Politics: shambles at large

By Richard North - July 13, 2025

I don’t want to make this another post about Reform as it’s already a subject which I find intensely wearying. But since – much against my own preference – I covered the original story about James McMurdock in the Sunday Times, I can hardly avoid commenting on the follow-up.

Despite protestations of innocence by McMurdock, when I wrote my piece I thought the ST had him banged to rights, and that seemed more-or-less confirmed when the errant MP issued a further statement making his temporary suspension from Reform permanent, after taking “specialist legal advice from an expert in the relevant field”.

Nor was that the end of it, with a further report to the effect that McMurdock’s business affairs were to be examined by the Public Sector Fraud Authority after a referral by the Covid corruption commissioner, the official charged with pursuing fraud related to Covid loans and related matters.

With a parliamentary investigation hanging over him, for a technical breach of the rules in failing to declare his interest in one of the limited companies, in which name a loan had been taken out, that would have been bad enough but now, the Sunday Times has come up with a further, utterly damning piece.

The headline is a tad misleading as it declares that “James McMurdock took bank salary while claiming Covid loans”, but the real meat is in the sub-head which tells us that McMurdock was paid his bank salary through a company used to apply for the £50,000 Bounce Back loan that he secured.

It turns out that the company he used to secure that loan, JAM Financial Ltd, was being used as a “personal service company”, a conduit for receiving his salary from the Standard Charter Bank, which was employing him at the time.

This device is used to minimise tax and national insurance payments, and effectively means that the company’s sole function in this case was to provide the services of James McMurdock to Standard Charter, which paid his salary in the form of a fee to this company.

After about three years, this arrangement came to an end, to take account of tax reforms going through the system, whence McMurdock was placed on the payroll and paid directly, cutting out the company.

The ST points out that this change in status is likely to have meant JAM Financial received less money in 2020 for reasons that had nothing to do with Covid, yet the application form for Bounce Back loans stated: “Has your business been adversely impacted by Covid-19? If you answer no to this question, your business is not eligible for a Bounce Back Loan”.

Specifically, the form asked applicants to confirm that at least half of the business’s income was derived from its “trading activity”, something McMurdock must have done to get the loan, yet JAM’s debts never exceeded a few thousand pounds before the pandemic, while “tax and social security costs” were the main source of debt.

We are at this point reminded that, to qualify for a £50,000 Bounce Back loan, the company would have required an annual turnover of £200,000 – a level it had never reported in its history.

Although the newspaper doesn’t say so explicitly, we are now looking at something far more serious than a technical breach of some arcane rules – even less an error on the part of someone who was employed as a loans manager at the Standard Charter bank.

As a pointer to a possible future outcome, Reform whip Lee Anderson is calling for McMurdock to vacate his seat to allow a by-election to be held. Anderson says he had compiled a list of questions for his former MP about his “historic business practices”, to allow the party to “respond with accuracy and confidence”.

This might be the last opportunity McMurdock has to do something that he might be forced to do anyway if the Public Sector Fraud Authority decides to pass the matter on to the police.

This whole affair is, of course, excruciatingly embarrassing for Reform, although Farage is trying to make light of it, saying he cannot be held responsible for a failure of vetting, when he had not assumed the leadership of the party when McMurdock had been selected as a candidate.

Nevertheless, it does illustrate the difficulties in trying to recruit a large number of parliamentary candidates from scratch. And, if anything, the problems are likely to multiply over time as it is quite evident that the party is having a recruitment crisis, having announced that it was to introduce a less stringent vetting system and is asking would-be candidates who have previously been rejected to re-apply under the new rules.

The game was given away when a message was posted to Facebook by Reform’s East Thanet branch in Kent indicating one reason for the change was a need to generate enough candidates. According to the Guardian, the message – later removed – said council by-elections “are frequent events as councillors retire or stand down – it is important that all branches have prospective candidates lined up ready to go”.

This is by no means the full extent of the problem though. In Warwickshire County Council, the party has selected a teenager permanently to run the council, overseeing hundreds of millions of pounds of public spending.

This is George Finch, currently 18 years of age, who took over temporarily after the previous council leader, also a member of Reform, resigned just weeks after being elected. Now, we are told, he has been elected by his party to head a council which has £1.5 billion of assets and a budget of around £500 million.

Labour MPs have expressed dismay at this development, noting that Finch has no previous work experience yet is expected to take on such an onerous position.

As yet, though, it is not a done deal. While Reform is the largest party on the council but does not have an outright majority, meaning he will need the support of other parties, such as the Conservatives, when a vote is held later this month to officially appoint a new council leader. It remains to be seen how the other councillors will react.

Overall, though, this reflects the shambles in Reform at both central and local level. In parliament, Reform is now back down to four MPs, with two sitting as independents, while newly elected councillors are being shed by the party at local level, opening up gaps which, in the one case, is being filled by a teenager.

If I hadn’t written my piece yesterday about Reform’s putative role as a wrecking ball, I might now be writing about this no longer being a serious party. But if the aim is to collapse the political system, Farage is certainly going the right way about it.

The only fly in the ointment – or nigger in the woodpile, if you still prefer – is that the many serious problems affecting this nation demand strong and effective measures from a functional political party. The very last thing we need is a bunch of clueless amateurs blundering over the terrain, making a bigger mess than we have already.

However, the Telegraph is telling us that Labour is attempting to even the odds, with plans to change the voting system for mayors after Reform’s victories in two mayoral elections in May.

This is styled as a “radical reset”, with the Angela Rayner creature ditching the UK’s first-past-the-post voting system, replacing it at mayoral level by a European-style system known as the “supplementary vote”, where candidates are ranked by preference. This is a return to the pervious arrangements which were used to elect London mayor Sadiq Khan, as well as Ken Livingstone and the oaf Johnson.

Unsubstantiated rumours suggest that Rayner might go further, perhaps replacing the voting system for the general election with a form of proportional representation. Should such a ploy succeed, voters will be in for a treat, electing a thoroughly dishonest party instead of a band of rank amateurs.

Where there will be no choice, however, is in the nature of the government elected, where incompetence will be the dominant characteristic.