Ex-councillor jailed for stalking former Conservative MP Penny Mordaunt

A former councillor has been jailed for 20 weeks after stalking Penny Mordaunt, which the former cabinet minister said left her fearing “sexual violence”.Edward Brandt, a professional sailor, had been found guilty of the offence but was acquitted of a more serious charge of stalking involving serious alarm or distress.The trial was told he sent at least 17 emails and three phone messages to Mordaunt, as well as turning up at her Portsmouth constituency office out-of-hours between 11 September 2023 and 12 May 2024.She said in a statement to police that she “feared sexual violence” because of the defendant’s “creepy” behaviour.Brandt, 61, was also sentenced for seven breaches in December last year of a stalking protection order, in place until November 2034, by failing to notify police of devices capable of connecting to the internet and of the creation of accounts on Facebook and Snapchat

A linguistic own goal from Starmer’s critics | Letters

Jonathan Liew links rude football chants to the unmerited personal abuse which Keir Starmer is currently receiving (When crowds direct offensive chants at Keir Starmer, who’s to blame? I’m afraid he is, 13 January).Football managers are frequently the target for similar treatment. Like them, Starmer has to set his team’s strategy and tactics and produce results that please supporters.No matter that he saved his side from relegation and gained promotion last season, things are not going as well as expected – hence the abuse. In style and charisma, he may be more Sean Dyche than Carlo Ancelotti, and as an Arsenal fan, he should get some tips from Mikel Arteta

Reform UK’s London mayor candidate condemned for burqa stop and search remarks

Reform UK’s mayoral candidate for London has been accused of endangering Muslims after she said women wearing the burqa should be subject to stop and search.Laila Cunningham, who was announced as Reform’s candidate for the 2028 mayoral elections last week, said no one should cover their face “in an open society”, adding: “It has to be assumed that if you’re hiding your face, you’re hiding it for a criminal reason.”Cunningham told the Standard podcast: “If you go to parts of London, it does feel like a Muslim city. The signs are written in a different language. You’ve got burqas being sold in markets

Jenrick says he hopes his defection to Reform UK will ‘unite the right’ after Badenoch says he ‘tells a lot of lies’ – as it happened

Robert Jenrick is now speaking exclusively to Laura Kuenssberg at BBC News and says he hopes his defection will “unite the right”.He said:This is uniting the right. My message for millions of people in the country who stuck with the Conservative party, often through gritted teeth because like me they were deeply frustrated, angry even, about what happened.They voted again in 2024 and many of those voters have now come to Reform over the course of the last year or so – but there are still people sticking with the party.If you want to get rid of this Labour government and have a strong reforming government to fix the country, there is frankly only one way to do that … that is to vote for Nigel and rally behind him and Reform

Tory ‘arsonists’ still in charge of party, says Jenrick as he hits back at Badenoch

The “arsonists” who tanked the reputation of the Conservatives are still in charge of the party, Robert Jenrick has said as he and the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, trade blows a day after his dramatic defection to Reform UK.Giving his first interview since his announcement on Thursday, the former shadow justice secretary said the Conservatives had not changed since the election, while defending himself against allegations of lying from his former party leader.He told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Friday: “I came to the conclusion over the course of the last year or so that … the party hadn’t changed, that the people who’d made those mistakes were still sat around the shadow cabinet table, the arsonists were still in control of the party, and that this was not a party that was capable of even understanding what it had got wrong, let alone fixing it.”Jenrick insisted “I could not have been franker” about his intentions, despite telling the Conservative chief whip on Thursday he would never defect – an act that Badenoch said showed he “tells a lot of lies”.In her own set of broadcast interviews hours earlier, Badenoch said: “You can’t believe a word that comes out of his mouth

Nigel Farage tricked into paying tribute to Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins

Nigel Farage has been targeted with another prank on the paid video service Cameo, this time paying tribute to the child sexual abuse offender Ian Watkins.Cameo allows fans to pay celebrities to make personalised video messages, with the Reform party leader offering his services from £78.45.In a 27-second video posted online by John Smith, who requested the clip, Farage called the former Lostprophets singer, who was killed in prison last year, “a good man, a really good guy” who “loved his children”.He pretended to know Watkins, whose victims included a baby boy, and said he was “very much in contact with me”