With MPs on their hols, party leaders are shadow boxing, coming up with stuff they can’t do anything about for the time being. And yet there’s a pattern here as they’re all chasing the same chunk of the voter base. As our Political Correspondent Peter Spencer reports, the question is whether they’re trying to put together a vibe, or responding to one that’s already there.
Ok it’s a sticky patch, with all the unanswered questions about the money he’s got his hands on, but the Reform Leader Nigel Farage is still in with a reasonable chance of winning the next election.
And it can be argued that he’s the one who planted the seeds of his own success all those years ago when he spooked the then Tory Prime Minister David Cameron into holding the Brexit referendum.
Given Farage’s fondness for Donald Trump’s credo, it’s fair to describe the underlying rationale for getting Britain out of Europe as a variant of the Prez’s MAGA creed. MEGA. Make England Great Again.
Economists would argue, forcefully, that the outcome was the opposite. That all it really did was cost us an arm and leg.
Nonetheless, what Farage tapped into was a maybe unexpressed sense of us against them. We once ruled the world, and we still don’t need foreigners to tell us how to do things.
An irony that the man who finally got Brexit done, Boris Johnson, then had to bring in loads of people from further afield to fill the gaps in the labour force left by departing Europeans.
And the absurdity is that this situation, that Reform Leader Farage himself was so instrumental in creating, is now central to his drive to whip up anger. Enough of it, he hopes, to get him into Number Ten.
Hence what we’re looking at now. The bidding war between parties of the right, as they try to sound like they’re the most cross. And know the best way to sort it all out.
And there’s no doubting there’s a ready-made customer base for their wares, if a new survey by the Society of Radiographers is anything to go by.
It’s revealed what it describes as a ‘noticeable’ and ‘unacceptable’ rise in racism from patients over the last couple of years or so.
Some have called NHS staff ‘dirty foreigners’ and ‘monkeys’, and even refused to be treated by non-white staff.
Paul Awah, a Bedfordshire-based diagnostic radiographer originally from Nigeria, said: ‘People are more expressive now. What used to be something people wouldn’t say – now the rhetoric has changed.’
Likewise, dead on cue, policies from mainstream political parties.
The Tory leader’s just promised to chuck out a quarter of a million foreigners from their council homes, so British families can move into them.
An idea that even the far from Trotskyite Daily Telegraph concedes is designed to get right wing voters licking their lips.
It’ll also, they point out, get Farage’s goat, as he came up with a similar, albeit tougher, wheeze a few weeks back.
Labour, naturally, say it all sucks. But they can’t afford to get too precious, given their own recent rightward drift in this area.
It’s far less obvious, but the Home Secretary does want to make life harder for immigrants, by telling those already here they’ve got wait ten years instead of five for the right to settle permanently.
And the undercurrent of resentment about foreigners in general is writ large in the violence on display last week in the Norfolk town of Thetford.
A mob repeatedly tried to storm houses where asylum seekers were staying. It got so bad that police had to mount a rescue operation, during which one copper got hit with a rock and another was bitten. Hard.
Of course Nigel Farage wouldn’t endorse this, but – admittedly from the safety of opposition rather than the exposed space of government – he did practically declare war on France last week.
Not really a rerun of Agincourt, but his idea of sending in the navy to snatch asylum seekers from their dinghies and dump them back where they started didn’t exactly make ’em laugh in the Élysée Palace.
Nor’s it likely to thrill bosses over here who’re even unknowingly employing illegal migrants to learn that he’d treat them to the ‘harshest penalties’ in the world if they got found out.
Underlying and underscoring all this is a claim from Reform’s unsuccessful candidate in a by-election earlier this year that white British people will be a minority in Britain in less than forty years.
This, and here we move from the unlikely to the totally bonkers, begs the question: ‘Is King Charles a white Briton?’
Oh come on, you might say, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and so on. But against that, his dad was born in Greece. Hence the old Private Eye gag about Phil the Greek.
Go back a bit further, and our first Hanoverian monarch George the first was so German he didn’t even speak English.
All of which helps explain why Rupert Lowe, leader of the more right than Reform Restore Party, couldn’t bring himself to say in an interview last week that Charlie boy is indeed a white Briton.
Still, if UK politics do sometimes feel a bit surreal these days, there’s plenty more in store where that came from.
When, in a few days’ time voters in Clacton get to decide whether they still want Nigel Farage as their MP, they’ll be choosing essentially between him and a man wearing a huge metal container.
Yup, the acclaimed comedian Count Binface, aka Jon Harvey, the self-styled intergalactic warrior who says if elected he’ll have the door of the commons raised. So he doesn’t bump his head on the way in.
With all the other main parties boycotting the contest, on the grounds that it’s just too silly, the Count is likely to get the support of the anyone-but-Farage faction.
With polls suggesting he could pick up something approaching a third of the votes, all sides will be watching very closely. Even though he really isn’t expected to get plummeted into parliament.
Still, when it comes to unlikely career changes, best never say never.
After driving her own double-decker around, taking kids to play centres, or grownups to weddings and things for twenty-five years, Sharon Telford decided to do something a lot different.
She’d spotted an advert for someone to bus dogs, when their owners couldn’t walk them, to a private park near Leeds. And it worked out a treat.
‘I adore my job,’ she says. ‘It’s so joyful and it doesn’t feel like work. Some of the dogs can be a bit aloof at first, but when they relax and take a treat off you, it gives you a real buzz.’
Because the vehicle’s named after a favourite cavapoo called Billy, the big sign on the side reads: ‘Billysbus.’ And the sight of it makes people smile.
Certainly it’s a stark contrast to that fave of Boris Johnson’s back in the day, the one that implied Brexit would redirect three-hundred and fifty million quid a week to the health service.
Difference being one does tell the truth, and the other did not.
Watch Peter’s report at peterspencer.org
Peter Spencer has 40 years experience as a Political Correspondent in Westminster, working with London Broadcasting and Sky News. For more of his fascinating musings on the turbulent political landscape, follow him on Facebook & Twitter.