It’s not hard to pick out where the power lies at any Reform party event. Just check out the middle-aged men with a tan. Richard Tice, Nigel Farage and David Bull all look like they’ve spent a suspiciously long time on the sunbed. Or maybe they’ve got a bulk offer on spray tan. Either way, you have to blink several times when you see them in the flesh. The glare is oppressive. Welcome to the party with heavy 1970s Benidorm vibes.
Nigel Farage had insisted that when he first booked Glaziers Hall near London Bridge, it had been to announce that he was planning to stand as a candidate in the election. Like a lot of things Our Nige says, this may be wishful thinking. Or a straight porky. Check out the timings. Rishi Sunak calls a general election last Wednesday. Nige books the room the next day. All set to go. Then changes his mind within days. Mmm. Maybe not.
Never mind. The venue was laid out as if for a wedding. Two rows of seats with a wide aisle down the middle. A little altar for the bride and groom with a hideous chandelier above. Photographers everywhere. More snappers than guests. Things got so meta at one stage that before the start, the photographers went through their own ritual of taking pictures of one another.
Enter the groom. From the back of the room, Tice made his way slowly up the aisle. No last-minute nerves for him. He was loving every second. A narcissist born for the small occasion. He paused to allow everyone to bask in his magnificence before taking his place on the stage.
Dicky T is completely unapologetic. When he looks at himself in the mirror each morning, he loves what he sees. He can’t believe his good luck to be so fantastically good-looking. And he wants us all to enjoy his beauty. Though weirdly, the person he now most resembles is Michael Douglas cosplaying Liberace. But it takes all sorts and we must try not to judge. If it makes Dicky happy, we should try to be happy for him.
Something else slightly odd has happened to Dicky. He’s started to morph into a Nige Mini Me. Not just with the tan, but in his speech patterns and mannerisms. Close your eyes and it’s become tricky to distinguish between the two. Perhaps it’s an expression of more than admiration. It’s one of a deep longing. He yearns to have just a tenth of the charisma of Our Nige. Imagine that.
“The country is in the grip of a deadly addiction,” Dicky began. “We are hooked on the drug of overseas cheap labour.” On every street corner you could find immigrants loitering, waiting to snap up the jobs that we Brits were too idle to do.
There was only one solution. Migrants Anonymous. A self-help fellowship dedicated to pushing foreigners back to where they came from. Step one: we admit we are powerless over our addiction and that our lives have become unmanageable. Step two: piss off back home.
That was really as close to coherence as Dicky T got. He tried to distinguish between cheap unskilled labour and well-paid skilled labour, without stopping to think that there was a third category of cheap skilled labour without which the country would fall apart. Even more than it has already. Dicky has a simplistic, binary view of the world. Scratch the surface and you might even conclude that his biggest failing is that he isn’t actually very bright.
On we went. The 80s and 90s had been our golden years. Had Dicky actually been awake in the 80s? Everything had been great. High wages, high growth, no foreigners. Then from about 2006, everything had gone wrong. Labour and the Tories had got us hooked on cheap labour. It didn’t occur to him to wonder that part of the problem might have been Brexit. British people just didn’t want to do the shit jobs for shit money, so when we kicked out the EU workers, fruit and veg were left to rot in the fields.
But Dicky had a plan. He would increase national insurance on foreign workers from 13.8% to 20%. This would raise £20bn and encourage businesses to pay British workers decent money. He didn’t seem to realise that it would also mean that prices went up by 6% so everyone would be just as broke.
Then came the arrival of the bride. From stage right appeared the ever more crocodilian Farage. Our Nige at least has the ability to sound slightly plausible even when he is talking complete bollocks. And bollocks it all was. The Tories and Labour were both socialists. This from a party that was just planning on hiking business taxes to the tune of £20bn. That’s the closest to socialism we’ve got in this election. Even a dog could see this. And it did. An adorable little terrier sitting in the audience began barking his disapproval.
“The number one priority of voters in this election is the cost of living,” said Our Nige. So the obvious way to tackle this was with a policy that would increase the cost of living. Presumably this was some kind of Marxist dialectic at work. Either way, Nige thought this was a stroke of genius. Dicky T could only look on in wonder.
But Our Nige was in his happy place. In front of the TV cameras without a trace of jeopardy. With no seat to win and none to lose, he was free to sound off to his heart’s content. It didn’t really matter what he said or did or if the policy was deeply flawed, because none of it was going to happen. Reform would be lucky to win a couple of seats at best. If you really want to be generous, this tandoori tax – even curry houses would have to pay – was a bargaining chip in the Tory party manifesto for 2029.
And sound off Our Nige did. When he had said he would be happy to do a deal with the Tories, he was being sarcastic. Really? It had sounded more like a flirtation. Dicky T should have thought of a prenup before the wedding. Read his lips. Just for today, there would be no deal with the Tories. Step three of MA. Foreigners were to blame for NHS waiting lists. Time to get rid of all of them, including doctors and nurses. British waiting lists for British people. That’s what everyone wanted.
And that was that. Dicky T and Nige had salons to go to. Those tans weren’t going to top themselves up.
