Prince William and Kate Middleton wedding: 350 million viewers.
On April 29th, 2011, Kate Middleton, who was the daughter of wealthy business owners with ties to the crown, became Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.
Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer wedding: 1 billion viewers.
On July 29, 1981, Lady Di went from nursery teacher’s assistant to the Princess of Wales.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle wedding: 1.9 billion viewers.
On May 19th, 2018, Meghan Markle, who had previously worked as an actress, blogger, charity ambassador, and advocate, (briefly) became HRH the Duchess of Sussex, Countess of Dumbarton and Baroness Kilkeel.
Funeral of Lady Di: 2 billion viewers.
Di’s funeral took place at Westminster Abbey on Sept. 6th, 1997. A hearse transported her coffin to Kensington Palace days before the funeral took place. Although this wasn’t the formal procession, thousands of onlookers lined the streets.
Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral: 2.5 billion people.
The State Funeral of Queen Elizabeth II took place at Westminster Abbey on Monday 19th September.
UK viewing peaked at 20.4 million as Charles was crowned (compared to the 29 million who watched the Queen's funeral, & the 32 million who watched Di's funeral - second only to the 32.3 million who watched the 1966 World Cup Final). 🇬🇧
Only ten global events (including Di's & Queen's funeral) have been watched by 2 billion+ viewers.
Ali vs Larry Holmes: 2 billion viewers.
On Oct. 2nd, 1980, Ali took to the ring suffering slurred speech & decreased motor function. After 10 rounds his manager ended the fight.
Michael Jackson Memorial Service: 2 billion viewers.
A public memorial service for Michael Jackson was held on July 7, 2009, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California, twelve days after his death.
Live 8: 2 billion viewers
Live 8 was a benefit concert to raise money to try & end poverty worldwide. The G8 countries & South Africa performed simultaneous concerts on July 2nd, 2005 - the 20th anniversary of Live Aid (estimated TV audience of 1.9 billion).
9/11 terror attacks: 2 billion viewers.
Media coverage started when American Airlines Flight 11 collided with the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Within one hour and fifteen minutes, three more planes crashed in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.
1998 World Cup Final, France vs. Brazil: 2 billion viewers.
France's 3-0 win was their first World Cup title. Zidane was named the man of the match, while Ronaldo was awarded the Golden Ball as FIFA's outstanding player of the tournament.
Muhammad Ali vs. Leon Spinks II: 2 billion viewers.
September 15th, 1978, marked the second time Ali and Spinks met in the ring. Ali was 36, but dominated the fight and defeated Spinks by unanimous decision, avenging his split decision loss to Spinks from seven months prior.
2002 World Cup Final, Brazil vs. Germany: 2 billion viewers
On June 30, 2002, Brazil played Germany in a world cup final for first time. Two second-half goals by the original Ronaldo led to a 2-0 victory.
Reform UK’s slick, stage-managed launch of a Christian Fellowship in St Michael’s Church is not some harmless Christmas-season publicity stunt. It is a clear and brazen step towards the Trumpification of UK politics, where religion is weaponised as a tool for cultural warfare and political mobilisation.
This is not organic Christian revival. It’s strategic political engineering.
Behind this development sit figures who have spent years trying to inject a US-style fusion of right-wing politics and religious identity into British political culture:
• Paul Marshall
A billionaire media financier with a clear ideological project: to build a hard-right cultural and religious counter-establishment. Through GB “News”, The |Spectator and UnHerd and other platforms he has amplified narratives about “woke attacks” on tradition, identity, and Christianity. The Islamophobic tweets he liked are disgusting. His network provides the media oxygen for precisely the kind of politicised Christianity on display at the Reform launch.
• James Orr
A Cambridge academic and prominent Anglican conservative intellectual, closely connected to the “post-liberal” movement and hard-right US conservative and Hungarian organisations. Orr openly promotes the idea of restoring Britain’s “Christian identity” through politics — a framing that sits uncomfortably close to the Christian-nationalist rhetoric of the US right. His advisory role to senior Reform figures is a clear sign of the ideological hardening underway.
• Danny Kruger
Long known for advocating a more “muscular” Christian politics, Kruger has repeatedly argued that the UK should explicitly root its laws and social policy in “Judeo-Christian values” - a dog whistle I explain in the next tweet.
This is the British echo of US culture-war evangelicalism: turning religion into a political badge, not a spiritual or moral tradition. His involvement in shaping Reform’s policy direction cements the party’s shift toward faith-infused populism.
• Calvin Robinson
Though no longer in the Church of England, disgraced former GBN presenter and political extremist Robinson remains one of the most prominent voices pushing an aggressive “anti-woke, anti-liberal” form of Christianity in the media — including endorsing narratives that paint inclusive or progressive churches as heretical. His alignment with Reform’s messaging shows how the party is deliberately courting polemical, grievance-driven Christian activism.
Together, these figures represent a new coalition: a British attempt to import the US religious-right model, with all its corrosive social consequences.
Using St Michael’s Cornhill — a church rooted in the conservative evangelical network — as the backdrop for this political spectacle is shocking in a UK context.
This is not merely a “religious event attended by politicians.” It was a political rally held in a church, wrapped in Anglican aesthetics.
The Church of England has historically avoided such political entanglement precisely because it knows how dangerous it is to let a religious institution become a vessel for partisan identity politics.
Britain is not America — but Reform UK wants to change that
What we are seeing is the deliberate construction of a political identity rooted in far-right themes lurching toward a contemporary form of Christofascism:
grievance Christianity
nostalgia for a mythic “Christian Britain”
hostility to minorities and multiculturalism
anti-LGBTQ+ theology rebranded as “family values”
anti-immigrant populism framed as moral duty
and a narrative of cultural siege identical to the US evangelical right
It is the Trump playbook, translated into British idiom.
This is disturbing, because once a political movement fuses religious identity with national identity, democratic debate changes: Opponents are no longer wrong — they are heretical. Policies are no longer argued — they are sanctified. Compromise becomes betrayal. And politics becomes a zero-sum culture war.
Britain has largely avoided this polarising poison. Reform UK is now trying to inject it directly into the bloodstream of national politics.
Reform UK’s “Christian Fellowship” is not about faith. It is the public unveiling of a British Christian-nationalist project — backed by wealthy ideologues, amplified by culture-war media, and borrowing heavily from the most divisive elements of the US right.
It is a serious warning sign of where Reform UK intends to take the country: toward a politics defined by religious grievance, cultural division, and the erosion of the pluralistic norms that have protected Britain from the worst excesses of American political extremism.
How have populist UK politicians and Britain’s right-wing press and broadcasters got away with repeating — day after day, year after year — the brazenly false and wildly misleading claim that we live in a “high-welfare, high-tax” country?
The claim that Britain is a “high-welfare, high-tax” country is a shameless lie—brazenly false—as OECD and OBR data consistently show: the UK's tax take is ~36% of GDP (mid-table globally, and well under the EU average of 40.5%).
The UK's total tax take of 36% is far under France's 45% or Denmark's 46%. Welfare benefits spending (including state pensions) is a modest ~11% of GDP—among the lowest in the OECD, well below the EU average of 17.5%, and just under half that of France (20.5%) and Italy (20%).
Not only has Nigel Farage shamelessly normalized far right discourse, but Reform UK have welcomed a new generation of young, radicalised, Andrew Tate fanboys who think it's acceptable to spread divisive bigoted lies and disinformation, and to make crass bigoted 'jokes'.
Joseph Boam is a radicalised 22-year-old Tate fanboy who started out as a Tory, running as a district councillor, then switching to Reform UK in 2024 and becoming a councillor in May 2025 representing the Whitwick division on Leicestershire County Council for the Reform UK party.
A former KFC worker, who has worked with his dad on sheds and property renovation, despite his total lack of any relevant experience or knowledge of the area, he was appointed Council deputy leader and cabinet member for adult social care—which ispatently absurd.
Across the West, figures such as Trump, JD Vance, Farage, Johnson, Tice, Kruger, and Lowe helped normalise far-right populist rhetoric within mainstream politics. Their appeal is anti-elite—yet they themselves embody the privilege they claim to challenge.
A multibillion-dollar scheme that exchanges cash from drug and gun sales in the UK for crypto—digital tokens hiding users’ identities—has enabling “sanctions evasions and the highest levels of organised crime, including providing money-laundering services to the Russian state”. theguardian.com/politics/2025/…
In 2023, the hedge fund co-founded by GB "News" owner Paul Marshall, who employs 60% of anti-Net Zero Reform UK's MPs, had £1.8 BILLION invested in fossil fuel firms.
Harborne (who has Thai citizenship under the name 'Chakrit Sakunkrit) also makes money from fossil fuels.
I and countless others are sick to death of the billionaire-funded Reform UK propaganda machine, GB “News”, and their decontextualised ‘facts’ that would make Goebbels blush.
Let’s examine the claim that “one quarter of foreign sex offenders come from just five countries”.
Yes, the raw data comes from a genuine Ministry of Justice (MoJ) prison census, but the way it’s being weaponised is deeply misleading.
The statistic sounds explosive, and deliberately so: a factoid engineered to sound like a revelation of hidden danger.
The right-wing information pipeline: a cherry-picked fragment of official data stripped of context, laundered through an opaquely funded “think tank” that isn't a think tank, amplified by billionaire-funded media, and weaponised by opportunistic politicians for electoral gain.