip Coppel KC said the site had ceased to be used as a hotel – its 'sole lawful use'. This, he argued, was a 'clear breach' of planning law. He also cited the concerns of local residents, as well as the safety of the asylum seekers themselves among the justifications for an immediate ban. The hotel's owners argued the planning issue was central – and was insufficient to justify the 'exceptional step' of an immediate interim injunction. It could be dealt with via conventional enforcement action or at a final injunction hearing, they argued. Piers Riley-Smith, representing Somani Hotels, argued asylum seekers had been housed at the Bell for about a year and a half without issue – with problems only arising recently. He told the court: 'In reality, this is an injunction by the council against the [recent] protests and the civil unrest. The council has targeted the wrong institution.' Coppel claimed the placement of asylum seekers put the local community at 'enhanced risk'. He said the alleged sexual offences took place close to the hotel – and that there were schools welcoming about 1,800 children in similar proximity. 'Having this sort of thing go on, with such a concentration of schools, with no measures to stop a repetition is not acceptable. That risk is needs to be removed … parents have the well-founded apprehension that the continued placement of asylum seekers at the Bell hotel represents a risk to those students.' Coppel said the asylum seekers themselves were not safe. 'The occupants, some of whom are vulnerable, are being housed in circumstances that can be described as intimidating. It is the last thing they need.' Riley-Smith said his client believed local residents' concerns were genuine. He said: 'It is clear recent protests have expanded far beyond the local community and have gone into concerns about wider ideological or political issues.' He argued that, if there were an urgent need to remove the asylum seekers and return the site to a conventional hotel because of fears about criminality, it would need to be shown the average asylum seeker has a greater propensity to commit crime than the average hotel guest. There was no such evidence, Riley-Smith told the court. Moreover, he said, were protests to be used as a reason to grant an urgent injunction against housing asylum seekers, this could be repeated at any place being used to welcome them across the country. Mr Justice Eyre reserved judgment until next Tuesday and ordered the hotel's owners not to take in any new asylum seekers before then.
The Independent
9 minutes ago
- The Independent
FTSE eases on weak US data as Ukraine peace summit looms
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Mr Trump extended the invitation at the Russian leader's suggestion, but the US president has since warned that the meeting could be over within minutes if Mr Putin does not compromise. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Anchorage, the US leader sounded a more positive note, saying: 'There's a good respect level on both sides and I think something's going to come out of it.' 'Investors will be watching closely for signs a credible peace deal is in the offing and any outcomes could set the mood music for next week,' said AJ Bell investment director Russ Mould. Mr Trump also said he will be setting new tariffs on steel, semiconductors and computer chips from next week, but declined to say what rate would apply, according to AFP. The US president said he would keep the new levies 'lower at the beginning' to give companies 'a chance to come in and build' in the US. 'And if they don't build here, they have to pay a very high tariff, which doesn't work. So they'll come and build,' he said. In New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.1%, the S&P 500 was 0.2% lower, and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 0.4%. Figures showed US retail sales growth decelerated in July, although the number was in line with hopes. The US Census Bureau said retail sales grew 0.5% monthly in July from June, when they had grown 0.9%, which revised up from 0.6%. But separate data from the University of Michigan showed the preliminary August sentiment index fell to 58.6 from 61.7 a month earlier. FX Street consensus had forecast an improvement to 62.0. The report showed US consumers are scaling back spending plans amid concerns about inflation and weakening job prospects. The pound climbed to 1.3566 dollars late on Friday afternoon in London, compared with 1.3541 at the equities close on Thursday. The yield on the US 10-year Treasury was at 4.31%, widened from 4.28%. The yield on the US 30-year Treasury was 4.90%, up from 4.87%. On the FTSE 100, mining stocks rose despite weak data from China. Anglo American rose 2.1%, Glencore climbed 1.8% and Antofagasta 1.2% on hopes the soft figures will spark action from Chinese authorities. 'Chinese economic activity slowed across the board in July, with retail sales, fixed asset investment, and value added of industry growth all reaching the lowest levels of the year,' ING said. 'After a strong start, several months of cooling momentum suggest that the economy may need further policy support,' the broker added. Asia-focused bank Standard Chartered slumped 7.2% after a US politician asked the country's attorney general to investigate the bank. Republican Elise Stefanik, in a post on X, said she has asked Pam Bondi to investigate the bank for 'illicit payments to known terrorists'. Ms Stefanik shared a letter on X in which she alleged Standard Chartered had made 9.6 billion dollars from such payments. 'China has been using Standard Chartered to purchase sanctioned Iranian oil,' she claimed. On a quiet day for company news, Associated British Foods ended up 0.2% after confirming the acquisition of Hovis Group from private equity firm Endless. AB Foods plans to combine Hovis with its existing Allied Bakeries division to create a 'profitable UK bread business that is sustainable over the long term'. Allied Bakeries owns the bread brands Kingsmill, Allinson's and Sunblest. It also produces own-label bakery ranges for major UK supermarkets. Clive Black, retail analyst at Shore Capital, said the deal shows AB Foods has been true to its word and taken 'demonstrable action to deal with persistent problem children'. He said AB Foods and Endless need to overcome any UK antitrust concerns, but he believes there is 'ample' choice for bread shoppers after any Hovis/Kingsmill alliance, providing a 'firm basis' for regulatory approval. On the FTSE 250, Bytes Technology Group jumped 8.4% after launching a share buyback programme worth up to £25 million. A barrel of Brent fell to 66.33 dollars late on Friday afternoon from 66.80 on Thursday. Gold rose to 3,343.39 dollars an ounce against 3,339.74. The biggest risers on the FTSE 100 were Anglo American, up 47.0p at 2,170.0p, BP, up 7.3p at 421.4p, Glencore, up 5.2p at 299.7p, Games Workshop, up 200.0p at 15,680.0p and Antofagasta, up 26.0p at 2,122.0p. The biggest fallers were Standard Chartered, down 101.5p at 1,305.5p, Rolls-Royce, down 27.5p at 1,074.0p , 3i Group, down 96.0p at 3,971.0p, Airtel Africa, down 4.0p at 216.2p and Rightmove, down 13.8p at 761.0p.
Telegraph
10 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Reform chairman David Bull: ‘We cannot be the Nigel Farage show'
Dr David Bull is run ragged in his new job as chair of Reform UK. I say he looks trim; he dissents. 'I have put on so much weight, really – absolutely ridiculous.' Nigel Farage has asked him to tour the associations, which means sleeping in hotels, dinner in pubs. 'I get to see real people in their environment… When one sits in one's bubble in London, you just don't understand the level of anger or frustration or upset about what's going on politically, and I hear that particularly when people have had a couple of pints.' A man who likes a party is now trying to build one. It will, he says, require teamwork, less ego and cannot be 'the Nigel Farage show'. The central party has had a 'disconnect' with the grass roots; democracy must bloom. Reform needs to operate in the centre-ground, appeal to different parts of society, focus on delivery. Things might be said that people don't want to hear, for instance on transgender rights. A bubbly blond with an electric car, wearing a wild blue shirt,Bull is an odd fit for Right-wing politics. He made his name as a TV doctor; I can remember him in the Nineties with curtained hair, giving advice on acne. Since his Reform appointment, memories have been jogged that he also hosted a ghost hunt that led to a violent altercation with a medium. Behind the scenes, however, he has played a serious role in the populist revolution, aided by his energy and charm. Reform's name, he says, was decided in this very house: 'either on this part of the sofa or in the kitchen'. The house is a converted barn in deepest Suffolk, down a lane marked by a sign that reads 'Cats Cross, Please Slow Down'. British and Suffolk flags flutter on his lawn. 'You may think it's lovely and leafy and sunny,' he advises, 'which it is, but actually rural crime is a huge problem. Local chatter is, these are a lot of immigrants who are here, nicking farm machinery. People go around nicking yer oil.' And don't get him started on Ed Miliband. 'Imagine heating this house with a heat pump… None of this lot from Islington has been to the country.' Bull was born in 1969, in Farnborough hospital, Kent (as was Nigel Farage, five years earlier). The family moved to Suffolk when he was four. Father Richard was an insurance broker working in Ipswich. Mother Pauline was a medical secretary-turned-homemaker. His father has since died, but his mother lives just 'five miles away', his brother, Anthony, is 'down the road' and his sister, Katie, 'is next door'. Various nephews and nieces 'call me when they hate their parents. I'm that kind of ridiculous uncle, right? They'll tell me things they would never tell their parents.' Bull attended the independent Framlingham College and studied medicine at Imperial College, graduating in the early 1990s, with degrees in medicine, surgery and science. As a junior doctor he was 'quite militant', after all he 'was doing a hundred hours a week or whatever… Got £17,000 for it.' But he feels the current British Medical Association 'has become a nasty, super Left-wing union'. Bull rattles off their recent pay increases: 'Tell me another job that gets that?' 'I went to various tower blocks,' to see various patients, 'and no one spoke English.' Critical of immigration, a fan of US President Donald Trump, he feels more must be done to enforce integration: 'All we've done is to pacify [a multicultural society] by having signs in multiple languages in hospital. I'm sorry, no: we'll speak English. If you come to this country and if you are legally allowed to come to this country, you learn English. You subscribe to British values, and that includes not wearing a burka.' Aside from healing, he was 'always obsessed with television', and took his first media steps via modelling. Was it clean? 'Of course it was clean! It was shampoo commercials.' An agent followed: Bull's first TV gig, in 1995, was giving health tips for a travel show on Sky. A meeting with John Craven landed him a job on Newsround ('I ended up doing Saturday mornings with an aardvark called Otis'). His list of credits is extraordinary, including kids' talk show Sort It!, Watchdog, Watchdog Healthcheck. Then he did Tomorrow's World in 2002 to 2003. 'I killed that,' he says. 'I was the last presenter of that.' He wrote books on teenage health, established a PR company, campaigned to put fruit on Virgin trains, was a ubiquitous presence on morning chat shows and met the Royal family. Prince Philip 'had the most brilliant sense of humour. I remember one day when we were in Buckingham Palace' – for the Duke of Edinburgh awards – 'and he came in and he looked at me and said, 'Not you again.' And I said, 'Well I could say the same for you, sir.' He loved that kind of sparring.' On another occasion, the Queen asked him the secret of a long life after he'd had 'three or four glasses of champagne'. He replied: 'You're doing pretty well without me.' There was a deathly silence. 'I thought I've either played this really well or it's a disaster. And she laughed.' All very interesting, but what I really want to hear about is Most Haunted Live!, the interactive paranormal show he fronted from 2002 to 2005. 'Outta 30 years' [career], you've chosen that one?' he asks with mock surprise. Shortly after he was appointed Reform chair, Bull was asked by Richard Madeley on Good Morning Britain if he believes in ghosts. 'I said, 'Look, things happen I can't explain.' And [he] said, 'What?' Now, I had a split second judgment to decide. Do I say, I'll tell you over dinner? Or do I launch in, full-throated – which was a foolish move, but I did.' Bull then recalled that after one edition of Most Haunted Live, relaxing in a hotel, the psychic Derek Acorah had told him his late grandmother was present in the room: then 'his face changed, he jumped on top of me and he tried to strangle me'. Bouncers pulled Acorah off. The next day, Acorah apologised and explained that when talking to Bull's grandmother, an 'evil spirit' had possessed him. I ask: 'Is there a part of you that thinks he was looking for an excuse to jump on you and strangle you?' 'Sure.' He admits: 'I must sound like a complete fruit loop.' But in the end the joke was on Madeley. A poll revealed that a plurality of Reform supporters believe in the paranormal, 'so there's a splash on one of the newspapers saying, David Bull is on the money'. Bull's transition to politics began at a drinks reception in the mid 2000s. 'There were various MPs around, and I was having a go at them and saying: 'None of you ever do anything and you're all useless.' And one of them said to me: 'Well, why don't you do it?' And I thought, right, I will then, 'cos I like a challenge.' David Cameron put Bull on his A-list of parliamentary candidates and he was chosen to fight Brighton Pavilion, though he pulled out a year before the 2010 election. His father was terminally ill, so he returned to Suffolk. He was asked instead to head a Conservative review on sexual health. Bull left a mark in Brighton by attending Pride in a t-shirt that read 'I've come out... I'm a Tory'. He is openly gay: is it easier to be homosexual than Right-wing? 'Yeah, hundred per cent,' in fact, 'being gay is a bit dull. Pride has kind of fulfilled what it's set out to do, which was to grant true equality.' With that battle won, he says some lobby groups 'are going after a whole new group' in a bid for relevance – ie transgender people – 'talking to kids who are not fully formed emotionally, intellectually, sexually, and persuading them that maybe they're not happy in their own body.' He empathises with the youngsters: 'you won't believe this but as a child, I was shy and… I was bullied really badly at school, and I was fat.' That's all part of 'growing up', and we shouldn't rush to 'medicalise'. I note that Vanessa Frake, a former prison governor who has joined Reform, has said that there shouldn't be a blanket ban on trans-women in female prisons, causing confusion over what the party thinks. 'It's not party policy: we believe there are two biological sexes, that actually male prisoners are in one prison and female prisoners are in another.' But then he adds that Frake 'made quite an interesting point. What happens if you fully transitioned? If you've got female parts but are biologically a man, where do you put them?' The obvious answer is 'they should be in their own prison'. But we can't do that, so 'that's why she said it needs to be done on a case by case basis, and that's why everyone's gone absolutely ape over the whole thing'. As to Frake's argument, he says: 'I don't think it is unreasonable but it's not what people want to hear.' He is 'fiscally conservative' yet 'socially liberal': one of his first encounters with Farage was in 2014, when he criticised the then Ukip leader for saying the NHS shouldn't treat migrants with HIV. 'I may or may not have written on Twitter [now X], after a drink, that he was an idiot.' So it came as a surprise in 2019 when he received a call from Farage – 'who I'd never met' – to say, 'I want you to stand for the European Parliament: right now.' For the north-west, rather than his home in Suffolk, where candidates were needed. Bull, who was enthusiastically pro-Brexit, won and served a few bizarre months in Brussels. 'I can see why the MEPs love it because you get paid really well. You only have to sign in, you don't have to do anything for the money.' Plus, 'you get a car to drive you everywhere'. In the 2019 general election, he stood in Sedgefield, placing third; in 2021, he ran in the London Assembly, coming fifth in City and East. With Boris Johnson as prime minister, Britain left the EU, and 'the Brexit Party was put on ice because it was a single issue party'. Nevertheless, Bull had become friends with Richard Tice, doing Tice's chat show out of the studio Bull had built next door to the barn: a small group decided to launch Reform to keep the populist flame burning. Farage returned for the general election of 2024, in which Bull ran for Suffolk West and took 20 per cent, and today the party polls north of 30 per cent across much of the country. Reform might be doing even better but for a series of internal rows that culminated in Zia Yusuf, the previous chair, criticising an anti-burka Reform MP and then agreeing to step aside. Yusuf did an 'amazing job' setting up 400 branches, he says, but 'it burnt him out', so Farage called Bull and asked him to take over. The role has been split in two, administration and team building, with Bull leading the latter as Reform expands and democratises. 'There's been a big disconnect I think in the past between the professional party in London and the people who do all the hard work knocking on doors and volunteering and all that dreadful stuff.' Bull travels the country 'rallying the troops'. Paul Nuttall, a past leader of Ukip, has joined as a more backstage vice-chair to take care of candidates. 'Ultimately, Nigel trusts me [because] I'm a team player.' I wonder if any of the splits that have happened have hurt? Rupert Lowe MP walked away, so did Ben Habib, a former co-leader of Reform whom Bull clearly likes. 'I have a lot of time for both of them actually. I think with Rupert, he's a really effective MP from what I understand. But I assume there's a clash of personalities.' Farage and Lowe are 'strong characters', both 'used to working for themselves'. Bull declares: 'I haven't got time for big egos.' How does he work with Farage then? 'He's the most effective orator and brilliant political mind I have ever met. If I say to him, I want you to speak for 45 minutes, he will speak for 45 minutes and zero seconds… without notes. And he's developed techniques to do that. But if we are seriously growing this to be a party of government, then we have to have a team. You cannot have the Nigel Farage show.' Bull continues: 'He's mellowing… He knows he has to build this party and – he has said this – it can no longer be about him.' It's an impression others share: I'm told Farage looked upon Yusuf with almost parental affection, and found the attacks on his character and ethnicity repellent. When Bull confided to him that he found reading his own Twitter feed demoralising, Farage replied: 'Just don't read it.' In an ideal world, would Habib and Lowe be in Reform? 'I don't think either would come back. It's a bit like a family when you've fallen out.' I suggest they're also going down a rabbit hole in their obsession with Islam and immigration. 'Remember,' says Bull, 'politics is won and lost in the centre-ground. It always has been.' Reform is about 'common sense' rather than ideology, and now that it is actually winning, it mustn't over-promise. 'One of the things that I'm really keen to impress upon our councillors – we've got 864 now – is that we absolutely have to deliver in those councils that we control because unless we can show that we're effective at local government, then people won't trust us when it comes to national government. Nigel can't do it as a one-man band, and he knows it.' Will Bull run for parliament again? 'It's hard blinking work doing that. Yes is the answer, but I'm a great believer you need affinity with the constituency that you stand for. Right? I hate people being parachuted in and I think people hate it when it happens.' He runs through the possible places – Kent, East Anglia – 'this area, central Suffolk, which is currently [represented by] Patrick Spencer'. I silently note that Spencer is on trial for sexual assault (he has denied wrongdoing); a by-election is possible. 'Might I be talking to a future health secretary?' 'Maybe. I mean, there's a lot of ifs in there, aren't there?' Bull is single. I say I'm surprised, he replies, 'So am I. Such a catch! Oh, you are kind. But it's very difficult, isn't it? And particularly given what I do now. A) I don't have very much time, as you can imagine, and B) Where do I meet anyone? I would need to date someone who likes politics,' preferably who shares his own: 'I would struggle to date someone who's uber Left-wing, for example.' He has learnt 'how lonely this job is'. He laughs, 'I'm staying in a Premier Inn' – the same one, so often that 'they've been giving me a free breakfast'. The realisation dawns: 'I am Alan Partridge!' I sense that in discovering Reform, Bull has found an even bigger family for whom he can play the fun uncle. 'I wouldn't say I'm like Nigel, but when I go into these places, there's whoops and hollers, and people are thrilled that I'm there. I'll give a speech and there's either a standing ovation or people are really moved by what I'm saying. And what I'm saying is nothing clever, it's just reaffirming their own views, I think.'
