1. Reform faced a crisis in Newcastle-under-Lyme after a series of leaflets featuring Alan Shearer and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet sparked suspicions that candidates believed themselves to be standing in Newcastle upon Tyne.
2. A Lib Dem pamphlet showing the party posed to win Calderdale turned out, on closer inspection, to feature bar charts based on a light-hearted YouGov poll of which party people would most trust to remember to feed their cat.
3. Tommy Robinson accused Zack Polanski of racially aggravated posting.
4. Your Party’s campaign stalled after Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn failed to agree on whether an election was actually happening on May 7.
5. A Restore candidate made waves in Kensington and Chelsea by demanding it secede from Greater London and be returned to its rightful place in the county of Essex.
6. Nigel Farage claimed that a 2019 photograph of a Reform candidate doing what appeared to be a Nazi salute just showed we should abolish the BBC.
7. After six weeks of door-knocking and leafleting in Spelthorne, the local Labour Party was embarrassed to discover that the council had actually been abolished under Keir Starmer’s local government reforms.
8. Concerns grew for a Tory council leader’s wellbeing after he issued a statement saying that “though I’ve been a loyal party member for 68 years, it may be time for Boris to stand down”.
9. Red faces in Cannock Chase after it turned out it had not been abolished under Keir Starmer’s local government reforms, and that someone was thus meant to have organised an election.
10. Ofcom declined to investigate bias at GB News after it broadcast a 90-second clip of Professor Matthew Goodwin just helplessly sobbing.
11. A leaflet featuring Labour candidates in Salford smiling and shaking hands with Keir Starmer turned out, on inspection of the small print, to be an AI-generated smear campaign blamed on opponents of Andy Burnham.
12. In what some are calling evidence of media bias, Reform’s improvements to its vetting procedures won praise after it turned out that 19 of its candidates standing in the West Midlands are also AI (“It’s just easier this way,” said a spokesman).
13. There was fury after a Green councillor opposed plans for a solar farm on the grounds it won’t be a community solar farm.
14. Kemi Badenoch spent seven whole minutes of the 8.10 interview slot on the Today programme furiously insisting to Amol Rajan that the Lake District is in Scotland.
15. A Holyrood candidate standing in the west of Scotland won a five-figure defamation suit after demonstrating that, when she referred to “remigration”, she was actually just referring to English people. The National described her as a future SNP leader.
16. A trio of Labour MPs in the north-west issued a joint statement denying that they had blocked Wes Streeting on WhatsApp.
17. The Sunderland Liberal Democrats were rocked by a polycule incident.
18. A new vetting crisis hit Reform UK, after it emerged that the AI candidate in Smethwick was three days deep into a thread on X arguing that England fought on the wrong side in the Hundred Years’ war.
19. Angela Rayner’s team complained of bias from The New World after she didn’t get her own joke in this column.
20. Nigel Farage issued a furious denial after Liz Truss released a two-hour YouTube video titled “Why I have joined Reform”. “This is the greatest crisis of my leadership,” admitted the Clacton MP.
21. There was a rare moment of political unity as every party agreed that British voters this summer shouldn’t have to pay a single extra penny for petrol, food or flights, economically ruinous global shortage of oil or no economically ruinous global shortage of oil.
Nigel Farage really did say, “Maybe we should ban the BBC, I don’t know”, on the grounds that Welsh Senedd candidate Corey Edwards had claimed that pictures of him doing a Nazi salute in around 2019 had actually been his Basil Fawlty impression. Oh, and a Green opposed a solar farm, but what else is new?
