Last Thursday, I spent 20 joyous minutes standing outside an office block in Northamptonshire, loudly arguing with a very wealthy former Tory donor who is standing – for another party – in next week’s Wellingborough byelection. We debated such issues as immigration, knife crime and the dire state of the NHS, before he told me what he thought of the politicians he used to give his money to.
The Tories, he said, were now hopelessly held back by people who were “remainers” and “large statists”, and deserved nothing less than extinction. “The reason I joined Reform UK,” he concluded, “was to obliterate the Conservative party.”
The Wellingborough contest, let us not forget, was triggered by the fall of the Tory Brexiteer Peter Bone, who was suspended from the House of Commons over allegations of bullying and sexual misconduct, and then removed thanks to thousands of local people signing a recall petition. By way of adding insult to injury, the new Tory candidate seems to be his partner. If the Conservatives are defeated there on 15 February, it will be at the hands of the Labour party – whose likely win in the contest happening on the same day in Kingswood, on the outer edge of the Bristol suburbs, could fuse with the Wellingborough result to compound the government’s air of terminal decay. But that is not the only story that is unfolding.
Reform UK is the latest creation of the people – Nigel Farage and the property multi-millionaire Richard Tice, chiefly – who played a huge role in Brexit and its aftermath, via such vehicles as Ukip, Leave.EU and the short-lived Brexit party. In Kingswood, they are soft-pedalling, reportedly aiming merely at getting the party’s deposit back. But, in the somewhat forlorn and troubled patch of England I visited last Thursday, things are very different.
The party’s candidate in Wellingborough is Ben Habib, who also made his fortune dealing in property, and energetically endorses his party’s pledges to “cut income tax” and “ditch net zero” – and, despite the fact that he was born and raised in Pakistan, the idea of “net-zero immigration”. A great deal of money seems to have been spent on his leaflets and mail-drops. The aim, according to party insiders, is for Habib to get at least 10% of the vote. For the Tories, this would heighten fears of Reform splitting their base of support elsewhere. And in the eyes of Reform’s prime movers, it would be a decisive step in the long march towards somehow replacing them.
Which gets us into Reform UK’s political theology. As far as Farage, Tice and their allies see it, the Tories have become a left-inclined party of net zero, high taxation and large-scale immigration. But in the Conservative flock, Reform UK’s leaders see people who would sooner or later join them. One insider I recently spoke to thinks that this description extends to “10% of Tory peers, 15% of their MPs, 40% of their councillors, and 60% or 70% of members”. In that sense, Reform UK has already achieved a kind of political cuckooing, planting sleeper agents in the party it wants to destroy.
A glimpse of what the party’s key figures call a new “centre-right” politics came with the 2016 referendum and the coalition of voters soon assembled by Boris Johnson, which they think they may eventually be able to put back together. But, in the meantime, they are chasing the proverbial tipping point. They think it may arrive if Farage decides to stand for parliament in the Essex constituency of Clacton. He has previously lost seven parliamentary contests. But in this new seat’s mixture of past support for Ukip and grinding poverty, there could be the key to a small but crucial breakthrough.
For now, he and his accomplices are striding around with a renewed sense of purpose – which is quite something to behold, given that their most successful project has been such an epochal disaster. Farage himself says Brexit has “failed”; it’s very telling that if you ask Reform UK people to explain why leaving the EU has been all harm and no benefits, their usual fondness for slogans and clarion-calls deserts them, and they seek refuge in impenetrable arcana about silent Tory betrayals on trading rules, customs regulations and the like. But it is some token of the bizarre state of British politics that none of this seems to matter.
Reform UK has enough sympathisers and supporters in the rightwing press to gloss over its evasions and hypocrisies. The arrival of GB News – on which Farage has his own show, four nights a week – is part of the same picture. And, for different reasons, both the Conservatives and Labour rule out even starting to oppose and undermine this new political arrival, so it gets a free pass. As Farage and co well know, lots of Tories are their de facto allies. Even the Conservatives who are hostile dare not attack them, because doing so would not only annoy and offend many of their own voters, but get dangerously close to shining light on Brexit’s follies, and thereby highlighting the sins of their own party. Labour , meanwhile, seems to see Reform UK as a problem only for the other side – which is what it thought about Ukip, until it became clear that it was something much more threatening.
All this plays into a general sense of a high-profile party being left completely unchallenged, and doing as it pleases. Last week, the Financial Times revealed that the party had accepted a £10,000 donation from the hedge-fund tycoon Crispin Odey after an investigation by that newspaper had brought forth serious allegations of sexual misconduct, which he denies. When asked if the party had been aware of them, Tice said he did not “read the FT every day of the week. It’s a trendy lefty newspaper.” In the Rochdale byelection, which will happen on 29 February, the party’s candidate will be the constituency’s former MP Simon Danczuk, who was last heard of when he was suspended from the Labour party after it was revealed he sent sexually explicit messages to a 17-year-old girl. There is an unspoken sense here of something unsettlingly Trump-ish.
Meanwhile, the story about Reform’s often overlooked effects on Westminster grinds on. From the Rwanda bill to the so-called war on woke, there is an array of Tory stances and policies at least partly motivated by a flailing quest to somehow keep the Reform threat at bay. As the Conservatives are continually pulled to the right, moreover, Labour thinks it sees proof of an essentially reactionary electorate, and often follows suit.
This is the unfathomable luxury of Reform UK’s position. For the time being, even if its quest to completely remake British politics remains a fantasy, its leaders and funders may as well carry on as they are. What, after all, is more gratifying and pleasurable than power without responsibility?
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
