The Reform stage in Birmingham is for razzle-dazzle and props; for Nadine Dorries, the latest Tory defector, and song. Beyond it, at the party’s first fringe, they grapple with things that are harder and less gaudy: how to turn a populist movement into a party of government in four years, or even two, because Reform are very optimistic about pessimism. Many here believe the government will collapse by 2027. The IMF will have to bail us out. We are £12 trillion in debt. Climate change is a myth. Covid gave cancer to a king.
As I sit among the crowd at an event called “Strengthening the Rule of Law”, an over-loud PA system cuts in to tell us, “Nigel Farage will be signing shirts [for £60]”. Otherwise, his party looks like the Tory Party in Sunday dress: Barbour jackets; Union Flag suits; cocktail dresses; a Panama hat, worn by a man telling a story of how he once met Nelson Mandela. On the first day, the More in Common think tank launches its analysis of Reform’s support base. Their current ceiling is 42% of the vote; supporters are socially conservative but tend Left on wealth distribution and nationalisation; most define politics as “broken”, and 59% of them do not believe Britain is a real democracy. New supporters are female, less radical and less online; those who have switched from both Labour and the Tories may switch back; potential supporters do not want the end of Net Zero, do not trust NHS reform, and fear Farage’s fondness for Donald Trump. Reform’s real dilemma is: as their coalition grows, their vulnerability grows with it. Voters want different things, and triumph is hard.
At “How to Reverse the Boriswave and Clean up the Other Parties’ Mess”, I watch the pollster James Frayne hurt his audience by telling them the truth. “Prepare for the first six months of a Reform government being a complete shambles,” he says. “Getting into government is hard enough, but actually being in government is more difficult.” He rebukes Reform’s dreamers and culture warriors: that is, much of the activist base here. “The party cannot rely on bullshit sound bites and ‘everything will be alright on a day,’ and ‘we’re just going to try hard, and we’ll face everybody down. We’ll fight people we don’t like’”. Reform must also, he says, “grow up out of this sort of tub-thumping stuff that sounds great somewhere like this” — he waves his arm at the room that sometimes hosts Crufts — “but when you get into government, the public will despise you within six months, unless you’re getting stuff done”.
I suspect it is no coincidence that Frayne is sharing a stage with Matthew Goodwin, the GB News presenter and tub-thumper who looks like an angry Lego man. Goodwin says the British state and the civil service — “let’s just say ‘the Blob’” — are going “to go to war with this movement. Including the Lords.” His gut instinct, he says, is that “they are just going to use every trick in the book to slow [Reform] down”. Expectation management will be essential, he says. But first win the battle, “where actually you do need a bit of tub thumping”.
Reform is not being propelled into government on a wave of joy, but on a wave of fear, and the fearful are combustible. Voters look to Farage on immigration, Frayne says, but they are nervous about a “perceived lack of competence, a perceived sense of extremism — less around Farage but around the margins of the party — [and] also a pervasive, to use a slightly and politically incorrect term, madness. There’s more than a whiff of eccentricity about the party.” It is true: Farage compares the UK to North Korea, which is absurd, and many activists are in costume, as if wearing their grievances. They love hats. But Reform is not the first political party to be held hostage by its own activists. It happened to Labour under Corbyn; his new project Your Party is the next instalment. At heart, Reform have done the same: this is the vengeance of the Tories on themselves, though others will get hurt.
“Reform is not being propelled into government on a wave of joy, but on a wave of fear, and the fearful are combustible.”
Frayne cites Liz Truss; her budget initially polled OK. “When it unravelled within five days the public were apoplectic, and they have been burned so badly that they now know that they need to look for detail.” The other parties don’t have the answer either: “If you put a microphone in front of Yvette Cooper’s face, it’s laughable. It’s clear that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. So, what we might end up with next time is a real sense [that] nobody can sort this stuff out, and at that point, it makes the next election very difficult to predict.” And the one after that, even harder. I used to think about Britain after a Boris Johnson government. Now I think about Britain after a Nigel Farage government.
Some in Reform, though, fear anything that feels like conventional politics — including detailed polling — because to collude with convention is to lose yourself in it. Zia Yusuf, head of Reform’s DOGE, and the party’s most prominent figure after Richard Tice, the deputy leader, and Farage himself, says: “Certainly, while I was chairman, we never commissioned a single focus group. Our focus group was talking to voters on the doorstep.” Yusuf talks about politics less as a national project than a personal journey, though this tendency is hardly singular to Reform. He walks his anecdotes from stage to stage, the cult of individualism on legs.
Reform supporters talk about betrayal the way drug addicts talk about heroin because they have the same sickness they accuse the Left of: over-dramatisation. Boris Johnson — who Dorries wants to join Reform to smash Labour — betrayed them. The Fabian Society, higher education, the civil service, the media, the judiciary, the RNLI, which plucks migrants from the sea, and the Labour Party all betrayed them; the Motability scheme and toothbrush coordinators in schools betrayed them; soon the House of Lords will betray them too. Nothing is sacred but their aggrievement.
They want to send illegal immigrants to the Falkland Islands; they would ban public sector workers from striking because they think there will be a General Strike within two weeks of a Reform government; they want to abolish MPs’ expenses, and therefore MPs’ offices.
I listen to James Orr, a professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge, and a major intellectual figure in Reform. He looks like a Merchant Ivory hero and talks like a romantic. “With every Government scandal, Reform gets stronger,” he says. “With every Conservative hypocrisy, Reform gets stronger.” At some point, momentum may turn into hubris — only a third of voters think Reform will actually improve the country — but not yet.
I hear stories of hiring thousands of workers — a parallel civil service — but, four years from an election, they hesitate to commit to policy: it is always painful easing a dream into reality. Richard Tice is asked what three things he would do on his first day as Chancellor. Tice, who mimics Farage’s cadences these days, replies that he can’t know the state of government finances; the civil service — the Blob — is not helpful. Essentially, he doesn’t answer the question. Wait for the manifesto, and until then, blame the media.
But some, at least, are hungry for facts: you cannot expect people who want their country back to wait forever. Last year, I am told, members, “spoke of nothing but immigration”. This year, according to one political analyst, “not one mentions immigration”. He thinks Reform know they have won this argument. Now they are talking about “gilt yields, the national debt and welfare. Some people are getting a bit frustrated. ‘We like Nigel, but that [his speech] was all fluff, really. Where’s the plan?’” As far as I can see from the fringe, it is this: tax cuts will be paid for by cutting waste, not public services. Jam for everyone you like, then; no jam for those you don’t.
“They need,” one man tells me, “To flesh out their economic policies: to show their workings-out. Because there is an inconsistency.” He adds: “They cannot be all things to all people”.
“I don’t think the depth is there,” another man tells me. “This is not an intellectual party”.
Even so, the next day, the historian David Starkey and Jacob Rees-Mogg, both Tory exhibitionists, headline an event called “How Can Reform Succeed in Office?” They are here to counsel crowds with their wisdom: this is how bad things are. Starkey says, “The thing that really matters is to understand: we’re all conservatives. What [Tony] Blair did was fundamentally — to use a technical phrase — to fuck Britain up. Our job, ladies and gentlemen, in another technical phrase, is to unfuck Britain”.
It will not be easy. “My great fear,” Starkey says, “is, at the moment you are riding to victory. There is simply no doubt about this, but there’s a terrible danger.” Starkey’s melodrama stirs the room. The reason Keir Starmer won, he says, “was simply they [the electors] got tired of Jacob [Rees-Mogg]. It took 14 years to get tired of Jacob. Jacob is endlessly entertaining.” Rees-Mogg does not flinch. If Reform win, he says, “and a Nigel-led government does not succeed in changing things within six months,” he fears the nation will be, “so angry that we will then be in real, real trouble. There will be nowhere else for them to go.”
The plan, Starkey says, is this: appoint five hundred new peers to the Lords. “We will have to neutralise the Lords, otherwise all of what we want to do will get lost in a Sargasso Sea of amendments”. I like his phrasing. Jean Rhys’s novel The Wide Sargasso Sea is about the first Mrs Rochester of Jane Eyre: the raving subconscious of every human being. “We have to be ready with both a blunderbuss and a scalpel. You need the big and the precise, and without that, we will lose.”
“What Reform has got to be is what Disraeli said,” he tells us. “‘The Conservative Party is a national party, or it is nothing’”. Starkey looks around at the sea of faces that look like Tories, and I think he is right: these are, at heart, just angry Tories. This is evidence of both a glut — in communication and entitlement — and an absence here: of compassion, and of hope. “I would hope,” Rees-Mogg says, “that everybody in the Conservative Party is as conservative as everybody in this room”.
“We’re not,” a man shouts at him, but Rees-Mogg laughs the heckle off, and it was the only fringe event which brought the people to their feet with cheers. Despite the pollsters and the Tory grandees attempting to finesse the brand, this is a race to the end: to a Britain none of us yet knows. I leave thinking that Reform is the Tory split over Brexit, reanimated yet again, and its bloodiest manifestation yet.
