Nigel Farage working as paid brand ambassador for gold bullion firm

Nigel Farage has been working as a paid brand ambassador for a gold bullion firm, in a third job alongside his roles as an MP and a GB News presenter.The MP for Clacton and Reform party leader promoted gold on behalf of Direct Bullion on a podcast sponsored by the company in November hosted by a fellow brand ambassador and influencer, Rob Moore.On the episode, broadcast last month, Farage said: “I’ve been working for Direct Bullion … I’ve been doing a bit of promotion for them, bit of advertising for them, bit of education for them, so you know I have an interest in this – declared.“But I’m not doing it out of nothing … I’ve been doing this now with them for getting on for a year, but actually for the last five years I’ve been involved with financial markets newsletters etc, making this argument that you should give gold a serious thought and it is open and accessible to you.”Farage argued during the podcast that gold was a good investment because there was no capital gains tax and people could put it in their pension pots

Living standards 2025 outlook ‘hardly cause for celebration’, says UK thinktank

Household incomes will stagnate or fall next year but the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will be hoping people feel better off as a result of improvements to public services, a leading thinktank has said.The Resolution Foundation calculated a new measure of “real living standards” that took into account both disposable income and the “in-kind” benefits of public services.It found the worst-off 10% of people of working age could see a 2% decline in their disposable income, but that would be offset by improvements in public services where they would be £28 better off overall.For the top half of earners, there was likely to be a 0.4%, or £140, fall in living standards once public service improvements were taken into account

The real test for Nigel Farage will be if donors follow foot soldiers to Reform

On brand as ever, Nigel Farage got the news that Reform appears to have surpassed the Tories in membership numbers while attending a traditional Boxing Day hunt.He was filmed for TikTok and Instagram wearing tweeds and a flat-cap, getting the news on his phone. He said: “We’ve done it. We’re through. How about that? We’re now the official opposition

MPs do not – and should not – always follow judicial orders | Letters

Stephen Sedley, writing of parliament’s freedom of speech and action, says it has “for centuries reciprocated by respecting court decisions and orders” (Letters, 19 December). This is to forget, for example, the 2011 naming, in defiance of court orders, of Ryan Giggs and Fred Goodwin, the origins of which lay in the Trafigura controversy of 2009, when solicitors who had claimed MPs were covered by a gagging injunction withdrew their claim after an MP referred to the injunction in a written question.The reality is that although the Commons has a rule restricting references in the house to current court cases (the “sub judice” rule), it reserves the right to defy judges who threaten to ignore their duty to respect parliamentary free speech. The same also applies to judicial attempts to undermine parliament’s ability to protect itself from people who illegitimately interfere with its work.Parliament should exercise its rights with moderation and restraint, but judges should also show moderation and restraint when their rulings might restrict democratic decision-making

Labour must not duck House of Lords reform this time | Brief letters

So more appointments to the House of Patronage (Sue Gray given peerage as Labour seeks to rebalance Lords, 20 December). And more ludicrous titles. A Labour government with a huge majority has a unique opportunity finally to sort out the Lords. All it requires is political will. The Blair government introduced a series of major constitutional reforms, but left the Lords as unfinished business

Reform UK claims to be ‘real opposition’ with more members than Tories

Reform UK has said it believes it now has more members than the Conservatives, surpassing 131,000 on Boxing Day.The party said it had hit the milestone of 131,680, which is the number of members the Conservatives had when Kemi Badenoch won the leadership election in the autumn.In a stunt to mark the moment, Reform released a videos showing a message that appeared to be projected on to Conservative party HQ in the middle of the night, telling Badenoch that Nigel Farage’s party was the “real opposition” to Labour.Badenoch hit back on Thursday evening, calling the membership counter a “fake” and accusing Reform of “manipulating British voters”. She also claimed that Farage was wrong to say his party had surpassed the Conservatives in members – without saying how many her party had