ALT Of the Reform leader there was no sign. It is now 50 days since the once unavoidable Farage has held a press conference. By an astonishing coincidence it is 42 days since the Guardian revealed that Farage had received a £5 million gift from a crypto billionaire. Farage has claimed that he needs the money to pay for his security, which seems to be largely devoted to ensuring no one can ask him how he funded his various houses. Tice was asked about this. Was Nigel frightened of scrutiny? “Nigel Farage is not scared!” Why had he gone to ground? “It’s part of actually showing that Reform has talent across the whole board,” Tice claimed, not entirely convincingly. (Farage would later hold a pseudo-press conference up in Makerfield, with invited journalists whose scrutiny included asking the Dear Leader if he agreed that Brexit was a good thing, that Andy Burnham was a bad thing, and that Rupert Lowe’s Restore Party was the worst thing of all. It didn’t scream “brave”.)

ALT “Cleaning Up Britain,” proclaimed the natty logo at Richard Tice’s press conference on Wednesday. And let’s face it, if that was what you wanted to do, there are few better places to start than Reform Headquarters, funded as they are by payments from overseas-residing cryptocurrency millionaires. Sadly, it turned out that this wasn’t the kind of cleaning up that Tice had in mind. “Littering, fly tipping has become the norm!” he declared. “We all want to be environmentally friendly,” he went on, taking a brief break from his usual demand that the country burn more fossil fuels. Next month, he revealed, the party will organise a day of litter-picking. What was going on? Reform is too young a party to have traditions, but I think we know what the party is — and isn’t — broadly about. If you’d asked me that morning what Reform’s approach to recycling was, I’d have told you the party thought that separating paper from glass was for losers. Now Tice was earnestly discussing bottle depos

ALT “Alot of people had given all sorts of opinions,” Kemi Badenoch told us, discussing the horrible murder of Henry Nowak. “Some have tried to score political points.” Not something the Conservative leader was going to do. Far from it! Though we would learn that she did in fact have some opinions, and indeed was about to argue that the teenager’s death proved she had been right all along. I don’t want to make it sound like Badenoch was being cynical. Her speech on Tuesday morning at the Institute for Government opened with a description of how shocked she had been by the case, and we should take her at her word. It is simply that, by happy chance, the Tory leader always finds that whatever just happened has proved her right. Her self-confidence is ironclad. Had she been in charge on the Titanic, she would still have been insisting that the iceberg had come off worse as the waters closed over her head.

ALT In Parliament on Wednesday we got a rare treat: a live sighting of Nigel Farage. Like the great bustard, Farage was once ubiquitous in Britain, holding constant press conferences to reveal policies that would subsequently be recanted, sometimes at the actual event announcing them. Biologists debated this behaviour: was it a mating signal, or a desire to mark territory? Whatever the reason, the hearty Farage chuckle seemed as much a part of national life as a batting collapse or a Eurovision disappointment. But in recent weeks, Farage has almost completely disappeared, hunted close to extinction by journalists asking questions like: “hang on, five million quid?” and “define ‘gift’?”. Suddenly the Reform Party leader could only be seen in protected spaces — soft interviews with sympathetic hacks, or his own social media feed — and then only rarely. Even after his party’s local elections triumph, when his usual behaviour would have been a strut through the Sunday morning interview shows

ALT “Look, I understand that question.” Nicola Sturgeon, former First Minister of Scotland and leader of the SNP, was preparing to explain why she hadn’t noticed her husband buying a campervan. Or a coffee machine that cost a grand. Or a coffee machine that cost two grand. Or another coffee machine that cost two grand. Every marriage is at some level a mystery to outsiders, but most of us think we’d notice if our spouse were gearing up to open a mobile branch of Costa. It was very decent of her to understand why people were asking how it came to be that she hadn’t noticed her house beginning to resemble a Saudi prince’s third home, with games consoles stacked next to Mont Blanc pens and a £2,600 salt-and-pepper grinder set. It was especially decent as it would turn out that anyone asking that question hates women. Over the course of Sturgeon’s hour-long interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, we would learn that only Sid The Sexist thinks that husbands and wives discuss small matters l