Politics
Nigel Farage, Trump ally and political flamethrower, shakes up British parliamentary vote
In a sludgy, slow-motion trajectory, the pale yellow milkshake found its mark: Far-right political candidate and Donald Trump acolyte Nigel Farage, on the inaugural day of his insurgent campaign for a seat in the British Parliament.
But no display of airborne voter displeasure was going to prevent one of the country’s most gleefully polarizing public figures from shaking up what had until then been considered a fairly sedate contest between Britain’s two biggest parties. In a surprise announcement in early June, Farage inserted himself as the ruling Conservatives were already forecast to lose decisively to the left-leaning Labor Party.
Some observers believe the return of Farage, 60 — political flamethrower, a key architect of Brexit, leader of a small, stridently anti-immigration party — could lead to a MAGA-like takeover of the Conservative Party, which has played a preeminent role in British politics for nearly 200 years.
Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-immigration Reform U.K. political party, plays a game at an amusement arcade below his party’s office in Clacton-on-Sea, England.
And his high-profile presence re-introduces an insistently clamorous voice to what has lately been a nationalist-populist upswelling in Western Europe and beyond, one whose full import may soon become clear.
“He’s good at getting attention, and he sees himself as a disrupter, someone who wants to overthrow the established order,” said Mark Wickham-Jones, a political science professor at the University of Bristol. “There’s not much coherence to his policies, but in terms of his support, that really doesn’t matter.”
Public opinion polls suggest Farage’s party, Reform U.K., will come nowhere near victory in Thursday’s general election. But after seven straight losses, he appears poised to succeed — finally — in winning election to the House of Commons, the 223-year-old lower house of Parliament.
Farage, who hails from a leafy village on London’s outskirts, is making his eighth parliamentary run in Clacton-on-Sea, a down-at-the-heels seaside town whose jangling arcades, shuttered storefronts and scuffy, darting seagulls can lend it the air of a distorted funhouse mirror. (In Britain, parliamentary candidates do not have to live in their constituencies.)
Boys on bicycles hang out near the main street in Clacton-on-Sea. The town and its surrounding villages are afflicted by high unemployment and poverty.
People walk by one of the many amusement arcades near the beach in Clacton-on-Sea.
“Something is happening out there — momentum!” Farage recently told a group of sweaty, enthusiastic supporters at his tiny local headquarters, situated above one of the many garish amusement arcades lining a seaside street.
“It’s like millions of simultaneous conversations are going on, at the breakfast table, at the bingo hall, at the pub — ‘Oh my God, we were just talking about you!’” he said, sounding almost giddy.
In many ways, Clacton is an electoral venue tailored for Farage.
The town and its surrounding villages, while containing some affluent pockets, are afflicted overall by high unemployment and poverty rates. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, 70% of the constituency voted to leave the European Union. Two years earlier, Reform’s predecessor, the United Kingdom Independence Party, or UKIP, won a parliamentary race for the first time — in Clacton.
In a political pattern that has become familiar in the United States and continental Europe, voters in Clacton, which is home to relatively few migrants, tend to be far more vociferous than the general population in demanding that immigration be cut dramatically.
Farage “has been able to play on people’s fears,” Wickham-Jones said, “and concerns about identity — a sense that society has been changing rapidly.” Other politicians, he said, have struggled to articulate a counternarrative about the social benefits of immigration, or less drastic ways of curtailing it.
David Allum, right, canvasses for British politician Nigel Farage outside Reform’s office, above an arcade center in Clacton-on-Sea.
The Labor candidate in Clacton is a charismatic 27-year-old named Jovan Owusu-Nepaul, who was born in the English town of Nottingham and is of Jamaican and Ghanaian heritage. He is seen as having little chance of overtaking Farage, although some political observers believe his quick-witted, social-media-heavy campaign style marks him as someone who could ascend the national stage at some point.
On a Clacton side street, Pushkar Dhasmala, a 40-year-old immigrant from India, said he supported Owusu-Nepaul but knew that most of his neighbors did not.
“The care sector is dependent on immigrants,” said Dhasmala, who works in a privately run assisted-living facility. Farage’s opponent, he said, “understands the situation” faced by those newly arrived and trying to make a home in Britain.
Labor’s expected dominance in the national parliamentary vote bucks a recent trend of nationalist-populist success elsewhere in Europe. The party has been buoyed by a wave of public disaffection with the Conservatives, whose nearly 15 years in power spanned the pandemic and Britain’s chaotic exit from the European Union, formalized in 2020.
Over the years, the Conservatives imposed hard-edged austerity measures that have gutted Britain’s public sector, including the revered but deeply troubled National Health Service. The Conservative-held prime ministership changed hands repeatedly during the tussle to enact Brexit, culminating in the scandal-plagued reign of Boris Johnson, who stepped down in disgrace in 2022.
Johnson’s successors fared little better: First came the hapless Liz Truss, the shortest-serving leader in modern British history, whose 50-day tenure inspired memes of whether she would outlast a wilting head of lettuce, and current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who called the upcoming vote when it became clear that cratering Conservative support could plunge even further.
Nigel Farage plays an arcade game. The anti-immigration politician, who hails from a leafy village on London’s outskirts, is making his eighth parliamentary run in the down-at-the-heels seaside town of Clacton-on-Sea.
The reemergence of Farage — who jumped into the parliamentary race after first saying he would not run — coincides with bruising times for mainstream political leaders elsewhere in Western Europe.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron is trying to hold shut the far-right floodgates in two rounds of parliamentary voting finishing on July 7; Germany’s centrist government suffered a stinging rebuke when a far-right party notched second place in the country’s European parliament elections this month.
There has sometimes been a certain synchronicity in American and British politics — Brexit’s narrow approval came months before Trump’s 2016 presidential victory — and prominent Trump backers have taken delighted notice of far-right gains in France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere.
Before, during and after the former U.S. president’s turn in office, Farage worked strenuously to insert himself into the Trumpian orbit, albeit as something of a distant satellite.
Nigel Farage’s sloganeering echoes Donald Trump’s — “make Britain great again.”
In a recent interview with Britain’s ITV, Farage declared that Trump had likely “learned a lot” from his own incendiary, insult-laden speeches in the European parliament, where he previously held a seat — but added, magnanimously, that the tutelage went both ways.
Farage’s sloganeering echoes Trump’s — “make Britain great again” — and he relishes describing the country as being in a state of terminal decline and branding opponents “boring idiots.”
Trump, for his part, was an avowed fan of Brexit, and his campaign hinges on many of the same social divisions that animate Farage’s run: immigration, economic dissatisfaction and culture wars.
Some political commentators, and Farage himself, have suggested the voting results might leave him positioned to essentially capture a hollowed-out Conservative party — a scenario likened by some to events across the Atlantic, where Trump’s MAGA movement has seized control of the Republican establishment.
“Post election, there may be a bid for forces from Reform to stage some kind of takeover of the Conservatives, perhaps involving Farage if he is elected” as a member of Parliament, said Andrew Blick, a politics and contemporary history professor at King’s College London.
“I don’t know if this will be successful, but if it were, the Conservatives would look more like the Trump-era Republicans,” he said. That would leave a victorious Labor party and prospective new prime minister, Keir Starmer, facing a far more extremist and intransigent political opposition.
For all the fandom that can be seen out on the campaign trail, Farage triggers strong negative pushback from across much of the political spectrum. He has been pilloried for saying NATO provoked Russia’s war against Ukraine, for blatantly misogynistic remarks, and for repeated expressions of what critics call thinly veiled racist sentiments.
“You don’t have to watch sheepdog trials to hear a dog whistle,” former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron said of Farage, speaking to the Times of London.
On the day Farage began his campaign in Clacton, a young female onlooker, who was later arrested, splattered him with a milkshake on the steps of a well-known seaside pub, the Moon and Starfish. This was not the first milkshaking of Farage’s career, and he handled the incident with a degree of aplomb, grinning for cameras later that day with an order of banana milkshakes in hand.
Three weeks later, though, the man who made bellicosity his political trademark was clearly still harboring a grudge.
“Politics has changed,” he said. “People hurl things at you.”
His divisiveness was attested to by a Clacton couple who were dining on a recent afternoon on the terrace of the pub where the milkshake episode occurred.
Paula Bracegirdle, a part-time cook who said she hoped to retire soon, had qualms about Farage — “a bit extreme, I think,” she said. But her husband, Paul, 60, who works part-time with elderly people with dementia, called him a truth-teller.
“I think he’s straight with what he says,” he said.
They disagreed on Brexit, too: She voted in 2016 to remain in the EU. He supported the Leave campaign that Farage helped spearhead, and like Farage, he now blamed the Conservatives for having failed to manage the departure effectively.
The pair agreed on one thing, though: Clacton, they both said, was no better off than before.
Politics
Trump says US, Israel shattered Iranian military capabilities, presses leaders to surrender: ‘Cry uncle’
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President Donald Trump on Saturday said that U.S. and Israeli forces have “wiped out” Iran’s navy, air force and much of its missile capability in just one week of war, declaring the regime’s military “almost non-existent” as he continues to press Tehran to surrender for “a much safer world.”
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, the president said the sweeping offensive has exceeded expectations, noting Iran’s navy “is now at the bottom of the sea.”
“We’ve wiped out their Navy — 44 ships. We’ve wiped out their air force — every plane. We’ve wiped out most of their missiles — you see their missiles aren’t coming much anymore,” Trump said.
He added military strikes have hit missile manufacturing areas “very hard,” and the country’s drone capacity is “way down.”
President Donald Trump, White House Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listen to a reporter’s question while traveling aboard Air Force One, Saturday, en route to Miami. (Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo)
The president said he is seeking an “unconditional surrender” from Iran, explaining the term means “they cry uncle, or when they can’t fight any longer.”
“Or there’s nobody around to cry uncle to, because we wiped out their leadership numerous times already,” he continued. “It’s if they surrender, or if there is nobody around to surrender, but they’re rendered useless in terms of military [capabilities].”
Discussing atrocities allegedly carried out by the regime, Trump said the war was 47 years coming and “no president had the guts to do it.”
GOP SENATORS SAYS TRUMP’S STRIKES ‘SIGNIFICANTLY DEGRADED’ IRAN BUT EMPHASIZE ATTACKS NOT ‘FOREVER WARS’
President Donald Trump listens to a reporter’s questions, Saturday, aboard Air Force One. (Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo)
“They are about the most evil people ever on Earth,” he said. “They cut babies’ heads off. They chop women in half. Take a look at October 7th, take a look at what they’ve done over the last 47 years. … When this ends, we’re going to have a much safer world.”
Despite concerns about rising gas prices on the home front, Trump said he is not worried.
TRUMP AND FIRST LADY ATTEND DIGNIFIED TRANSFER FOR 6 US TROOPS KILLED IN KUWAIT
U.S. Central Command released footage showing strikes on Iranian mobile missile launchers. (@CENTCOM via X)
“They’ll come down very fast, and we will have gotten rid of a major, major cancer on the face of the earth,” the president said. “We’ll have taken out a cancer. … What we’re doing is a great thing, not only for our country, not only for Israel, not only for the Middle East, but for the world.”
It is unclear if ground troops will be sent to secure the enriched uranium at Iranian nuclear sites targeted by joint forces, though the president described the attacks as “a total obliteration.”
“They haven’t been able to get to it, and at some point, maybe we will be,” he said. “It would be a great thing, but right now, we’re just decimating them. We haven’t gone after it, but [it’s] something we could do later.”
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Trump concluded by calling the war “a minor excursion” that in the end will make the world a safer place.
“When this ends, we’re going to have a much safer world, you know, so, you know, this is a minor excursion,” he said. “And we will have gotten rid of a lot of sick and demented people, the leadership. So we got rid of one leadership. We got rid of the second level of leadership. Now they’re on that third or fourth level of leadership. And they have leaders right now that nobody even knows who they are.”
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WASHINGTON — Signs of division emerged in Iran’s leadership Saturday as U.S. and Israeli strikes continued battering targets throughout the country, with Tehran sending mixed signals on whether it would keep attacking Washington’s Arab allies entering the war’s second week.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian began the day offering an apology “on behalf of Iran to the neighboring countries affected,” promising to halt the attacks that have affected nearly every nation in the Middle East. But strikes continued within hours, hitting Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, and Pezeshkian quickly issued a statement walking back his remarks.
President Trump vowed on social media to “hit Iran very hard” on Saturday, shortly before flying to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for the dignified transfer of six service members killed in the war.
Speaking at a summit of Latin American leaders in Miami before his trip to Delaware, the president said the fallen service members were heroes “coming home in a different manner than they thought they’d be coming home.” He said it was “a very sad situation,” and he pledged to keep American war deaths “to a minimum.”
And Israel launched its own wave of fresh attacks against Iran while taking incoming fire from Hezbollah, Iran’s allied force in Lebanon, that set off sirens in Tel Aviv. Reports of a fire at a major oil refinery outside Tehran sparked fears the conflict was only escalating, marking the first attack on Iran’s energy infrastructure, if confirmed.
The burst of activity over the weekend underscored that Trump’s unexpected war with Iran, launched alongside Israel just a week ago, is continuing at full force with no sign of slowing.
Missile and drone strikes by Iran against Arab nations, targeting U.S. military assets in the region as well as civilian targets, including hotels and airports, have been an effort by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to pressure regional governments to in turn press Trump to end the U.S. air campaign. The strikes have jolted markets worldwide and sent the price of oil soaring.
President Trump salutes Saturday as soldiers carry the coffin of Sgt. Declan Coady, 20, of West Des Moines, Iowa. Coady and five others were killed in a drone strike in Kuwait.
(Roberto Schmidt / Getty Images)
While the attacks have decreased substantially over the course of the week, with U.S. Central Command recording a 90% decrease in ballistic missile launches and an 83% drop in drone attacks as of Friday, Iranian strikes are still penetrating regional air defenses. One drone hit the world’s busiest airport, in Dubai, on Saturday, dashing hopes that flights could resume from the regional hub.
Hours after Pezeshkian’s apology, Iran’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement vowing to continue strikes on territories that host U.S. offensive forces. Iran’s Defense Ministry said that its strategic stockpile of munitions was sufficient to sustain a protracted campaign. And a Revolutionary Guard spokesperson issued a statement addressing Trump, calling him “the corrupted island man,” referring to his former friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender who allegedly trafficked girls to his private island.
“The ground and the map of the war is in our hands,” the Revolutionary Guard official said. “This will continue.”
In his videotaped remarks, Pezeshkian also rejected Trump’s call for Tehran’s “unconditional surrender.” Trump later said he would be satisfied reaching a point at which Iran is no longer capable of fighting back.
“The idea of Iran surrendering unconditionally is a dream they will take to their graves,” Pezeshkian said.
A member of Iran’s Assembly of Experts, a council of 88 clerics responsible for naming the country’s supreme leader, was quoted in local state media vowing to select a new ayatollah within the next day, more than a week after U.S. and Israeli forces assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the opening salvo of the war.
Trump has said he expects a say in that decision, preemptively rejecting the late supreme leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, who is seen as the most likely successor.
Mojtaba Khamenei is seen as even more ideological than his father, with deep ties throughout Iran’s security apparatus — and with a potential vendetta against Trump, on the heels of U.S. forces killing much of his family.
Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council who formerly served as the late Khamenei’s top advisor, said in his first remarks since the ayatollah’s killing that his assassination was unprecedented. “The price for this is not small,” Larijani said.
“They shouldn’t think we’ll let America quickly sweep this under the rug and say, ‘We hit, now let’s move on,’” Larijani continued. “Things will only resolve when they understand they no longer have the right to violate Iran, and when they compensate the Iranian people for their losses.”
More that 1,200 people have been killed in Iran since the war began, according to Iranian officials.
“He killed and martyred our leader,” Larijani added. “We’re not letting it go.”
Politics
Tech company at odds with Pentagon warns its AI possibly gained consciousness, Elon Musk gives 2-word response
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SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave a two-word retort after Anthropic leader Dario Amodei claimed in an interview that he isn’t sure if his company’s AI models have gained consciousness.
“Anthropic CEO says Claude may or may not have gained consciousness, as the model has begun showing symptoms of anxiety,” read a post on X by cryptocurrency-based prediction market Polymarket, to which Musk replied, “He’s projecting.”
The comment from Musk, who is also the founder of xAI, comes as Anthropic is at odds with the Pentagon over its use in a separate matter.
In an interview with The New York Times, Amodei, when asked about AI and consciousness, said, “We’ve taken a generally precautionary approach here,” and, “We don’t know if the models are conscious.”
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, left, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Samyukta Lakshmi/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“We are not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious or whether a model can be conscious. But we’re open to the idea that it could be,” he continued.
“We’re putting a lot of work into this field called interpretability, which is looking inside the brains of the models to try to understand what they’re thinking. And you find things that are evocative, where there are activations that light up in the models that we see as being associated with the concept of anxiety or something like that. When characters experience anxiety in the text, and then when the model itself is in a situation that a human might associate with anxiety, that same anxiety neuron shows up,” Amodei also told the Times.
The interview comes as the Trump administration is moving federal agencies away from Anthropic after the tech company pushed back against the War Department’s usage of its tools.
The Pentagon has called for Anthropic to allow the Department of War to utilize the company’s artificial intelligence product for “all lawful purposes,” but Amodei has suggested the government could potentially use their product for “mass domestic surveillance” or “fully autonomous weapons,” and that the company would not be willing to allow such use cases.
PENTAGON’S AI BATTLE WILL HELP DECIDE WHO CONTROLS OUR MOST POWERFUL MILITARY TECH
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stands outside the Pentagon during a ceremony welcoming Japan’s defense minister in Washington, on Jan. 15, 2026. (Kevin Wolf/AP)
President Donald Trump said last Friday, “The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY.”
“Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again! There will be a Six Month phase out period for Agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropic’s products, at various levels,” Trump added on Truth Social.
President Donald Trump gestures as he boards Air Force One before departing Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, on March 1, 2026. Trump said last week he is “directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology.” (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
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Secretary of War Pete Hegseth later wrote on X, “In conjunction with the President’s directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic’s technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.”
Fox News Digital’s Alex Nitzberg contributed to this report.
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