"Farage is completely pissed off that anyone dares to ask him a question” | The News Agents

Over the past few weeks, Kemi Badenoch's performance in the Commons has improved massively. She seems to be much more clear about where she's taking the Conservative Party. At the same time, you've got Andy Burnham, who is clearly enjoying a bounce compared to where Keir Starmer was. At the same time as you have had Nigel Farage and Zak Polanski really struggling out there for differing reasons, but both struggling. Let's imagine for a moment that Burnham and Badenoch do manage to maintain their personal popularity, at least for a while. Badenoch's been in an intriguing position that she has been much more popular than the Conservative Party for some time now, and yet it hasn't affected terribly the Conservative Party's overall polling position. So it is possible that you might end up having two parties being led by quite popular political figures, but their respective brands are still very poor. How long does it take before one affects the other? And the other question of course is, if we're talking about Polanski and Farage, one of the reasons it feels to me that that has happened is that there has been a pretty concerted media effort to go for both men and both parties over the past six months or so. Polanski would never enjoy much favourable press, but managed to seem to overcome it via social media activity. And Farage meanwhile, one of the things that has undoubtedly happened over the last three months is the extent to which the Murdoch press in particular, and the wider right-wing press, have started to go for coverage and go for stories, not least around his finances, which have not been favourable to him. I think that's the wrong way of looking at it. I think that what's happened... Not for the first time. You've got a story which you just look at and think, oh bloody hell, what, he got a five million pound present from somebody. That is epic. I mean Nigel Farage, who I have said umpteen times on this podcast is a brilliant communicator, has been absolutely woeful in seeking to explain where that's come from. And so, surprise surprise, you've got a guy who could be the next prime minister of this country whenever the general election comes, and the scrutiny is coming his way, as befits any future prime minister, and I think it's the newspapers responding to events. Reformist political strategy in all sorts of ways over the past twelve months has been poor. We've talked about it before, but they've leaned way too hard into their sort of online political life. They've focused on eccentric, esoteric, weird things, they've been too concerned about their right flank, and the way that Farage has responded to these questions has been baleful, like genuinely appallingly bad. I mean I can't actually think... For a guy who has such political flair, and such political acumen, you know, the unbelievably thin-skinned nature of it, for a guy who says he wants to be prime minister, genuinely, apparently completely pissed off that anybody might dare to ask him a question, you know, you're in the wrong job. But, where stories appear in the media, that the papers that they're in, does tell us something about the shifting political sands, right?