Former Ukip leader given top job in Reform UK
His website and LinkedIn page were found to carry several inaccuracies about the failed politician's past.
READ MORE: Reform UK lose two council by-elections in England
Nuttall claimed to have been a professional footballer, served on the board of a charity and that he obtained a PHD in history. These claims were found to be false.
And now, Nuttall is understood to be focussing on election campaigns and expanding Reform Reform UK lose two council by-elections in England
UK as part of his new role.
A Reform source told The Telegraph his role would not be 'front facing' and he would be doing 'purely internal stuff'.
The party denied Nuttall would be running a 'six-week summer offensive' starting in July, insisting that leader Nigel Farage would be in charge of this.
Nuttall, 48, was elected as a Ukip Member of the European Parliament (MEP) in 2009, becoming deputy leader a year later.
He did not stand in the leadership election after Farage resigned following Brexit in 2016, but was elected to head the party after Diane James resigned.
Nuttall failed six times to be elected to the House of Commons, and resigned as party leader in 2017 after he failed to win Boston and Skegness at the general election that year.
Ukip saw their votes plummet across the country to just 593,852 from 3,881,099 in 2015.
READ MORE: LIVE: Palestine Action in court to challenge UK Government's terrorist ban
He then left Ukip in 2018, before joining the Brexit party in 2019, set up by Farage after he left Ukip. Now he has followed Farage to Reform UK.
We previously told how Nuttall was criticised by families of Hillsborough victims after being caught lying about the disaster that claimed the lives of 96 people in 1989.
His website claimed he had lost 'close personal friends' during the tragedy, but later admitted it was not true, blaming whoever wrote the words on his website.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Times
an hour ago
- Times
Yes we can! A master of political slogans reveals his secrets
There can't be many people working in politics with a CV like Chris Bruni-Lowe's. One morning in late 2018 the pollster and strategist took an unexpected phone call from his old friend Nigel Farage. Together the two men had taken Ukip from nutty obscurity to nearly four million votes in a general election and the EU referendum victory it had always dreamt of. Now, with parliament deadlocked and Ukip back beyond the fringe, a restless Farage was planning his most audacious heist on British democracy yet: the Brexit Party. Now he needed a slogan. To Bruni-Lowe, a shaven-headed thirtysomething from south London, Farage was insistent: he wanted to promise a 'political revolution'. Saying no to Farage is never easy. But Bruni-Lowe did just that. 'I pointed out to him that the politically explosive connotations of the term made it a risky choice,' he writes in Eight Words That Changed the World, a fascinating and timely history of election slogans – some of them his. Instead he settled on a gentler line with a deliberate double meaning: 'Change politics for good.' Farage won the European elections of 2019, Theresa May was ousted as prime minister, then Boris Johnson got Brexit done. 'We had succeeded,' Bruni-Lowe reflects, 'in choosing the right word for the right candidate at the right time.' A couple of pages after this story Bruni-Lowe recounts another of his professional triumphs. 'I was advising Milojko Spajic, a former finance minister in Montenegro … He had resigned from the government six months earlier to found a new political party called Europe Now! and he wanted my help to win the presidential election in March 2023.' Pardon me? What now? Europe when? We thought you were the Farage guy. But no: here is Bruni-Lowe, settling on the slogan 'It's time' to help another upstart party 'overturn some deeply entrenched attitudes' and win an election on a pro-EU platform. It worked. Just how does he do it? In an age of volatile electorates and unpredictable polls, this stuff is more important than it has ever been. At their best, slogans capture the zeitgeist and express in not even a sentence the essence of a politician's mandate. Just ask Keir Starmer. 'Change', one of Bruni-Lowe's eight words, spoke to the anti-Tory mood of 2024, but is proving rather difficult to substantiate in office. Few people know all of this better than the author, a gun for hire whose work has taken him to almost every democracy in the world. There is a little bit of memoir in this pacey, breezily written history of a much misunderstood political art — I almost wanted more — but it is short on baccy-stained anecdotes about Farage. Instead, this short book's great strength is in its breadth and depth. Those eight words are people, change, democracy, strong, together, new, time and better, with a chapter for each — and two bonus choices, great and future, as our introduction and epilogue. Some are invariably more effective, ambiguous and elastic than others, but it of course depends where you are. As the Liberal Democrats have learnt from a century of banging on about proportional representation, lecturing UK voters about 'democracy' is likely to put them to sleep. In embattled states like Taiwan and Ukraine, however, it means something real. Parties that look knackered, meanwhile, can be reinvigorated by the judicious use of a single word. Old rogues like Recep Erdogan in Turkey and Viktor Orban in Hungary have both used the word 'time' to present themselves afresh to exhausted electorates. Political journalists like me are constantly discovering that there's really nothing new in our line of work — and that is also the lesson here. Not least the word 'new', which turns out to belong to rather more people than Tony Blair. Vladimir Putin, Erdogan and the Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko all used it to win the elections that would, in time, turn them into very old-school strongmen. The best slogans are a repository for millions of diffuse — and very different — hopes and dreams. • The 9 best politics books of the past year to read next Take Barack Obama. 'Yes we can' was his clarion call to a restive America in 2008. Even I, the sort of tragic political nerd who watches old Michael Cockerell documentaries on holiday, didn't know that Alex Salmond had used the same slogan for the SNP in the general election of 1997. As Bruni-Lowe notes, drily and wryly: 'It is plain to see that Alex Salmond and Barack Obama had different qualities.' It wasn't so much the slogan that mattered, but the time and place in which voters were reading it. 'The words can work,' he writes, 'but only if they're used by the right person at the right time.' See also: Winston Churchill. Almost absurdly, given how intimately he was then known by the British public, Churchill told voters that it was 'time for a change' in 1951. Despite knowing him only too well — just as they knew Farage by 2019 — they happened to agree. But when the Republicans ran Thomas Dewey against Franklin D Roosevelt with the same slogan in 1944, Americans laughed him out of the room. Yes, Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented and controversial fourth term — but the business end of the Second World War was not, it turned out, the ideal time for a change. Perhaps my favourite one of all is the frankly deranged slogan employed by the Japanese Social Democrats in 2021: 'Change is fun!' That may be the implicit logic of every 'change' line, but in this case the voters did not agree. They won one seat. As South Africa prepared for its first multiracial elections in 1994, Nelson Mandela — not a man we imagine as a ruthless electioneer — learnt a similar lesson. He told his American strategists, Stan Greenberg and Frank Greer, that he had come up with the ideal slogan for the African National Congress: 'Now is the time.' They duly polled it and found it resonated only with hardcore activists from the ANC. Mandela, 75 but ever conscientious, did not much like that. 'He really wanted to unite the country,' Greer, one of many gnarled veterans to speak on the record, tells Bruni-Lowe. 'I've never been a candidate,' Mandela would say. 'I want to learn how to be a candidate.' That resulted in a slogan befitting of a father of the rainbow nation: 'A better life for all.' • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List As Bruni-Lowe rightly concludes, the election slogan has never been more important. With everything up for grabs in British politics, his comrades in the polling fraternity should study his book. I bet Farage will. And if that scares you, read to the very end. The author's parting shot should terrify well-meaning liberals even more than the prospect of a Reform government. The reader we should worry about isn't an unscrupulous politician but ChatGPT. The future, Bruni-Lowe warns, is a world of 'hyper-targeted slogans', written by AI, mashing his eight words together in different orders for each individual voter and smashing our national conversation into tens of millions of pieces. That's certainly new. It will be a change too. And it's about time politics caught up with technology. But is it democracy? Eight Words That Changed the World: A Modern History of the Election Slogan by Chris Bruni-Lowe (Biteback £20 pp272). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Scotsman
2 hours ago
- Scotsman
How, one year after defeating Tories, Labour has delivered more of the same
Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... It hasn't been the happiest of 'birthday' weeks for the government at Westminster. Labour colleagues were not in a celebratory mood on the anniversary of their 'landslide' election win. In Westminster, it wasn't hard to find government parliamentarians griping about their own record whilst in open rebellion. The Welfare Bill debate on Tuesday was, for those of us who still wear the scars, a throwback to the chaos at the height of the Brexit debacle. Ministers were making U-turns at the despatch box just before key votes. It was difficult to keep up, so rapid was the disintegration of the Bill over the course of one afternoon. Potential rebels were unsure what they were voting for at the end of the day. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad So feverish was the atmosphere that the Chancellor's tears at Prime Minister's Questions led to a bout of frenzied speculation as to what it all meant. The Conservatives, struggling to find a meaningful role themselves, were quick to jump on the visible upset of Rachel Reeves, in a way that reflected rather worse on them than the incumbent of Number 11. It did, however, tell a story of a government that has lost its way. This week's events were more reminiscent of an administration staggering to the end of its time in office rather than at the peak of its powers. Keir Starmer has failed to live up to the expectation of change that people wanted to see following last year's rejection of the Conservatives (Picture: Carl Court) | Getty Images Hard Tory Brexit remains A major challenge is that Labour doesn't know what it's for. Inevitably it has failed to live up to the expectation of change that people wanted to see following last year's rejection of the Conservatives. Westminster has levers Holyrood ministers could only dream of to deliver policies, but doesn't use them. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The increasing levels of poverty in the UK, the lack of investment in infrastructure, an outdated parliamentary and electoral system, a hard Tory Brexit that no one seems to want and the UK certainly can't afford – all areas they could have delivered on. A year ago, there was an appetite for change. Labour won a landslide in terms of seats, albeit a shallow one in terms of the vote because of who they weren't. Rather than taking the historic opportunity afforded to them, unfathomably, Labour's message has been one of continuity, the very thing that people had voted against. Continuity was seen in the cuts to the winter fuel payment that hit the most vulnerable, continuity in failing to fix our relationship with the rest of Europe that hampers growth, and continuity in maintaining the Conservatives' failed fiscal rules. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Contrast with Blair and Salmond Labour won power and don't know what to do with it. Compare with previous incoming administrations who knew that people had voted for change. In 1997 on day one as Chancellor, Gordon Brown made the Bank of England independent. In Scotland, in the days after the SNP's narrow election win in 2007, Alex Salmond changed the name of the Scottish Executive to the Scottish Government, and scrapped bridge tolls amongst a range of other measures. These actions by two distinct administrations told the electorate that not only had the voters' message of change been heard but it was being delivered. These opening acts also told voters something of the governments' plans. Blair's New Labour was determined to be financially prudent and Salmond's administration was delivering a distinctive Scottish Government that would make up its own mind on policy and pursue devolution that diverged from Westminster where the First Minister believed that to be in Scotland's best interest. Agree or disagree, these administrations knew what they were for from the start. Wrong side of poverty issue Even after this disastrous week, there is no sign of improvement. Government sources have briefed that the rebellion over the Welfare Bill will mean that the two-child cap will remain in place. The Child Poverty Action Group said of the latter policy: 'This tax on siblings is the biggest driver of rising child poverty in the UK today.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Former Blair adviser John McTernan remarked, with palpable frustration, that the government's position appeared to be 'you stopped us harming people with disabilities, so we'll hurt children'. This Labour government seems to be on the wrong side of tackling poverty and getting people back to work. Scottish Labour are no better. The day after the rebellion, there was a debate in Westminster Hall about the UK Government's vision for Scotland. Labour MP after Labour MP stood up, not to talk about their hopes and aspirations for their own government, but rather to focus on the Scottish Government. More than once, the chair had to remind Scottish Labour MPs that their job was to scrutinise the UK rather than the Scottish Government. Their focus on Holyrood is something of an unintentional complement to the SNP administration and says much about the lack of imagination or clear mission within the ranks of Scottish Labour MPs. The UK Parliament has powers and responsibilities over Scotland far in excess of that of Holyrood. The fact that Labour MPs don't have much to say about that speaks to a malaise in a party which doesn't know what to do with the power it has attained. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Lacking credibility This week Scottish Labour were one of the last holdouts of loyalty to Keir Starmer. The Welfare Bill would have a profound impact on the Scottish Parliament's own efforts to reduce poverty, but few Scottish Labour MPs joined the rebellion. As Labour leaders in Wales, London, Manchester and elsewhere were joining in calls for change to the Bill, Scottish Labour remained silent. Their claims that they wouldn't introduce the changes in Holyrood, that they failed to oppose in Westminster, lack credibility. That's the problem. Labour showed this week that they lack credibility or a plan to end the chaos. One year on, the great change has led to more of the same.
Evening Standard
2 hours ago
- Evening Standard
The Prime Minister has a London problem
This last point underlines the threat facing Starmer's party more widely. Its rhetoric and policies reflect the desire to win the support of 'traditional' Labour voters who defected to the Conservatives in the 2017 and 2019 general elections. Yet as Professor John Curtice underlined, drawing on data from the 2025 British Social Attitudes Survey: 'London is now the most pro-Labour part of the country and actually the core Labour voter is a young, often first-generation, middle-class professional living in London'. As such, Ministers neglect the capital at their peril.
