Farage said “if you pick a fight which a chimney sweep you get covered in soot” when asked whether he would take Polanski up on the offer.

It comes after the Green Party leader knocked back the chance of a debate with Reform policy chief Zia Yusuf.

Referring to Polanski’s support for drug legalisation, Farage added: “You know, he’s got a fan club. All the heroin smokers think he’s absolutely marvellous.”

But Polanski told HuffPost UK: “Farage is running scared – he doesn’t want to talk about Reform’s super-rich backers, their Russia links, their plans to strip rights away from working people and to introduce charges to use the NHS.”

The Greens are locked in a three-way battle with Reform and Labour in the crunch Gorton and Denton by-election, which takes place on February 26.

Polanski added: “Farage knows that in Gorton and Denton, Labour are out of the race and Hannah Spencer is coming for Reform.

“It’s no surprise Farage is hiding behind cheap jokes – he’s got nothing to gain and everything to lose from going up against someone willing to say it how it is.”

In an appalling move, Keir Starmer has moved to block some of the dirt on Peter Mandelson from getting out. The reason given is as follows:

🚨 UPDATE: Keir Starmer has tabled an amendment to the Tory motion which would exempt “papers prejudicial to UK national security or international relations”

h/t @danbloom1 https://t.co/AxU5OVVOW5 pic.twitter.com/cc8Svb3zRK

— Politics UK (@PolitlcsUK) February 3, 2026

Broken trust

Of course, no one believes this is down to national security. After all, Starmer is the man who hired known paedophile associate Peter Mandelson in the first place. As such, it’s clear Starmer doesn’t have the UK’s interests in mind when he makes decisions.

No, everyone can see this for what it is; a last minute attempt for Starmer to save himself and his cronies from embarrassment (and potential criminal charges).

This video should come back to haunt him. Everyone on twitter knew. One journalist finally asked. Did he not bother to follow up? Did he not think he needed to? Did he know anyway? Starmer is as corrupt and dodgy as any of them and he needs to resignhttps://t.co/B5069DqFTP

— any other leader would be 20 points ahead (@anyotherleader1) February 4, 2026

This isn’t the only headache for Starmer, either, as Skwawkbox wrote for the Canary yesterday:

Keir Starmer has given evidence to the Met Police of Peter Mandelson leaking confidential government information to serial child rapist – and Mandelson’s bestie – Jeffrey Epstein. The evidence includes original emails containing sensitive economic information. The emails released by the US justice department also show Mandelson engaging in insider trading that would enrich Epstein and his allies.

Now Starmer has. But his Downing Street officials – and therefore Starmer – were aware of Mandelson’s emails to Epstein months before now, probably even longer.

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And as people are pointing out, Mandelson’s Epstein friendship is far from the only unseemly connection between Labour and total depravity:

Labour MP Dan Norris sat on the board of the Snowdon Trust, which supports disabled students, + the Kidscape child safety charity.

He co-wrote “Don’t Bully Me”, advising school children on how to deal with abuse.

He even launched a booklet to educate parents about paedophiles. pic.twitter.com/kn1wrDwonv

— Jody McIntyre (@jodymcintyre_) February 3, 2026

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The emails keep coming too, including this exchange which shines a light on the relationship between Mandelson and Epstein (read the below email first):

A defining feature of the Labour right is that they are *desperate* moochers – from the Blairs taking free clothes from Paul Smith, to Starmer’s suits and glasses and Taylor Swift tickets, to Mandelson exhausting the patience of the world’s most prolific sex offender pic.twitter.com/MslTOv5ZSV

— Nicholas Guyatt (@NicholasGuyatt) February 3, 2026

What’s clear from this is that Mandelson was desperate for Epstein’s attention; Epstein, meanwhile, clearly just saw Mandelson as a pawn in his international power games. This is clearly why the pathetic Mandelson ended up sending him British state secrets.

What sort of man betrays his country to encourage the affections of a paedophile?

Justice at last?

Many – including the Canary – were speaking out against Mandelson and Starmer long before these latest revelations:

Peter Mandelson, now Starmer’s Ambassador to the USA, with Jeffrey Epstein.
I was sacked as Ambassador for opposing torture and illegal rendition.
The worlid of power is a dark place indeed. pic.twitter.com/PJG4Byfh21

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) September 9, 2025

We published this about Peter Mandelson 4 yrs ago

Whilst Keir Starmer was being advised by Mandelson & the media invited him on their shows

Thanks to the lack of media scrutiny Starmer felt emboldened to appoint him Ambassador to US

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The media & government do not work for you pic.twitter.com/itEhIw4LG5

— Double Down News (@DoubleDownNews) February 3, 2026

Mandelson has been sacked; pressured to resign from Labour, and bullied into stepping down from the lords. But this isn’t enough.

He must face criminal consequences for leaking British state secrets to Epstein, with a full investigation into whatever else the pair got up to.

Further than that, Starmer must answer for what he knew, and for how this sorry affair came to pass.

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“The Reform Party is nothing but a hotchpotch, a mess, a corpse infested by waifs, strays, weirdos, charlatans and crooks, offering the whole political spectrum from the seriously deranged to the criminally insane”

It’s a spicy line to start with, but before Reformers blow a gasket and accuse me of libel there is something they should know. This line was written by satirist Mark Taverner, in his novel “In the Red” who died in 2007, eleven years before Reform UK  were founded – as the Brexit Party – and was actually written in 1989.

In 1989 Nigel Farage was still three years from the founding of UKIP. He was then a commodities broker and metals trader and even he’d admit, probably with a grin, they were a gaggle who had their fair share of ‘charlatans and crooks’. But the quote cannot have meant his current political vehicle, first in the polls, and positioning itself for Government.

Besides, outwardly Farage is Teflon-coated to accusations his outfits are full of misfits.

His reaction in 2004 to the accusation from the then Tory leader, Lord Howard, that UKIP was filled with “cranks and political gadflies” was to have a tie made, adorned with both the tool and the insect, for members of a dining club of the same name, in Brussels!

He is, and always has been very good company socially, whatever you think of his politics. As is Lord Howard for that matter.

Attending one of these events at Nigel’s invitation twenty years ago was how I first met him. He wasn’t leader at the time, but chatting it became clear he would be. However the only ambition he’d admit to was his “own show on LBC, that would be brilliant. Did it before and loved it’” You can hear him saying it.

His ambition now is still to ‘lead Britain’s conversation’ – not from LBC’s studios but 10 Downing Street.

Many of Reform’s outriders have nearly as long an association with Farage. Reform UK may be a new insurgent party but many of its passengers and drivers – those not pushed under the bus for ‘disloyalty’ – are old hands in the insurgency business. Some of them demand the Conservatives don’t just recognise past failings, but crawl in ‘shame’. Arron Banks and newbie Zia Yusuf, a Tory until Aug 2024, like the language of snivelling abasement as the Tory price for sharing the same air!

Imagery aside I’ve said before, they and Tory defector Robert Jenrick make a challenge to the Tories that should not be airily dismissed but addressed. This site has seen Tories argue the same in order to avoid the risk of looking like they don’t need to.

It is bizarre to criticise the Tory Government as ‘a total failure’ whilst simultaneously welcoming some of its players into your ranks but there is still a feeling that – even if changing under Kemi Badenoch – the Conservatives haven’t changed enough or fully accepted why the electorate rejected them in 2024?

Suella Braverman says: “The truth is no Tory Party Leader has ever wanted to stop the boats or cut migration”.

Now despite the fact that measures brought in November 2023 by the Conservative government she’d just been removed from, have significantly cut migration – and if only someone like her had been in a position to do that, as, say, Tory Home Secretary – her defence is, the same as Robert Jenrick’s as Tory Immigration Minister; that they tried but Rishi Sunak wouldn’t let them.

It’s hard to utterly dismiss that, when the Conservative leader, who has put the entire party ‘under new management’ says similar; that she argued in Cabinet for certain courses of action but that she wasn’t ‘in charge then’ when challenged with why she didn’t do these things in Government.

Now in opposition, Badenoch and her shadow Cabinet argue they’re relentlessly focussed on the future. There’s a sound logic to that as people are crying out for vision. But having acknowledged the mistakes of the past, they’d have to accept it hasn’t landed as well as they’d have hoped. The argument about blame still continues on ConservativeHome, even this week. 

Those who demand repentance have as many different things they want it for as people doing the demanding, but if the ‘new’ Conservative party has a shrewd idea of what the old party got wrong, then maybe it needs to say so more clearly. You own the future if you can leave the past comfortably behind, not burying it and hoping people forget. Kemi is improving her standing with the public but the brand still has a long way to go.

Reform also have a past. Much shorter but nonetheless instructive.

Farage said, early on, that he knew Reform would “come under more scrutiny than probably any other party ever has”. He wanted to make this sound unfair or conspiratorial but it’s neither, nor true. They are getting exactly the same scrutiny, which they deserve as serious contenders to govern.

They jettisoned their 2024 manifesto within a year, because they recognised it was economically illiterate. They supported the scrapping of the two child benefit cap – for months backing billions of spending on top of an already ballooning welfare budget – only to U-turn on it yesterday and supporting the ‘disastrous Tories’ who’d brought it in and wanted to keep it.

Reform councils, like many others, are putting up council tax having said locally they’d cut taxes, despite denials at the top. In an emulation of Trump’s America, they instigated DOGE into local authorities. Predictably, Cllr Paul Chamberlain, one of their cabinet members in charge of such cuts at Kent County Council, told the FT:

“We made some assumptions that we would come in here and find some of the craziness that [Musk’s] Doge found in America … and that was wrong, we didn’t find any of that.”

In Warwickshire the nineteen year old leading Reform on the council – age not in itself the weakness some make out – has admitted “I had to learn very quickly” before complaining about the ‘blockages’ officials had put in his way. Doge-meister Yusuf has yet to visit Warwickshire. These are less ‘failings’ and more a wakeup call that promising the moon often hits hurdles higher than bravado and slogans can overcome in delivery. Reform’s solution to national problems they claim they, uniquely, can solve, too often involve just bravado and slogans.

On Monday Farage launched a telling social media attack on Charlotte Cadden, Conservative Candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election. A police officer for 30 years who wants “a proper inquiry on grooming gangs” and “to get rid of carbon taxes“, both policies he agrees with, instead highlighted a fun run she did 15 years ago, as somehow a symbol of the entire Conservative now. But don’t anyone ask him about things he did fifty years ago.

Conservatives are not going to quit – in Gorton or anywhere else – to help a party that insists it wants to destroy them, but the tragedy of trading blows over the past of both parties is that it distracts from directing ire and fire at the party in charge of the present.

The past, is Labour’s well of sour motivation. Deepest dipper is the Education Secretary whose entire ethos is to attack everyone, including her own party’s legacy on education, to settle scores from when she was a school girl in an A-line skirt.

The soul raison d’etre for the now farcical Chagos deal – that no amount of phantom billions ‘won’ in China will pay for – is to apologise, to the wrong people, for the ‘colonial’ past.  Labour demand an apology for the mini-budget, an issue Badenoch has addressed more than once, and soemthing Farage supported, but Peter Mandelson’s past is apparently a closed book. Saw nothing, heard nothing, did nothing is not going to save Starmer and Morgan McSweeny was never going to bite the hand that fed, and is now punching him and his boss in the teeth.

L P Hartley once wrote “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. Everyone in this now crowded political landscape is trying to express the same, but it might be an idea for all to visit it occasionally and say ‘you know what? We got that wrong’.

That goes for all politicians not just the ones you want it to.