Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, is in the US where he is due to attend an election day party at Donald Trump’s Florida home in Mar-a-Lago. In an interview with the Telegraph, he has said that Trump, who is a friend, should accept defeat if he loses the presidential election. (See 10am.)

But Farage said he expected Trump to win. And he said he was particularly excited by the prospect of a Trump victory because Trump has said he will put Elon Musk, the Tesla founder and X owner, in charge of a government efficiency commission. Farage said that Musk would slash government spending, and that this would provide a blueprint for what Reform UK would propose for Britain. He told the Telegraph:

"This is the sexy bit: Elon comes in and takes a knife to the deep state. Just like when he bought Twitter he sacked 80 per cent of the staff.

There are going to be mass lay-offs, whole departments closing and I’m hoping and praying that’s the blueprint for what we then do on our side of the pond.

Because that’s what Reform UK believes in - that we’re over-bureaucratised and none of it works. This assault on the bureaucratic state is the thing that’s really exciting.

They’ll all be gone. They’ll all be fired. Why do we need Whitehall with all these useless, ghastly Marxists? Universities have all become madrassas of Marxism. The whole thing is appalling.

Trump’s first term taking on the deep state was impossible because they had no idea how it worked; he finished up with a lot of people around him who weren’t supporters and who were imposed upon him.

They didn’t know an American president has the power to appoint 3,000 people. This time they have been working really hard on that for 18 months."

Rightwingers regularly complain that the state is too large (Kemi Badenoch believes this too), but it’s unusual to argue that Musk’s management of Twitter has been a success. Since he took over, it has lost three quarters of its value, equivalent to a sum worth around $30bn. That is partly because, after Musk sacked most of the moderators, people were less willing to use and advertise on the site.

It's been about eighteen months since I first spoke to a doctor about getting referred for an adult ADHD diagnosis. The doc said basically "I'll refer you but don't expect anything because you're holding down a job and a family so you must be doing alright". I had my screening interview back in June, and that was followed up by two web-based questionnaires, one for me, and one for an adult who was about when I was young. My mum filled this role. And it's off the back of this questionnaire that the NHS has discharged me, stating "ADHD is a life-long condition and we would expect differences to have been evident from an early age" and "[my] difficulties are not best explained by a diagnosis such as ADHD".

Unqualified as I am, I do still feel like based on my own research, ADHD is probably the best explanation for a bunch of stuff in my life. A guy I've spoken to a lot who has some experience says my lived experience sounds fairly textbook ADHD/autism as taking effect from my mid to late teens (when my mum wasn't about so much), but the NHS seem to have focused in on my early childhood in discharging me.

Has anyone here been discharged by the NHS before a diagnosis, and what did you do afterwards? Did you carry on and get diagnosed elsewhere? If that happens, do you have to cover the entire cost of prescriptions forever? Did you get diagnosed with something else? ngl this feels like a real blow and I don't really know what to do next.

I bought a Thule Crossover eight years ago and the zip on it has finally gone. Short of getting a local seamstress to fit a new zip, I think it's time for a new one, and am a bit tempted by the Thule Crossover 2 30l. Are Thule still good? Is there anything else of the same sort of size that I should be considering?

A by-election will be triggered in his Kingswood seat.

20th to 23rd December, 3rd to 9th January