The rift between Elon Musk and Nigel Farage overshadowed Reform’s latest ‘coup’ – the defection of another former Conservative MP to the party.
The party had teased that it would pull off a headline-grabbing new signing at its East Midlands conference last Friday, but rather than shadow cabinet minister Robert Jenrick – whose constituency is nearby Newark – or imaginary border wall spotter Suella Braverman, the person joining turned out to be Marco Longhi, recently kicked out by the voters of Dudley North and not even a household name in his own household.
Longhi is an oddball even by the standards of the outgoing Conservative cohort, a former oil and gas executive who has served as president of Turning Point UK, a hard right pressure group that claims to “champion patriotism and British culture” but in reality just gets weirdly angry about drag acts.
In 2022 he called for anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray to be “locked up in the Tower with a loudspeaker playing Land of Hope and Glory on repeat at maximum volume”, while he was also part of the Common Sense group of Tory MPs who in 2020 penned a letter to the Daily Telegraph attacking the National Trust for being “coloured by cultural Marxist dogma, colloquially known as the ‘woke agenda’”.
In this year’s general election he was accused of “dog-whistle” tactics against his Labour opponent Sonia Kumar after sending leaflets to British Pakistani and Kashmiri Muslims in his constituency drawing attention to Kumar’s Hindu surname (writing it in capital letters and underlining it), arguing that she would not support Kashmir while in Parliament.
Not that it did him any good – he convincingly lost to Kumar after his share of the vote dropped by 34.4%. Still, at least he’s got his portfolio of 10 rental properties to keep him off the breadline – something which definitely didn’t influence his decision to vote against his own government’s Renter’s Reform bill, which increased the rights of tenants in rental properties and included a manifesto pledge to ban no-fault evictions.
