Reform’s conference was both dull and deranged

Speaker after speaker, including Farage, made the same lame jokes about Keir Starmer’s suits and glasses. It almost came as a relief when Ball attacked another Labour figure, foreign secretary David Lammy, who he implied was letting down Ukraine. That will be the same Ukraine that Ball’s party leader wants to force into accepting a peace deal with Vladimir Putin.

Reform lacks intellectual heft, properly costed policy and Farage aside, slick communicators. Chairman Zia Yusuf, one of few non-white faces on show at the NEC, lulled the audience to sleep with an interminable Wikipedia-style anecdote about Operation Market Garden. 

The charmless Richard Tice focused on what he called three cults – mass immigration, the NHS and net zero – while managing to make a complete cult of himself. Tice was particularly steamed up that hundreds of jobs had been lost when Labour shut down a coal mine that didn’t exist yet. Work that one out.

Former soldier turned reality show host Ant Middleton was allowed to ramble for 15 minutes about how opponents could use distraction techniques “to distract you and control you, and guess what – we fall into chaos”. He ended with this rallying cry: “The right political party, i.e. Nigel and Reform, need your help – um – to make sure that the next political party that we do is Reform!”

Middleton failed to mention losing his job on TV’s military-base reality show SAS: Who Dares Wins after referring to Black Lives Matter protesters as “absolute scum” and advising people to not change their habits and “carry on as normal” during Covid. “Don’t worry, I’m not here to thrash the living daylights out of you,” he said, although some of the elderly gentlemen in the audience looked like they might rather enjoy that.

The rosy-cheeked former Southampton chairman Rupert Lowe droned on about rainbow lanyards, the Financial Conduct Authority, Soviet collectivism, “the Bilderbergers”, Tulip Mania, “Orwellian virtue-signalling doublespeak” and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. It was a speech that had all the excitement of a sparsely-attended Sunday sermon, apart from the moment he began ranting about “forcing an experimental [Covid] jab on millions of people”.

Neither is Reform capturing the cross-section of society that it needs to become a serious political force – its audience was overwhelmingly, almost embarrassingly, old and white. “We are Britain’s future,” roared Ann Widdecombe, who will be 77 in October. 

Ann was furious about prisoners being let out of prison early, just because there was no room to keep them in prison any more. Labour should have done what she did, she said, and housed convicts in “disused portakabins from Norwegian oil rigs.” She added: “I even proposed to take over a disused holiday camp.” Imagine how the Daily Mail would respond to Starmer nationalising Pontins and offering parole as top prize in the knobbly knees contest.

Talking of prisoners, not discussed was the spell in jail served by the party’s new MP for Thurrock James McMurdock for attacking an ex-girlfriend. His speech contained the slogan, “Thurrock deserves better” (while this is accurate, McMurdock may want to work on this messaging).

McMurdock said he had joined Reform because it promised “conversations about taboo subjects like immigration, which have been swept under the rug”. Yes, because no-one had been talking about immigration at all for the last decade or so – not the last government, not the new government and certainly not any politicians with the initials NF.

Lee Anderson, who entered to a bizarre singalong of “here we go, here we go, here we go”, wants the migrants to go, go, go. “It’s a disgrace,” he said. “These men have broken into our country and guess what, I do not want them here.” 

Anderson said migrants were chewing up all our council house stock and all our dental appointments (but not our dogs and cats). He also claimed that Britain’s school children were being made to “sit down and have a six-foot-five drag queen read stories to them”. At one point during his speech, he told his audience, “This gets better, believe me”. He was wrong.

Farage’s own speech began with him rapping along to Without Me by Eminem and got more embarrassing from there. The overwhelming focus was how well his life had been going before he took over as Reform’s leader and how grateful the assembled proles should be for him giving it all up to earn even more money as an MP. On cue, they lapped up this preening narcissism.

Far more interesting than Farage’s speech, or any of the speeches, was the chat function that ran alongside the speeches on YouTube. One theme stood out: a deep love among many of the commenters for the oft-jailed Islamophobe Tommy Robinson, whose name was repeatedly chanted by far right rioters during the days of disorder at the start of Starmer’s reign.

“Oh Tommy Tommy,” wrote Healing Queen, adding six Union flags and a heart emoji just to make her point. “​​Nigel should welcome Tommy and allow him to speak here, that would truly galvanise the British people,” said Joe90ninety. “​​Nigel, please help Tommy, he’s a good man,” wrote Valerie Twine. “Let’s hope Nigel can resist attacking TR, otherwise Reform is not going to have the strength to beat the uniparty,” wrote KH Gamer. There were plenty more.

On this evidence, Reform is going to continue to split the Tory vote – albeit haphazardly – while running the risk of being split itself by the Robinson true believers. That is bad news for Nigel Farage and bad news for whoever ends up in charge of the Conservatives. It’s therefore good news for Britain.