Politics: flying false colours

By Richard North - January 4, 2024

One of the first tasks confronting me yesterday was to view a Youtube video  of a well-attended Reform UK press conference – not something I pursued with any relish.

First impressions, confirmed by a number of reports, are that Richard Tice – party leader for the moment – held the conference in a Westminster hotel under false pretences. Most, if not all of the journos in the room expected Nigel Farage to be there.

As we now know, those who held such expectations were disappointed and the whole room had to make do with Tice pretending they had come to see him perform, announcing his non-policies and his choice of co-party deputy Ben Habib as the candidate for the Wellingborough by-election, the date of which has yet to be settled.

Of all the accounts of this embarrassing episode, John Crace was on the money, with his article headed: “Where’s Nige? We were promised the organ grinder, not the monkey”, dismissing the conference as “an exercise in collective time-wasting”.

It was Crace who gave the game away, revealing that Tice had promised the 50 or so hacks who had made the trip to the hotel that there would be “special guests” in attendance, prompting the assumption that this meant Farage. But, says Crace, “the special guests turned out to be even more anonymous than Dickie Tice. Imagine that”.

Perhaps by way of revenge, many of the papers whose hacks had been enticed to the show offered less than complimentary articles about the party. In fact, The Times goes for three pieces, one which echoes Crace.

This is headed: “Only one question for the Reform leader: Where’s Nigel Farage?”, and it notes that “Richard Tice has grown so used to fielding questions about whether the former Brexit Party leader will return, he supplies the answers in advance”.

For the record, Tice explained that it was too early to say where Nigel was. “Nigel is the master of political timing,” the paper records him saying, summarising his position as: “if he is going to come back it sadly wasn’t going to be today, or maybe ever, but he didn’t really know”.

The second, more substantial piece is an analysis, addressing the issue of how the Reform party could disrupt the next UK general election, with the Tories having described the party as a bigger threat than Labour in the 2024 election, especially if it fields a candidate in every seat.

But the real meat is reserved for the editorial, which expresses the view that Reform UK is “playing politics”. To be taken seriously, it says, “the Conservatives’ tormentors on the right must do more than castigate others”.

At its most constructive, the piece concludes, “politics is not a soap opera, but the navigation of difficult decisions in pursuit of the common good”. It then closes with the sentiment: “Although Reform may well have identified some of what is broken in Britain, it has so far done almost nothing to indicate a plan for how to fix it”.

The Guardian in its own editorial is more pointed, calling Reform “a cult of perpetual grievance with unearned influence”, arguing that the “ideological convergence with the former Brexit party reflects Conservative failure to take the business of government seriously”.

That is as maybe but the editorial goes on to say that Tice’s election agenda “is a wild mishmash of nationalist and libertarian demands – reckless tax and spending cuts; rejection of any effort to battle climate change; reducing net immigration to zero”.

One might expect the Guardian to dislike the agenda but it is so blinded by its dislike that it misses the substantive point that Reform’s policy offerings are so shallow that a cockroach would have trouble getting its feet wet wading through them.

Yet comment was bouncing around on social media all afternoon yesterday, and the hacks would have done well to read Pete’s piece, where he notes that the problem with the alternative parties is that they’ve no real idea how to do politics.

Echoing The Times, he reflects that we all agree that “the establishment is shit and change needs to happen”. But just starting a new party to replace the existing ones doesn’t take us any further forward – unless that party has a real product to sell to the electorate.

“One of the reasons Farage-era Ukip was shit”, Pete says, “was because it didn’t have any vision or any coherent policy agendas to speak of. Sure, they had a shopping list of things they wanted to see (among them Brexit), but that’s just tinkering with individual strands of policy. They never developed a vision of post-Brexit Britain or a destination point”.

“Consequently”, he adds, “leaving the EU was a dead end for the party. Once that was done, all they could do is piss and whine about Brexit not resembling the Brexit they never bothered to define”. And that continues with Richard Tice and Reform. He continues:

We know they want to scrap net-zero and to lower immigration, as do I, but what’s the big idea to take us forward? What is the underlying philosophy? If you don’t have an underlying philosophy, you’re going to have your party spokesmen making things up on the fly to suit the moment. You’re then all over the shop – not rooted in anything, and not promoting anything tangible. We can identify bad policies and vow to change them, but that’s enough. We want fundamental reform.

All of this invokes in me a weary sense of déjà vu. In my years with Ukip, sitting opposite Farage at the same desk in the cramped offices in the European Parliament at Strasbourg, I implored him many times to support a comprehensive policy document to cement the party’s intellectual credentials.

I wanted him to use some of the MEPs’ expenses and the resource of the European Parliament to set up a think tank producing policy papers, and I even prepared for him some examples of what could be done. But he would have none of it, insisting that every spare penny be devoted to fighting Westminster elections, the fruit of which was to make him a seven-time loser as he failed that many times to win a seat.

There was no question on my being on my own – others wanted to see the party develop an intellectual base. Long after I had left the party, for the 2010 general election, the party eventually managed to produce a comprehensive policy document (on the lines of the renowned Tory party election guide), but Farage famously disowned it, having admitted to not having read it.

So here we are again. Beyond the dog-whistles, there is no serious (or any discernible) intellectual base to the policy offerings from Reform. In the unlikely event that they got close to power, they would be just as clueless as the rest of the parties as to what to do about the pressing problems of our age.

The party is showing exactly the same defects that were presented by Ukip under Farage. And, as Tice admits to being in close contact with the former Ukip leader – even to the extent of aping some of his mannerisms – I’ve no doubt that this dilettante approach is heavily influenced by Farage.

However, I suspect that Tice would need little persuading to take this approach. From what I know of him, he strikes me as an Olympic-class lightweight who, like Farage, will march his troops to the top of the hill and down again, without achieving anything more than to aid the defeat of the Tories. Despite the Telegraph’s wet dreams, it will never be mainstream.

There are some who believe that destroying the Tories, in itself, is a worthy aim and sufficient unto the day. But, in what I labelled the “Ukip effect” in 2010, where the party cost the Tories seats by robbing them of their (often slender) majorities, the effect this time round could be to give the game to Labour in what Tice calls “Starmergeddon”.

Not in any known universe is there any likelihood of Reform winning sufficient (or any) seats at the general to take a significant role in Westminster, but it seems from the Independent that Farage, if he takes control of Reform, is still pursuing his original 1990s electoral paradigm.

Using Ukip, he wanted to take seats from the Tories and split the party with the (then) Eurosceptic rump joining him to form a reconstituted Tory party – of which he would be leader – creating what the Independent describes as “one populist nationalist hard-right bloc”.

The ambition, then and now, is pie in the sky but, imbued with that vision, Farage has never felt he needs to develop an independent intellectual base. Essentially parasitic, he would simply co-opt the policies of the Tory Right and implement them.

For as long as Reform has any links with Farage, therefore, and Tice remains under his spell, the party is flying under false colours. It cannot and never will offer serious (or any) reform and will simply remain another platform for Farage’s already failed paradigm.

The thing about Farage though, is that while most of those who know him and worked with him in the past will have nothing to do with him, there is always a plentiful supply of fresh meat on which he can work his charms, sufficient to make a credible show before they too become disillusioned, and he has to start all over again.

Tragically, these people have yet to learn but, as the media have already sussed, Reform is going nowhere in a hurry. Whatever the question, it isn’t the answer.