Good morning. In a speech yesterday that would have been considered extreme just a few years ago, Nigel Farage said that a Reform government would not just abolish indefinite leave to remain for new migrants to the UK – but rescind the status of those who have already been granted it, and force them to apply for new visas. He said that the policy was necessary for one reason above all: “to wake everybody up to the Boriswave”.
You might have noticed that term in the past few months: it has been used repeatedly in the mainstream media to describe the increase in inward migration from outside the EU after Brexit, when Boris Johnson was prime minister. What you may not know – what even some of those deploying it may not fully understand – is that “Boriswave” is not simply a pithy description of a sociological phenomenon but a term coined and popularised among the online far right, used in unapologetically racist terms to describe new arrivals to the UK, and then rapidly laundered into the mainstream.
That is a reflection of the sharp rightward turn in British politics – but it is also the story of some of the submerged factors that brought us here. Today’s newsletter, with Dr Robert Topinka, an expert on reactionary digital politics at Birkbeck, University of London, explains how it happened. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
UK news | Multiple charities have severed ties with Sarah, Duchess of York, after it emerged she had described the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein as a “supreme friend”. The charities included the Teenage Cancer Trust and the Children’s Literacy Charity.
US news | Donald Trump announced that pregnant women should limit their use of acetaminophen, usually branded as Tylenol in the US or paracetamol elsewhere, which he claimed heightens the risk of autism in children when it is used by pregnant women, in an assertion hotly contested by scientists internationally and contradicted by studies.
Egypt | The British-Egyptian human rights activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah has been released from jail after serving six years for sharing a Facebook post. Egypt’s president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, granted him his freedom after intensive lobbying by the UK government and pressure from Egypt’s national human rights council.
Russia | European allies have vowed to shoot down any Russian aircraft violating their airspace after Nato members accused Moscow of repeated incursions into the alliance’s territory in recent weeks.
Media | Disney has announced that Jimmy Kimmel’s late night talkshow will return to broadcast on Tuesday after the host was suspended over comments about Maga and the killing of far-right activist Charlie Kirk.
In depth: ‘They see themselves as seeding mainstream conversation – and they’re sort of right’
After Brexit took full effect in 2021, many Leave voters expecting a dramatic fall in immigration were instead confronted with the opposite. Under a new points-based visa system, and in part because of new humanitarian routes for refugees from Hong Kong and Ukraine, net migration rose sharply even as EU migration fell – in fact, precisely because the rules were changed in anticipation of labour shortages. When people talk about a “Boriswave”, that’s what they’re referring to.
As Michael Goodier explains here, the numbers have since fallen somewhat – but the shift has become a crucial force in British politics in the years since. And while “Boriswave” is now often used as a neutral shorthand, the term carries a charge: think of the human specificity of the “Windrush generation” against the idea of a “wave” – an inhuman mass, entirely out of control.
That suggests why understanding the term’s provenance matters. “There is an empirical reality that’s being referred to,” Robert Topinka said. “But whether you’re aware of it or not, it commits you to a far-right framing that makes it very difficult to talk about in any other way.” To understand how that came about, you first have to understand the people behind it.
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Who are the ‘extremely online right’?
You may remember the seminal scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Meryl Streep’s terrifying magazine editor Miranda Priestly tells Anne Hathaway’s clueless assistant that she didn’t really choose her own blue top.
After rehearsing the particular shade’s journey from an Oscar de la Renta collection to the department store, she concludes: “It’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.”
The originators of the “Boriswave” concept, and many others like it, are basically the Miranda Priestlys of contemporary rightwing politics.
There are various overlapping designations: once known as the alt-right in an American context, now sometimes called the new right, or the “post-organisational far right”, Topinka says that he tends to refer to “the extremely online right”. They’re a hard group to pin down precisely, but the median member of the tribe operates somewhere between Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage: less openly hooliganistic than the first, less interested in mainstream approval than the second, and more internet literate than either.
“The boundaries between the different factions are often blurred,” Topinka said. “They benefit from that incoherence – it is more confusing for others to identify what’s extremely far-right, and what’s not.”
They are immersed in meme culture, often amused by the “daring” use of openly racist language, and enthusiastic in their disdain at attempts to anthropologise them like this one. “A lot of it is a game for them,” Topinka said. “The people who are really good at it are able to tap into what these subcultural actors are talking about, and boil it down for a broader audience. They see themselves as seeding mainstream conversation – as advanced players in a game that normies don’t even realise they’re playing. And they’re sort of right.”
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Where did this phrase start to be used?
In the past, the extremely online right tended to congregate in relatively private spaces like 4chan, where a term like this might be workshopped away from the eyes of a general audience. That didn’t happen here.
“They used to have to spend a long time cultivating this discourse before it trickled into the mainstream,” Topinka said. “But it’s happening more and more quickly. A massive part of it is that X is now completely different to what it was, and nobody is too far-right to be allowed an account – so it happens there just as much.”
He refers to this as the “ambient extremism” effect: the idea that radical rhetoric now saturates widely used online spaces to the extent that those exposed to it may not even notice – and thoroughly destabilising the idea of a set of shared principles from which all mainstream political actors begin.
The earliest extant use of “Boriswave”, or “Boris wave”, came in June last year, when X user @maxtempers – who attentive subscribers might remember from this piece about the controversy over Motability – described someone as being “so thick he must be from the Boris wave”. (A possible prior use has been deleted.) The phrase caught on, and in September another prominent anonymous X user, @kunley_drupka, published a long post titled “WHAT IS THE ‘BORISWAVE’?”, giving the example of “groups of Africans standing or walking along country lanes in the middle of nowhere”.
Even as the term picked up momentum on X, it was being used on 4chan’s /pol forum, often appearing alongside egregiously racist epithets. “A lot of it is about euphemism,” Topinka said. “It can be a knowing replacement – ‘I saw a Boriswaver the other day’.” A search finds multiple examples of this kind: “Every quaint village … has a Boriswaver at the bus stop”; “Boriswaver had to ask the white council worker what the numbers of my address were on my ID.” But in more visible spaces, that kind of rhetoric was mostly excised.
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How did it move into the mainstream?
“Boriswave” first appeared in a national newspaper in the Daily Telegraph last October. A Wikipedia page was set up in December, and while it has since been removed, the debate among anonymous editors about its validity sheds light on the way that distancing from the original sources becomes crucial to mainstream credibility: “With all due respect to Max Tempers, you can’t just invent a phrase from whole cloth, make a Wikipedia article for it, and then say “omg this is spreading”,” one says.
But it wasn’t long until it really was. The Wikipedia page’s brief existence was reported by Politics UK, an account with more than 370,000 followers that often picks up trending stories from the online right and others. Reform’s Zia Yusuf used it in December; the term also made its way to rightwing online publications like The Critic and the Pimlico Journal.
Thus laundered, and with a huge boost from X’s tendency under Elon Musk to amplify material emanating from the online right, the term appeared with increasing frequency in mainstream outlets: it was in national newspapers six times in January, 15 times in May, and 42 times in the past month. It has even made its way to parliament: two Labour MPs, Tom Hayes and Connor Naismith, have used it to criticise the Conservatives’ record on immigration.
Notably, it has now appeared in the Daily Mail for the first time, in an opinion piece by Nigel Farage trailing yesterday’s speech – no small concession for a newspaper which counts the former prime minister as a columnist. Whereas it used to at least be outsourced to “critics” of the government, it is now generally assumed to be so readily understood that it gets no distancing descriptor at all.
Max Tempers noted this shift himself yesterday. Referring to his post from last June, he wrote: “Just fifteen months ago. Incredible how it’s blown up. Wikipedia determined it not well-known enough just in December last year because we could only link it to a couple of Critic articles.”
What all of this suggests, Topinka said, is that “once it becomes a broad enough conversation, you can say that people are talking about it. And then it’s quotable in a mainstream way. Part of it is that a lot of politicians and people who write about politics are still seeing X as some kind of proxy for public conversation. That was never fully true, and it’s even less true now.”
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What does it tell us about the direction of rightwing politics?
This is a case study, not an anomaly: the same pattern was evident in the discourse around online grooming gangs turbocharged by Elon Musk; the phrase “military age males”, cultivated online, frequently quoted at the Tommy Robinson rally last week, and deployed by the Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn and others; and the antisemitic “cultural Marxism” trope infamously picked up by former home secretary Suella Braverman. There are other examples besides. Among the extremely online right, this is often described as the “posting to policy pipeline”.
All of this is, of course, catnip to Reform because of the way it suggests that the entire political mainstream, including the Conservative party, is in the same useless place – a feature made particularly clear by the connection to Boris Johnson in this case. To others, it may appear trivial – an etymological note about a phrase which has lost any such valence by the time it appears on the front pages. But that is to forget how deeply choices about language shape the thinking that arises from them.
“All of this has reshaped what gets treated as the common sense framing for mainstream conversation,” Topinka said. “The extremist origins get forgotten, but the narrative remains.”
What else we’ve been reading
Paul Laity’s long essay for the London Review of Books about the aftermath of the preventable death of his daughter Martha, and the colossal undertaking of seeking accountability from those who failed her, is an unforgettable piece of work: controlled, masterful in its grasp of detail, and utterly enraging. Archie
Hundreds of bodies could have been buried at a mass grave discovered in Egypt’s Sinai province by human rights campaigners. My Guardian colleague Kaamil Ahmed has the exclusive on the horrifying findings. Aamna
Our most valuable resource isn’t time, it’s attention. With so many addictive apps hijacking our attention and the need to be more productive ever-increasing, this interview shows us how to take back control and is well worth a read. Aamna
Tim Dowling made a bunch of extinct desserts to mark their precipitous decline. The results are very enjoyable, even if you have no intention of copying him. RIP the flummery. Archie
We live in an era when so much can be achieved so quickly by the press of a button, Moya Sarner writes, but the first step to implementing profound personal growth is to accept that many things do not work that way. Aamna
Sport
Football | Ousmane Dembélé and Aitana Bonmatí were the winners at the Ballon D’Or ceremony in Paris, while Sarina Wiegman won the award for best coach after taking England to triumph at Euro 2025.
Formula One | Christian Horner has formally left the Red Bull Formula One team with what is understood to be an £80m settlement after his dismissal in July as team principal.
Rugby | Ticket sales for the Women’s Rugby World Cup are more than triple the previous tournament in New Zealand, with more than 440,000 tickets sold for the tournament.
The front pages
The Guardian leads with “Outrage as Farage threatens mass deportation of legal immigrants”. The i follows the same story with “New Farage plan to deport migrants would split families who live in Britain”, while the Times reports “Farage faces questions on migrant benefit sums”. The Mirror looks at the effect the scheme could have on the health system, under the headline “The NHS wrecker”.
The Financial Times says “Nvidia poised for $100bn deal to take big OpenAI stake”. The Telegraph has “Reeves told to launch tax raid on pensioners”. Finally the Mail asks “Will the King now banish Fergie?”.
Today in Focus
Does Labour’s new home secretary signal a harder line on immigration?
Shabana Mahmood is already making headlines in her new role. But who is she and what motivates her?
Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
A trio of leopard sharks in New Caledonia has made marine science history after they were recorded mating in a “threesome”. It is the first time the globally endangered species has been documented in a mating sequence, providing valuable knowledge to aid conservation efforts.
Dr Hugo Lassauce, a researcher at the University of the Sunshine Coast, recorded the event while surveying the leopard shark population off the coast of Nouméa. While snorkelling, he “spotted a female with two males grasping her pectoral fins on the sand below me”.
“I thought ‘Something is going to happen – I’m staying right here with my GoPros’. An hour later, it finally happened.”
The menage a trois was over in 110 seconds: The first male took 63 seconds, while the second was done in 47 seconds. “Then the males lost all their energy and lay immobile on the bottom while the female swam away actively,” Lassauce said.
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
