Today Havering, tomorrow Westminster

Hurrah for the Tealshirts! Nigel Farage emerged from Havering Town Hall looking smug even by his standards. For years, he has been written off, denied the respect — and peerage — he feels he deserves, forced to scrape by on gifts from well-wishers, and now he was showing them all, wreaking havoc on both Labour and Conservatives.

Nothing could hold the party back, not the endless terrible comments from Reform candidates who for some reason believe Farage agrees with them, not even a huge bribery scandal involving the party leader in Wales. Today Havering, tomorrow Westminster!

Elsewhere, people were gloomier. James Cleverly explained to the BBC that winning elections isn’t the goal of politics. The Conservatives aren’t interested in here today, gone tomorrow popularity, it turns out. They just want to govern well. Which leaves a couple of questions about the last decade and a half.

David Lammy told anyone who would listen that you don’t change pilot mid-flight. Better, he didn’t add, to wait until the plane has hit the ground.

The real show of the morning was the confrontation on the BBC between Cleverly’s colleague Vicky Atkins and their former fellow Tory, Robert Jenrick. Atkins and Jenrick have a long friendship going back to the time when he was the anti-Farage candidate in Newark in 2014, through the time he was an anti-Brexit MP supporting David Cameron, his days in Theresa May’s government, his early backing of Boris Johnson, his years in the Cabinet, all the way to his realisation this year that he’d never believed any of the things he’d been telling the voters.

“Robert and I haven’t actually spoken to each other since I supported his leadership campaign,” Atkins announced, and the rest of us fastened our seatbelts for a bumpy ride. “I’m surprised that he’s so quick to can all of the work that he did when he was in government.”

Next to her, Jenrick looked like a man who has arrived at a school parents evening to discover that his ex-wife got there first and has been filling people in on the reason she cut the crotches out of all his suits. But Atkins was just getting started. “Nobody should believe the snake oil salesmen,” she said. Jenrick had accused the Tories of messing things up. “Rob was part of the team that made those mistakes.”

Jenrick made another bid to get the conversation back on track. “The question is about honesty and trustworthiness,” he said. You could have used Atkins’ expression at that moment to freeze lava.

On Jenrick ploughed, trying to ignore the chuntering that was now coming from the woman at his side. “The most important thing in politics is to be honest with the public, and being honest means saying what needs to be done and actually doing it, not a sham scheme like Rwanda.”

Let’s just press pause there. It was understandable, in the wave of words pouring from Jenrick’s mouth, that this line passed without comment, but it’s barely two years since the plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda was so important to him that he resigned over moves to water it down. “I genuinely believe, having immersed myself in this issue for 14 months, that this is a good policy,” Jenrick told parliament at the time. Now it turns out it was a sham.

Jenrick is on the very short list of politicians who have complained about appearing in this sketch, something that cheers me up even on the lowest days. He shares with Farage a total lack of shame, a naked concern only with his own interests, and a level of moral flexibility that means you could use him to unblock even the bendiest pipes. If he thought Labour offered him a plausible route to a top job, he’d announce he was putting a couple of asylum-seekers in one of his many spare rooms.

Let’s go back to Farage at Havering. “It’s a big, big day!” he told the assembled press. “We’re not promising miracles.” Just vastly improved public services and lower taxes. Keir Starmer would resign any day, he announced, in much the same tone that last year he was telling us we’d be having a general election around now.

It was all bonhomie until someone asked about the five million pounds that was kindly dropped into his bank account before the last election, a matter that is entirely private and no one else’s business. “Yeah, yeah,” Farage replied, with deep sincerity. “We’ll talk about that any other time you like.” Will we, though? Perhaps he’ll get to it just after he explains the funding of the house he uses for his occasional visits to his Clacton constituency.

And what of the prime minister? He was busy insisting he isn’t going anywhere. He’d won the election less than two years ago. “That is a five-year mandate to change the country.” The problem is that the local elections show Starmer’s government is already changing the country. Just not in the way he has in mind.