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.
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Telegraph
6 minutes ago
- 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.'
Times
40 minutes ago
- Times
After a terrible anniversary week, is Keir Starmer finished?
At the Spectator summer party, one of the biggest events of Westminster's social calendar, much of the conversation centred around one man — Nigel Farage. The Reform UK leader and his allies adjourned to a private terrace overlooking the Spectator garden and private security cordoned off the stairs. There they sipped Dom Perignon while cabinet ministers and senior Tories including Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick circled the garden below. When the news broke that Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, was planning to found a new party there were cheers from the Reform terrace. A new Corbyn-led hard left party meant yet more pain for Starmer — and a bad end to a truly terrible anniversary week for the prime minister. Senior Tories were disparaging about Farage and his coterie of supporters. 'They're so cocky,' said one shadow cabinet minister. Labour ministers said Farage offered 'no answers'. But both parties were alive to the threat posed by the man standing a few yards from them. At a cabinet meeting on Tuesday Starmer expressed his pride in his government's achievements after a year in power, listing off what he views as the successes. Free school meals, increasing defence spending to 2.6 per cent of GDP, trade deals with the US, the EU and India. The list went on. But within a few hours he was forced to make an extraordinary retreat in the face of a mass rebellion by Labour MPs over the government's welfare reforms, leaving a £5 billion hole in the exchequer. Then it got worse. On Wednesday Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, broke down in tears at the dispatch box, prompting a frenzy in the bond markets. As the dust settles this weekend, some cabinet ministers are asking the question: is it terminal? Will Starmer, who secured a landslide majority at the last election, lead Labour into the next election? 'It feels like it's done,' said one. Certainly the polling is bleak — and far worse than that for any party in recent political history that won a landslide just twelve months before. Research by YouGov for The Times this week found that just one in five voters (21 per cent) think that Labour has done well in office so far and less than a third think they are any better than the previous Conservative government. Across a range of issues the party's voters are deeply dissatisfied with the government's performance. On the cost of living, 62 per cent of those who backed Labour at the election say the government is doing badly, while 46 per cent are unhappy with the government's handling of the NHS. On Starmer himself: 69 per cent of voters think he's weak, 65 per cent say he doesn't care about people like them and 49 per cent say he's dishonest. 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The YouGov polling also shows that all the plausible Labour alternatives, including Rayner and Streeting, are seen as more likely to be worse than Starmer. The speculation about Starmer's future stems in part from the knowledge that things are likely to get much worse. As difficult as the first year has been, the challenges of the second will eclipse them — the biggest of which will be the budget. At the cabinet on Tuesday, before the week's calamitous events, Reeves sounded a warning to ministers. At that stage the government had only made a partial about turn on welfare, protecting all existing claimants at a cost of £2.5 billion. Reeves said the compromise came at a cost, and that money would need to be raised. She said the last budget, painful as it was with £40 billion worth of tax rises, represented the 'low-hanging fruit'. The next budget would be more challenging. The tax rises are likely to be big. The cost of the change in direction on welfare and winter fuel payments came to around £6 billion, but economists are much more concerned about the anaemic levels of economic growth and a potential downgrade in forecasts. Some put the figure that needs to be raised as high as £30 billion, which would require huge tax rises. Cabinet ministers privately acknowledge that the benefits U-turn means all options for raising tax are now on the table. That includes potentially breaking the manifesto pledge not to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT, although ministers are loath to do so. A tax raid on pension savings is also being considered. Paul Johnson, director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, said it would be very hard for Labour to find the money necessary without touching those 'big three' taxes. 'I don't really think there is [a way of doing it],' he said. 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The Sun
an hour ago
- The Sun
Labour are inflicting open borders on us and pretty soon Britain will not be a country any more
A COUNTRY without secure borders and a national identity is not a country at all. It is just a land mass inhabited by disconnected groups, devoid of shared values or even a common language. 2 2 Tragically, that is the path that Britain is now following. Obsessed with cultural diversity, contemptuous of our heritage and seduced by the myth that prosperity can be achieved by the import of cheap labour, the political class opened the floodgates and transformed the fabric of our society, leaving many British citizens feeling like aliens in their own land. Only this week, official statistics revealed that a third of all babies now born in Britain are to foreign mothers. This has been a revolution imposed without any democratic mandate. Miserably inept Neither of the two main parties ever stood on a platform of open borders and immigration anarchy. But that is precisely what the politicians have inflicted upon us. In the Brexit referendum of 2016, the electorate voted decisively to take back control. Instead the number of new arrivals has continued to spiral out of control as the chaos of the immigration system worsens and our rulers remain impotent. The depressing reality of the current shambles was spelt out yesterday in a report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee into the Skilled Worker Visa, expanded by the last Tory government in 2022 to tackle labour shortages. The Committee was scathing about the management of the scheme, which had led to an influx of 1.2million people over the past four years, three times more than the Home Office had anticipated. Vile 'people smuggler' herds migrants onto small boat with a stick as packed dinghy evades French cops AGAIN According to the damning report, this department had failed to gather 'basic information' on whether migrants had left the country when their visas expired. 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