Farage floats El Salvador prison deal and rules on Restore Britain pact

Nigel Farage has given a press conference days before a by-election in Clacton, where he is defending the seat he won for Reform UK. The Sun reports he is in talks with El Salvador to deport foreign criminals to its prisons - a model borrowed from the Central American country's mass-incarceration strategy. The Express carries the same story: Farage's plan for foreign offenders serving time in British jails.

GB News says Farage has ruled out any deal with the Restore Britain party unless its co-founder Rupert Lowe expels another co-founder - an internal dispute on the aligned right now playing out in public. The Mirror runs two pieces: one covering the press conference live, the other an opinion column calling Farage's Clacton candidacy a clown show.

The El Salvador proposal is statecraft as signal. The country's president, Nayib Bukele, built a vast prison and filled it with gang members under a state of emergency - a policy admired on parts of the right for its bluntness and loathed elsewhere for its disregard of due process. Whether Britain could lawfully deport convicts to a third country for incarceration, or whether El Salvador would accept them, is unstated. The idea's function is rhetorical: it says the problem is solvable if the will exists, and that the current system's constraints are a choice.

The Restore Britain question is smaller but tells you where the fragmentation sits. The aligned right has two parties competing for the same voters; any pact requires one side to yield. Farage is setting terms publicly, which means he expects Lowe to move or the talks to collapse for cause.

What to watch: the by-election result in Clacton. If Farage holds the seat, the proposals harden into platform; if he loses it, they were only ever talk.