Latest news with #BrexitParty
Spectator
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
When did double-barrelled surnames stop being posh?
When the lead singer of Bob Vylan's name was revealed, it caused a fair amount of amusement. This anti-establishment musician who hit the headlines after ranting about the Israel at Glastonbury is actually called…Pascal Robinson-Foster. 'A posh double-barrel name is perhaps not the best handle for a self-styled Rasta radical. So he goes by the name Bobbie Vylan instead,' wrote veteran broadcaster Andrew Neil. But while it's vaguely amusing that Vylan's real name is rather less 'rock-n'roll' than his stage act suggests, Neil got one thing wrong: the era of double-barrelled surnames signifying poshness is over. Once upon a time, hyphenated surnames were a way of aristocrats displaying their social cachet. The upper class is full of Parker-Bowleses and Spencer-Churchills. The list of current earls in the Peerage of England includes a Chetwynd-Talbot, a Hastings-Bass, a Fiennes-Clinton, and an Ashley-Cooper. When, in 1964, the fourteenth Earl of Home faced the fourteenth Mr Wilson, it can't have been lost on the electorate that the former was a Douglas-Hume. It is no accident that the poshest pupil at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books is named Justin Finch-Fletchley. But times have changed, and now double-barrelled surnames can be more of a disadvantage than an advantage. Double-barrelled names have more recently reared their head as a political liability. When Annunziata Rees-Mogg, Jacob's sister and sometime Brexit Party MEP, embarked upon her political career, then-Tory leader David Cameron famously advised her to change her name to Nancy (also, curiously, the name of his own daughter: yes, the one he left at a pub). Less well-known is that Cameron also reportedly told her to drop the Rees; Nancy Mogg might have been the future, once. Under Cameron's leadership, there were reports that other Tory candidates were told to go single barrel: thus Simon Radford-Kirby became Simon Kirby, and candidate Scott Seaman-Digby became Scott Digby. But while politicians were dropping the hyphens from their names, the same wasn't true in other fields. In football, there has been a crop of stars with double-barrelled names, including Trent Alexander-Arnold, James Ward-Prowse, Emile Smith Rowe, and Dominic Calvert-Lewin. It is a sign of the times that, whereas the men's and women's England football squads contain between them five double-barrelled names, Britain's Olympic equestrian team – surely the poshest sport – has none. There are proportionately far more double-barrelled surnames in elite football than rowing. All this reflects a wider trend. In 2017, it was reported that 11 per cent of couples now take on a double-barrelled name on marriage. It is difficult to work out what's driving this change. Is it that double-barrelled names are more common in mixed-race families (like Bobby Vylan's own), because both sides wish to preserve their cultural heritage? The shifting politics of double-barrelled names might also reflect an increase in single-parent families, or other deviations from the traditional norms of the nuclear family; single mothers quite understandably want to share a name with their children. Double-barrelled surnames can also carry some advantages. Aside from appearing to promote equality between the sexes, they also make people more distinctive, lowering the risk of confusion. Hence the full-back Kyle Walker-Peters, who plays for Southampton, is not the right-back Kyle Walker, who recently signed for Burnley. Names can still be signals of social class, with all that this implies: there is every difference, in the Shire of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, between the humble Bagginses and their snooty Sackville-Baggins cousins. But one should not be deceived by appearances: Ainsley Maitland-Niles could have been an excellent Victorian high court judge. In fact, he used to play for Arsenal.
Times
05-07-2025
- Politics
- 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
Daily Mail
05-07-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
'Just ignore Farage': Boris Johnson tells Tories how to counter the rise of Reform - as calls grow for former PM to lead the Conservatives once again
Boris Johnson has suggested that the best way for the Conservative Party to tackle the rise of Reform is to simply ignore them. The former prime minister, who led the Tories when the Brexit Party, now known as Reform, was polling at 'zero per cent,' believes that attacking them head-on is a waste of energy. Speaking about his time leading the Conservative Party, Mr Johnson pointed out that Reform's popularity in the polls was practically non-existent when he was in charge. He said that his approach was clear: 'My strategy with the individuals that you mention is don't talk about them.' He added: 'I think Conservatives need to focus on the economy and making life better for people and giving people opportunity. 'I think if we concentrate on the economy we mount full spectrum warfare on all the things that Starmer is doing wrong, we will win.' His advice comes after Reform's rise in the polls, with the party making a significant impact in the May local elections. Meanwhile, some Tory MPs have been calling for the former prime minister to make a dramatic return to the Commons, hoping he can evive the ailing Conservative Party. The former prime minister, who led the Tories when the Brexit Party, now known as Reform, was polling at 'zero per cent,' believes that attacking them head-on is a waste of energy Meanwhile, some Tory MPs have been calling for the former prime minister to make a dramatic return to the Commons, hoping he can evive the ailing Conservative Party Reform gained control of seven local authorities and became the largest party in three more, a stunning sweep that left Conservative strongholds in tatters. His remarks come amid growing concern in Conservative ranks about the threat from Reform, which has seen increasing support, particularly since the last general election. While the Tories lost a staggering 252 seats and only managed a 23.2 per cent vote share, Reform surged to secure five seats with 14.3 per cent of the vote. In recent months, both Sir Keir Starmer and Tory leader Kemi Badenoch have come under fire for spending too much time attacking Reform. Mrs. Badenoch, in a March interview with The Telegraph, dismissed Nigel Farage as a 'reality TV star,' suggesting that government should not be about drama. But Farage fired back, saying it was a good thing people knew who he was, comparing his TV background to Donald Trump's unconventional political rise. In May, the Prime Minister escalated his rhetoric, attacking Reform directly and calling them his main political rival. Yet, his attempt to discredit the party has only backfired. Last month, he echoed Reform's tough stance on immigration, warning that Britain could become an 'island of strangers.' His words sparked outrage among Labour MPs, and he was forced to walk back the comment, admitting regret. In May this year, Mr Johnson's allies were reportedly trying to convince him to make a bombshell return. Mrs Badenoch attempted to play down the prospect of a political return by Mr Johnson in a TV interview this morning, telling GB News: 'So, I love Boris. 'He sends me lots of messages, gives me lots of advice, like Iain Duncan Smith, like David Cameron. 'I have great people who have been in this situation before, who dealt with difficult times. So it's up to him what he wants to do. 'I have to focus on my job, which is making sure that Keir Starmer does not do more than the damage he's doing right now. 'We have to get him out in four years time, otherwise there's not going to be a country left I'm afraid.'
Telegraph
04-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Just ignore Farage, Johnson tells Tories
Boris Johnson has said that the best strategy to counter Nigel Farage is to ignore him. Speaking to the Swiss magazine Weltwoche, the former prime minister pointed out that when he was leading the Conservatives, the Brexit Party – which changed its name to Reform UK in 2021 – was at 'zero per cent' in the polls. Some MPs have called for the former prime minister to return to the Commons to revive the fortunes of the Conservative Party, which is now being beaten in the polls by Reform. Mr Johnson said that while he felt 'a deep sense of regret' that he was 'not able to be useful', he could afford to return to politics because he had to pay for his wife Carrie's new kitchen. However, he did offer advice on how to tackle the threat from Reform, saying that the best thing was for political rivals to offer their own policies and not to talk about Mr Farage. 'My strategy with the individuals that you mention is don't talk about them,' he said. 'When I was running the UK, this party you mention was on zero per cent in the polls, sometimes 3 per cent max. Don't talk about them. Talk about what you are going to offer the people.' The Brexit Party was on 19 per cent in the polls when Mr Johnson took over as prime minister in July 2019. By the general election in December, that had fallen to 2 per cent. Mr Johnson was speaking a year on from the general election, at which Reform secured five seats with 14.3 per cent of the vote and the Tories lost 252 seats, recording a 23.2 per cent vote share. The most recent survey of voting intention by YouGov has Reform on 26 per cent, Labour on 24 per cent, and the Conservatives on 17 per cent. In the May local elections, Reform wiped out Conservative councils across England in an historic sweep. Mr Farage's party won control of seven local authorities and became the largest party in three others. Both Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, have been accused of spending too much time addressing the threat from Reform. In March, in an interview with The Telegraph, Mrs Badenoch dismissed Mr Farage as a reality TV star, saying government was not an episode of I'm a Celebrity. Mr Farage retorted that it was a good thing that people know who he was, and compared his television past with that of Donald Trump. In May, Sir Keir gave a speech dedicated to attacking Reform. The Prime Minister declared the Right-wing party his main opposition, and said that the Conservatives had 'run out of road'. His efforts to tackle Reform have backfired, however. He echoed the party's hard-line stance on migration in a speech last month, when he said that Britain was at risk of becoming an 'island of strangers', but it was met with fury from Labour MPs and he later said he regretted using the phrase. I'm trying to pay for Carrie's kitchen Mr Johnson said he was sorry that he was 'not able to be useful' to the Conservative Party. 'I feel a deep sense of regret that I'm not able to be useful today,' he said. Asked whether he would consider returning to power – as Cincincattus later did in Rome – he implied that he could not afford to. 'Rome is in good hands and I'm very happy,' he said. 'I'm engaged in the innocent task of trying to pay for my wife's kitchen refurbishment which is extremely expensive and difficult and that's basically what I'm doing.' While in office Mr Johnson is said to have privately complained about the cost of refurbishing the Downing Street flat he shared with his wife. A row over who funded the redecoration, which came to more than £100,000 with thousands spent on luxury wallpaper, fuelled a backlash among Tory MPs. Elsewhere in the interview, Mr Johnson also took aim at Sir Keir's non-dom crackdown and suggested it would be 'useful' for the Government to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). He criticised Sir Keir's high-tax policies, especially the raid on non-doms which had driven billionaires out of London. Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, is now considering reversing the policy under which non-doms are charged 40 per cent inheritance tax on their global assets. 'Every private business in Britain, a big increase in taxes, big taxes on non-doms,' Mr Johnson said. 'My God: people are leaving London to come to Italy. What's going on? Mamma mia.' Calling the exodus 'unbelievable', he said that he had met people leaving London for Italy. 'When I was mayor of London I used to say that London was to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan,' he said. 'You went out into Mayfair late at night and you saw the billionaires in their natural habitat, and now I think you can come to Italy for a flat tax of €200,000 – it's a good deal. 'I met some people last night who had fled London to come to Italy. When I was running London that would have been absolutely unthinkable.' He also suggested that leaving the ECHR could be a 'useful' way to bring down illegal immigration. A Conservative policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda was blocked by European judges citing the ECHR in 2022. Mr Johnson said: 'It would be useful to quit the ECHR but the main thing is to get back to our Rwanda plan: the only credible way of smashing the cross-Channel gangs. Bring back Rwanda.' Mrs Badenoch last month signalled she was ready to quit the ECHR 'in the national interest'. She has set up a commission to look at the possibility of leaving the treaty, amid concerns it makes it harder for countries to expel illegal migrants. The UK's membership of the ECHR is a divisive issue, with Reform committed to leaving and Labour to remaining. 'Boris-wave' of migration is 'nonsense' Mr Johnson also discussed immigration and rejected criticism that he oversaw a 'Boris-wave' of migrants flooding into the UK. Mr Johnson blamed the huge increase on civil servants for over-estimating the number of EU nationals who were going to leave after Brexit, meaning they allowed too many others to come in to replace them to do vital jobs. 'Nonsense. All bollocks,' he said. 'What we had was two things: we had Covid which meant nobody came, so immigration collapsed, and then what happened was unfortunately the Remain Establishment believed their own propaganda. 'They thought the millions of EU nationals were all leaving and they were not… They panicked when we couldn't find people to stack the shelves and drive the trucks after Covid but the crucial thing is that we took back full legal control and can rectify such mistakes immediately while Starmer would surrender control again to the EU.' A European Union research document last week claimed Brexit was the main driver of Britain's worsening migration crisis, stating that the post-Brexit 'liberalisation of migration laws' caused a record increase in net migration. But Mr Johnson defended Brexit, saying it saved lives during the Covid pandemic because it meant the nation was able to roll out vaccines quickly. 'Brexit was a wonderful thing and is a wonderful thing and I love Brexit more and more with a weird intensity because it's about freedom and autonomy is the most wonderful thing for people, for countries, for families,' he said. 'We saved lives because of Brexit and we were able to get our economy moving again faster because of Brexit.' Mr Johnson also addressed the conflict in the Middle East, downplaying the suggestion of imminent regime change in Iran. 'I've become a bit of a sceptic about the value of regime change in the Middle East,' he said. 'Countries need to make their own decisions about their governments. You can't impose a new government. We tried it in Iraq, we tried it in Libya, it wasn't a great success… 'I may be wrong but I don't think there will be regime change very soon in Tehran. That's not the information I'm getting.' A Reform source said: 'Boris Johnson did unprecedented damage to this country. He is the mastermind behind the mass immigration experiment. 'Whilst he tries to save and rewrite his legacy of mass immigration and net zero, Reform is offering the country real change.'
Yahoo
03-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Critics Say There's Only 1 Word To Sum Up Nigel Farage's Attack On Rival Politicians
Nigel Farage just attacked his rival politicians who he described as 'one-man bands' with large egos. The trouble his, his critics think this description sounds rather familiar. The Reform UK leader told LBC: 'All one-man bands, all led by people whose egos are much bigger than the reality of the impact they can ever have.' He even said there were as many as 15 centre-right political parties to rival his own. It came after he was reminded that former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe, who now sits as an independent after a major spat with the party leadership, has set up Restore Britain, while former co-deputy leader Ben Habib is building Advance UK. Farage, once part of the Conservative Party, used to lead Ukip but left in 2018 to set up the Brexit Party – which has since been renamed as Reform UK. He has run for parliament eight times over the years and was only successful on his 2024 attempt. When Farage announced he was going to be taking over the leadership and standing for the election last June, Reform jumped in the polls from 15% to 17%, according to YouGov. The party then won five MPs in July 2024, and won another seat in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, overturning a 14,700 Labour majority. YouGov also found last month that Reform is now on track to win the most seats at the next general election. The turnaround is staggering, considering the party had just one MP in the last parliament – Lee Anderson, who was elected in 2019 as a Tory but defected in early 2024. So the public could not help but point out there was a certain irony to Farage's criticisms of his rivals.... I'm not sure irony gets much bigger and better than this! — John (@john_notabot) July 3, 2025 The man is describing himself, the irony🤣🤣 — Paul Upton (@Puptonogood) July 3, 2025 Serious case of projection here from Farage. — David Patrikarakos (@dpatrikarakos) July 3, 2025 Irony alert. 🚨 — Matt Alexander 🏴🇬🇧 (@DOTR94) July 3, 2025 'All one-man bands, all led by people whose egos are much bigger than the reality of the impact they can ever have.' Nigel Farage describes Nigel Farage and Reform? — Matt Alexander 🏴🇬🇧 (@DOTR94) July 3, 2025 Beyond ironic for Farage to talk about ego though. Bigger than everyone else's combined. — Matt Alexander 🏴🇬🇧 (@DOTR94) July 3, 2025 Nigel - who's a one man band - takes on the others — The Accidental Disruptor (@The_A_Disruptor) July 3, 2025 Rod Stewart Faces Backlash After Voicing Support For Nigel Farage In Run-Up To Glastonbury Exclusive 'Will It Be Children Up Chimneys Next?' Minister Blasts Nigel Farage's Plan To Ditch Net Zero Nigel Farage Slammed By Albanian Prime Minister Over 'Bonkers' Prisoner Numbers Claim
