Labour has described Richard Tice’s claim that the people saying Nigel Farage was racist or antisemtic towards them when he was a teenager at school are lying (see 9.22am) as “deplorable”.
Anna Turley, the Labour chair, issued this statement after the Tice interview on the Today programme.
It took serious courage for the victims of Nigel Farage’s alleged racism to come forward and tell their story.
It’s utterly deplorable that Richard Tice has dismissed this and suggested they are lying, despite Farage himself refusing to offer a categorical denial and saying he couldn’t remember everything that happened at school.
Instead of repeatedly changing their story, Nigel Farage and Richard Tice should urgently apologise to those bravely raising these serious concerns. Reform want to drag our politics to a dark place and it shows they are not fit for high office.
Updated at 04.58 EST
Key events
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Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said that in Essex county council elections were postponed. He said district councils were being replaced with a new “pretty amorphous unitary authority”. Because of that, the area also needed “a clear elected figure”, a mayor, he said.
Fahnbulleh said the government wanted to create strong, unitary councils. He said that would be a difficult concept for Reform UK to understand, “given the absolute shambles that we’re seeing in the councils that they control”.
ShareFormer Labour minister accuses government of ignoring ‘moral obligation’ to allow mayoral elections to go ahead
Jim McMahon, who was local government minister until he was sacked in the reshuffle in September, accused the government of ignoring a “moral obligation” to allow these mayoral elections to go ahead.
He said local leaders “across the political spectrum” accepted these reorganisation plans in good faith. They have prepared for these elections and parties, including Labour, have selected candidates, he said. He went on:
The government had a moral and a legal obligation to honour its side of the bargain
Fahnbulleh paid tribute to the work that McMahon did on this when he was in government. But she said the government had to respond to the “facts” as they are now.
David Simmonds, the shadow local government minister, pointed out that, when the Tories tried to amend legislation saying the four mayoral elections would have to go ahead next year, the government claimed it would be wrong to put that timetable in law because there was a risk the elections might need to be cancelled for a reason like Covid.
He suggested ministers were not being honest when they insisted previously that they wanted these elections to go ahead on time.
In response, Fahnbulleh stressed that the normal local elections were not affected.
But these elections were different, she said, because they were linked to the establishment of new bodies that are still being set up.
ShareLocal government minister says four mayoral elections being delayed to allow time for council reorganisation
In the Commons Miatta Fahnbulleh, the local government minister, is responding to an urgent question about the cancellation of some mayoral elections next year.
She says the local elections will go ahead as planned next May. “We are as up for elections as anyone else,” she says.
But she says the government is “minded” to delay elections for mayors to take charge of new strategic authorities – Greater Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, Hampshire and the Solent, and Sussex and Brighton – until May 2028.
She says is because the strategic authorities are being set up at the same time as local government reorganisation is taking place in those areas.
The government wants to delay the mayoral elections because it wants to allow time for the new unitary authorities (councils) and for the strategic authorities (multi-council organisations, run by mayors) to be set up first.
ShareReform UK gets record £9m donation from Boris Johnson supporter and crypto investor Christopher Harborne
Reform UK has received a donation of £9m, the biggest single donation in history to a political party from a living person, Electoral Commission figures out today reveal.
It is from Christopher Harborne, a British businessman who made the donation on 1 August.
According to the figures, Reform UK received £10.5m in the third quarter of 2025. The Conservatives received almost £7m, Labour £2.5m and the Lib Dems just over £2m.
The full list is here.
Political donations Photograph: Electoral Commission
Harborne has in the past given money to the Conservative party. He also gave a £1m donation to Boris Johnson’s office after Johnson stood down as PM. Tom Burgis wrote about his relationship with Johnson as part of our recent “Boris Files” investigation.
Harborne, who is described as an aviation entrepreneur and crypto investor, was born in Britain but lives in Thailand. He gave large sums to the Brexit party in 2019 and 2020. The Brexit party subsequently changed its name, becoming Reform UK.
While Harbone’s £9m donation is the largest to a party from a living person, it does not match the £10m that John Sainsbury left to the Conservative party in his will in 2022.
Updated at 05.35 EST
Labour says it’s ‘deplorable’ for Tice to dismiss Farage schoolboy racism claims as lies
Labour has described Richard Tice’s claim that the people saying Nigel Farage was racist or antisemtic towards them when he was a teenager at school are lying (see 9.22am) as “deplorable”.
Anna Turley, the Labour chair, issued this statement after the Tice interview on the Today programme.
It took serious courage for the victims of Nigel Farage’s alleged racism to come forward and tell their story.
It’s utterly deplorable that Richard Tice has dismissed this and suggested they are lying, despite Farage himself refusing to offer a categorical denial and saying he couldn’t remember everything that happened at school.
Instead of repeatedly changing their story, Nigel Farage and Richard Tice should urgently apologise to those bravely raising these serious concerns. Reform want to drag our politics to a dark place and it shows they are not fit for high office.
Updated at 04.58 EST
Wes Streeting orders review of mental health diagnoses as benefit claims soar
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has ordered a clinical review of the diagnosis of mental health condition, Nadeem Badshah reports.
ShareHome Office launches consultation as it sets to expand use of facial recognition technology by police
Ministers are seeking to ramp up police use of facial recognition to fight crime and are asking people how it should be used to form new laws, PA Media reports. PA says:
A 10-week consultation is being launched that will ask for views on how the technology should be regulated and how to protect people’s privacy.
The government is also proposing to create a regulator to oversee police use of facial recognition, biometrics and other tools and is collecting opinions on what powers it should have.
Policing minister Sarah Jones described facial recognition as the “biggest breakthrough for catching criminals since DNA matching” saying that it has already helped catch thousands of criminals.
“We will expand its use so that forces can put more criminals behind bars and tackle crime in their communities,” she said.
According to the Home Office, the Metropolitan police made 1,300 arrests using facial recognition over the last two years, and found more than 100 registered sex offenders breaching their licence conditions.
But the technology has faced criticism, with the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) describing the Met police’s policy on use of live facial recognition technology as “unlawful”, earlier this year.
The equalities watchdog said the rules and safeguards around the UK’s biggest police force’s use of the technology “fall short” and could have a “chilling effect” on individuals’ rights when used at protests.
ShareNo 10 to delay four England mayoral elections amid accusations of ‘cancelling democracy’
Ministers are to postpone elections for new mayors in four parts of England, triggering accusations from opposition parties that Downing Street is “cancelling democracy”, Eleni Courea reports.
ShareReform UK’s deputy leader Richard Tice says racism claims about Nigel Farage from fellow pupils are ‘made-up twaddle’
Good morning. Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has given different responses, at different times, to the accounts of him being racist and antisemitic when he was a teenager given by some of his contempories at Dulwich College in south London. They have ranged from saying he may have engaged in “banter” using language that, 50 years later, may be regarded as offensive, to saying the claims were entirely without foundation. There is a good summary here.
But today Richard Tice, Reform UK’s deputy leader, has gone much further, accusing at least one of Farage’s critics of lying and describing the recollections as “made-up twaddle” motivated by political bias.
Tice was being interviewed on the Today programme by Emma Barnett about the decision to delay some mayoral elections in England. Tice described the decision more than once as “dictatorial” and, after a decent discussion about the elections, Barnett (who is Jewish) used the reference to dictators as a cue to ask about Nigel Farage and Hitler. She summed up some of the stories about Farage highighted in the recent Guardian investigation, including Farage telling a Jewish pupil “Hitler was right”, and asked if language like this would amount to racist abuse.
Tice said it would be. But he went on:
I can’t believe anybody would have said that.
Barnett asked: “Including your leader?” And Tice went on:
Yes. This is all made-up twaddle by people who don’t want Nigel to be prime minister of the country. It’s funny how they didn’t remember this three years ago, six years ago, 10 years ago.
Barnett pointed out that Peter Ettedgui, the former pupil who remembers Farage telling him “Hitler was right”, did remember this years ago. He spoke about it to people like Michael Crick, who first reported on some of these allegations more than a decade ago, she said. Barnett said that people who do suffer racist abuse don’t forget it because “it gets etched on your memory”.
But Tice doubled down. He said:
This is this is this is made-up nonsense by someone who’s got a politically biased motive.
And let me tell you; no one has stood up against antisemitism more than Nigel and I. We were the ones who, immediately after October 7, said we were very worried about the protests, the pro-Palestine protest, that were inciting hatred, antsemitism and violence.
Barnett said Tice was accusing Ettedgui of lying. “Yes,” Tice replied.
Barnett went on: “But you don’t know that?”
And Tice replied:
I think this is made-up twaddle by a whole bunch of people with … a political axe to grind.
And every week the voters are going out in byelections and they are voting for Reform because they are not buying into this leftwing, anti-Nigel narrative.
‘Brave’ would be one word that might Tice’s approach in this interview. Readers can probably think of others. It is certainly not the strategy that would have been adopted by anyone taking advice from a libel lawyer beforehand.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: Darren Jones, the Cabinet Office minister and cheif secretary to the PM, takes questions in the Commons.
Morning: Kemi Badenoch is on a visit in west London.
Morning: Keir Starmer meets Jonas Gahr Støre, the Norwegian prime minister, in Downing Street.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
Noon: The final report from the inquiry into the death of Dawn Sturgess, who was killed in the Salisbury novichok Russian nerve agent attack, is published. Dan Jarvis, the security minister, is due to make a statement on it to MPs.
Afternoon: Starmer and Støre visit RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland where they will announce measures to deal with Russian submarine incursions.
Late afternoon: Starmer visits Glasgow for an event with Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, where they will highlight budget measures that will benefit Scotland.
At at some point today Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president, is giving a speech in parliament to MPs and peers as part of his state visit.
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Updated at 04.46 EST