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A Tory Minister is involved in an extraordinary row over claims that taxpayers’ money was used to fund gay sex parties. The politician is said to have been in a feud with a senior party official accused of using dating app Grindr to invite gay MPs and activists to his suite at the Conservative Party conference. The £70,000-a-year official, who is not an MP, has also been accused of bullying staff and being drunk on duty. He was disciplined after a formal investigation. …

Ukip is to drop its opposition to gay marriage, party leader Nigel Farage revealed today. The move risks angering disaffected Tories who switched to Ukip after same sex weddings were legalised by the coalition, but Mr Farage insisted: ‘We have absolutely no problem with anybody.’ He said that as part of a review of Ukip’s manifesto, which he has dismissed as ‘drivel’, he would not campaign for gay weddings to be banned. Ukip previously said civil partnerships were a ‘common sense’ way for gay and lesbian couples to register their commitment ‘in a formal way’. But it warned: Gay marriage...

The often stale British political system is being rocked by its very own Tea Party. The UK Independence Party (UKIP), formed in 1993 opposing Britain’s entry into the European Union, failed to make an electoral dent for a long time. However UKIP has built up steam in recent years and is spearheading a seismic shift in the British political spectrum. In this year’s local elections – the British version of midterms -- UKIP took a stunning 23 percent of the vote, up from the 3.1 percent they won in the 2010 national election. Their leader, Nigel Farage, is buoyed by...

An Audience With … Nigel Farage features a stage with only a table, a chair, and a bottle of wine as props. Farage thinks it will give him a chance to “explain who I am” and, crucially, to “reach a new audience”. … “We need a much more muscular defense of our Judeo-Christian heritage. Yes, we’re open to different cultures, but we have to defend our values. That’s the message I want to hear from the Archbishop of Canterbury and from our politicians. Anything less is appeasement of the worst kind.” Yet he speaks not as a defender of the...

Video link - 4 minutes or so. This is how to handle an aggressive and biased interviewer. Politicians that are not fast on their feet don't last long in a parliamentary system. The reference to a "whopping 14%" in the last elections - that's up from 7% so, in fact, it's a dramatic increase, which could interpreted as 25% of Conservative supporters switching their allegiance to the UKIP.

The leader of Ukip, Nigel Farage, has claimed that his party has now displaced the Liberal Democrats as the "third force" in British politics after it performed strongly in three byelections. In the party's strongest showing in a Westminster byelection, Ukip secured 21.79% of the vote in Rotherham, claiming second place behind Labour, which won with 46.25%. The Lib Dems trailed in eighth place on 2.11%. Labour scored a hat-trick of comfortable victories in the three byelections held in its safe seats of Rotherham, Middlesbrough and Croydon North.