Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, thinks that his chances of becoming PM before Donald Trump leaves the White House in January could be as high as 25%.He made the comment in an interview with Dan Walker for 5 News being broadcast tonight.Farage told Walker he did genuinely believe he could be the next PM.And this is what he said when he was asked if that could happen during Trump’s presidency.Look, Labour have got a whopping great big majority.

The only thing that really brings an early election is if we get an economic meltdown,Now, that is not impossible for two reasons,One, the level of indebtedness is worse than it was in 2008 when we had the big meltdowns,And I think we’ve lived through rocketing stock markets for years,That can’t go on.

But we have a peculiar set of circumstances.In the UK, growth is dead, confidence has disappeared.Here [in the US, where the interview was recorded] everyone’s talking really bullishly about what’s going to happen.Somehow Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer have just killed any economic optimism of any kind at all.So, you could see a situation – we saw it with Liz Truss, actually, we saw what a run on the markets can do to governments, we saw it back at Suez.

In the end, it was the markets that really brought Eden down more than anything else,So, yeah, it’s possible,I wouldn’t put it at more than 20%, 25%, but it’s possible,(In the transcript from 5 News it says “distrust”, not Liz Truss, but from the context it is obvious that Farage said Liz Truss,Maybe she will send another lawyer’s letter.

)Farage may be rating his chances of becoming PM within the next four years a bit high, but it would be foolish to think that it could not happen.Two leading political commentators have recently written long Substack articles explaining how it might.Peter Kellner, the former YouGov president, wrote a post before Christmas headlined: Memo to Nigel – how you can become PM.After setting out a strategy for Farage, Kellner said it had “an outside chance of working – no more”.And Sam Freedman more recently wrote a post headlined: Will Reform kill the Tory party? Here is an extract from his conclusion.

For Reform to replace the Tories three things would need to happen.First they would need to sustain their current momentum well into 2025, then there would need to be a tipping point moment when donors, right-wing media and a number of Tory MPs decided to shift support en masse, and then they would have to win more seats in the 2028/2029 election.The first of these seems fairly likely.The enthusiasm of Reform’s voter base, the weakness of the Tory party, and the media need for narrative all point the same way.The biggest barrier is probably Farage’s ability to manage the negative associations caused by Musk (who is not at all popular in the UK).

The second is much less likely and a prerequisite for the third,My guess is it would require another botched Tory leadership election that led to a major split in the parliamentary party and other supporters to collectively give up,We’re much closer to this scenario than at any point in history but it’s still hard to trigger, given historic and emotional attachments to the Conservative party,But Freedman also argued that, under first past the post, two big parties with similar views could not survive alongside each other forever because “a ‘winner takes all’ system … will always end with one party being crushed or a merger”,He went on:It may take a long time but if - and it is a big if - Reform remain a major player in British politics, under the voting system we have, it will ultimately lead to the end of the Tory party as we know it.

Keir Starmer has said that the government will leave “no stone unturned” in investigating the failings by government agencies that contributed to allowing Axel Rudakubana to murder three young girls at a dance class in Southport last summer.He made the statement as Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, suggested ministers unreasonably held back information about the killings from the public last summer.Farage even accused the government of a “cover-up”.(See 4.40pm.

)Ministers have congratulated Donald Trump on his inauguration.Within the last few minutes David Lammy, the foreign secretary, posed this on social media.Many congratulations President @realDonaldTrump on your historic return to the White House.There are no greater allies than the UK and US.Our close economic, security, intelligence and cultural ties deliver growth and prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic.

I look forward to further strengthening the special relationship over the years to come.But the Liberal Democrats have described Trump’s inauguration as “deeply worrying” (see 9.57am), and the Green party has called him a fascist (see 10.24am).Farage has claimed that there is a 20/25% chance he could become prime minister before Donald Trump leaves the White House.

(See 11.50am.)Work will not begin until 2039 on some of the “40 new hospitals” Boris Johnson promised to build by 2030, after a Labour rethink on a pledge it called “a work of fiction” by the Conservatives.A bid by unionists in Northern Ireland to stop new EU rules for chemicals, including paint and household detergent, being applied in the region has been formally rejected by the government.(See 2.

30pm.)A new artificial intelligence tool can warn ministers whether policies are likely to be very unpopular with their party’s MPs, using a search described as a “parliamentary vibe check”.Here is Denis Campbell’s story about the announcement.Streeting said that he was doing two things with his annoucement today: putting the hospital building programme on a “firm footing”, with sustainable funding; and giving an “honest, realistic deliverable timetable”.Under the Tories, the projects were all due to be built by 2030.

But Streeting said almost half of the 40 projects will now not even start this decade,Nine are now due to start between 2030 and 2035, and another nine will not commence until between 2035 and 2039,Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is making a statement to MPs about the hospital building programme promised by the Tories,When Boris Johnson was PM, he promised 40 new hospitals,Streeting said that the plans were a fiction.

He said the new building projects could not be delivered on time.And he said that, when he took office, he was “shocked” by what he discovered.The scheme was not just years behind schedule.The money provided by the previous government was due to run out in March, just weeks from today … The truth is that no funding had been set aside for future years.The money simply wasn’t there.

This was a program built on the shaky foundation of false hope,If I was shocked by what I discovered, patients ought to be furious, not just because the promises made to them were never going [to be met] but because they can see when they go into hospital, how badly the health service needs new buildings,The NHS is quite literally crumbling,Keir Starmer has said the government will leave “no stone unturned” in investigating the failings by government agencies that contributed to allowing Axel Rudakubana to murder three young girls at a dance class in Southport last summer,In a statement following Rudakubana’s surprise decision to plead guilty this morning as his trial was opening, Starmer issued a statement saying:Our thoughts are with the families of Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Alice da Silva Aguiar – and the families of everyone affected – who will be saved the ordeal of a protracted trial.

The news that the vile and sick Southport killer will be convicted is welcome.It is also a moment of trauma for the nation and there are grave questions to answer as to how the state failed in its ultimate duty to protect these young girls.Britain will rightly demand answers.And we will leave no stone unturned in that pursuit.At the centre of this horrific event, there is still a family and community grief that is raw; a pain that not even justice can ever truly heal.

Although no words today can ever truly convey the depths of that pain, I want the families to know that our thoughts are with them and everyone in Southport affected by this barbaric crime.The whole nation grieves with them.Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has accused the government of a “cover-up”, claiming that when he demanded information about the background of the killer last summer, it should have been disclosed.At the time the police said there was a limit to what they could say because of the need not to prejudice future legal proceedings.As Vikram Dodd reports, Rudakubana had been referred three times to Prevent, the government’s scheme to stop terrorist violence – in part because of his potential interest in the killing of children in a school massacre,Kemi Badenoch has also implied that ministers held back information unreasonably last summer.

In a statement on social media, she said:As we learn more details of Axel Rudakubana’s horrific crimes, my thoughts are first and foremost with the victims’ families,We will need a complete account of who in government knew what and when,The public deserves the truth,This case is still in court and there are, properly, limits on what can be said at this stage,But once it concludes on Thursday with sentencing, there are many important questions the authorities will need to answer about the handling of this case and the flow of information.

Here is a picture of Boris Johnson at the Capitol in Washington, where he is attending President Trump’s inauguration.The picture has been posted on social media by Frank Luntz, the American pollster and consultant who knew Johnson at Oxford and helped in his campaign to become president of the Oxford Union.Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.He appears to be on of the most popular people in the rotunda this morning.#Inauguration pic.

twitter.com/MaQzEQ9SreThe Scottish parliament voted last month to stop MSPs also serving as either MPs or peers.It also voted for ministers to consider stopping MSPs from being councillors while they are serving in Holyrood too.The Scottish government has now launched a consultation on so-called dual mandates to decide exactly how this law will be implemented.The UK will launch a grain verification scheme “to track grain stolen from occupied areas of Ukraine”, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has announced.

It says:Using cutting-edge science to determine where grain has been grown and harvested, the UK has developed a database to support Ukraine’s efforts to trace and stop grain theft from occupied regions.The scheme will strengthen the food security of Ukraine and also ensure the country remains a major supplier of agricultural produce worldwide.This scheme is part of the 100-year partnership between the UK and Ukraine announced by Keir Starmer last week.Consumer confidence in the UK remained broadly flat in the final quarter of last year, according to Deloitte Consumer Tracker.It says:The latest Deloitte Consumer Tracker shows that UK consumer confidence remains close to its highest level in five years with confidence at -8.

1% for Q4 2024 compared with -7.9 % in Q3 2024.However, after recovering for two years, the lack of improvement in the overall index in Q4 points to consumers being nervous about the UK economy following the budget including how higher taxes on businesses might impact their income and prices at the till.Consumers’ view on the state of the economy in the UK dropped by 14 percentage points in Q4 compared with Q3.The Conservative party flagged up the figures to journalists, describing them as “depressing”.

Ulster Unionist party leader Steve Aiken has said the Northern Ireland secretary Hilary Benn has “failed at the first hurdle” to pass a credibility test over the government’s commitment to ensuring the region does not suffer because of Brexit.(See 2.30pm.)He said Northern Ireland had been told it could use the “Stormont Brake” to stop EU laws applying in Northern Ireland but nowhere else in the UK if it impacted significant society there.He said:Northern Ireland is far from being in the ‘best of both worlds’ and Hilary Benn had an opportunity to actually examine the impact of this divergence, he has demonstrably failed at this first hurdle.