15 JANUARY 2025 | OPINION
The author, Tony Bolton, is a freelance journalist.
Reform UK has recently suffered its first major hiccup – one that has been dealt with swiftly and decisively, simply by staying on-message and by Farage sticking to his principles on Tommy Robinson. In effect, the first test on the road to winning the 2029 election is over. One can already sense the media cycle moving away from Reform’s successes and towards Labour’s failures on the grooming gangs, Tulip Siddiq and the Truss-tier economic meltdown, which the mainstream media is trying to sidestep.
The next few months are therefore ones of consolidation, and perhaps a bit of a breather from what must have been an extremely difficult, if rewarding, Christmas period. Having attended one of their recent conferences, I think this consolidation will require a firm approach by the party to continue.
Firstly, any member of Reform genuinely calling for Farage’s removal ought to be seriously considering their position. I’d argue for outright suspensions, were it not for the fact that the issue has currently blown over and it would reignite it to start letting heads roll.
YouGov has Reform on 25% of the vote in their most recent poll – a fact that is never mentioned by such malicious actors, because their focus is simply on scoring points within their own circles of equally deranged people on X. I’m not naming names, but one might well be picturing a few people in one’s head already.
This is alongside the recent rumours that Kemi Badenoch, as Leader of the Opposition, is setting up an ‘anti-Farage unit’ at CCHQ. Judging by CCHQ’s alleged competence levels in plenty of circles, this may well guarantee a Reform victory in 2029.
I’m very glad I was not among the people moaning about Ben Habib getting the sack, and it looks like he’s doing everything he can to feed the nonsensical media narrative of ‘Reform infighting’. This infighting is nowhere to be found at the conferences or elsewhere – the recently suspended councillors in Derby were reported as ‘resigning’, despite not being Reform councillors for well over three weeks.
It seems that any ‘infighting’ is coming from people who are not actually from Reform, but want to turn it into something completely different. The media is really struggling to put out any actually negative stories about Reform, and it’s clear that people have an interest in stoking the flames of tension in order to produce something that just isn’t there.
Farage and his team want Reform to remain a tight-knit organisation, and I don’t blame them. Behind-the-scenes squabbles practically ruined the last 14 years of Conservative governance, and they continue to plague the sprawling party structure. Above all, it is just safer and easier to keep it like this.
Farage has been put in a situation where one of his MPs was being used as a rallying point for people dissatisfied with his leadership for not being ‘based’ enough, endorsing remigration or cosying up to Tommy Robinson. Publicly, Rupert Lowe didn’t do anything to elicit this, and yet he has been thrust into the crosshairs by his own ‘supporters’ in such a way that guarantees he will be guided slowly out of the limelight – he has been, for the most part, absent from most of the regional conferences.
For no reason other than their clear inexperience in actual Westminster politics, certain people have practically guaranteed that Lowe will take a long walk off a short pier very soon. The following tweets will summarise this better than I can:
I’m going to have to go against the grain here and say that excessively democratising Reform is not the right way to go. Too often, in Toryland, elections for provincial posts get in the way of local electioneering and the broader national issues.
I hope Reform members will understand that whoever the constituency Chair is, candidate for Parliament etc., is not the only pressing issue – nor even the most pressing. All that is required is 326+ Reform MPs, and the leaner the local organisations that select and elect them, the better. This is a difficulty that European parties can circumvent by having a more proportional voting system, greatly decreasing the need for the ground game.
Geert Wilders’ PVV in the Netherlands has only one legal member – Geert Wilders. Poland’s right-wing Law and Justice Party have only 30,000 members and membership is by application. The AfD in Germany has 34,000, the National Rally in France (allegedly) has 100,000, and the Brothers of Italy have 130,000.
Complaints about ‘autocracy’ are unwarranted in light of the fact that the UK is a massive outlier in terms of how political parties work. Brits are also used to their party leaders being at best boring and at worst incompetent, so it is not surprising that they don’t understand how Farage can run things so centrally.
This is certainly something that Conservative members don’t quite seem to be able to grasp, but I think Reform members are capable of being a lot less self-centric. I have seen a lot of people aged 30-50 at Reform’s regional conferences, and the best way I can describe why this is positive is that these people are already a good way through living a life.
Democratisation has left the Conservatives and Labour beholden to internal factions, community and group interests, NIMBYism, and a stalling of the speed at which a party can operate. This is because they have overwhelmingly attracted pensioners and students, respectively – groups with a lot of time on their hands and a lot of opinions.
There’s a very fun drinking game to be had where one guesses whether a post is from someone’s, ah, gently ageing grandmother on Facebook, or a second-year uni student from roughly south of Birmingham. I have seen it far too often that local politics becomes a game of very low stakes but very inflated egos – hence the battles over selections, elections, and other nonsense.
Reform’s membership having other things to do with their lives might make it a little harder to organise leafleting, but it does mean that local politics won’t be the only thing keeping them sane. If people have a job and a family, they spend less time paying attention to the media cycle, and what they do pay attention to is more mainstream.
Who the local candidate is does matter in terms of their suitability for office, and especially given that such a person could well end up as a Minister – if today’s polls are to be believed. But as for the Reform electorate, these people will just be remembering what Nigel has said on the TV lately, rather than recounting their gripes against the local candidate from the last branch meeting.
In summary: naysayers, go to Hell. Reform just needs to stay the course, because when you’re above 20% of the national vote share, you must be doing quite a lot right.
