“We are still a bit of a pirate ship,” a senior Reform figure acknowledges privately. It was the recurring conversation throughout Reform UK’s conference in Birmingham: the consequences of the undercover filming broadcast by Channel 4 News which has cost two senior party figures their jobs, at least for now. How much damage does it cause to Reform? And what does it tell us about them?
“A key part of the appeal of us is the sense of us being cavaliers. Doing things differently. Standing out. And that’s great.
But we need roundheads too. Those who ask the boring questions. Do the checks. We need more of them too,” this same senior figure adds.
The story of Reform over the last 12 months can be summarised in three words: defections, elections and money. Farage says his aides’ donor comments were ‘loose pub talk’ Reform donations row overshadows party’s moment to lay out big ideas Farage threatens to overhaul Lords and judges to meet his pledges Defections, those who leave one party and join another, have been a big part of the party’s growth in the last year – not least the recruitment of former Conservative cabinet ministers Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman. Elections have been as well – Reform’s gains in the English local elections and the devolved parliament elections in Wales and in Scotland. But so too has money.
The backdrop to this conference was the swirl of questions about money even before Channel 4 News’, and Verbatim Investigations’, endeavours. In the hour or two before its broadcast on Thursday night, senior Reform figures, including those directly caught up in it, projected a sense of being relatively relaxed about it. Awkward, embarrassing, but survivable. Once it was broadcast, things changed.
There was fury, I am told, and very quickly there was a sense of its gravity. “A few bottles of red were had, and we knew we had to act,” is how one source described it to me. The conversations went on into the early hours. Firstly, there was anger that it would drown out a conference that has been months in the planning.
And yes, it has dominated conversation here in Birmingham. Secondly, there was widespread concern about the image it projected, the impression it would leave. Reform wants to project itself as a prospective party of government. And yet the headlines allow critics to claim they are not just ramshackle and amateurish but can point to what looks like a pattern of activity, consciously pursued, to breach the law.
Absolutely not, Nigel Farage insisted to me, there was no such pattern. But what of the ethos of the party? Journalist Tim Shipman in The Spectator writes , externalthat “it is the experience of everyone I have ever known near the summit of politics that political operations take their character and operating logic from the person at the apex of the triangle. Leaders set culture.” There is something in this.
Take Rishi Sunak’s Downing Street operation and Boris Johnson’s. They were wildly different culturally, reflecting the very different characters at their helm. Would all the things that happened during Partygate under Johnson have happened under Sunak? Unlikely, I would have thought.
Some within Reform, who are full of admiration for Nigel Farage’s chutzpah and gift as a communicator, are desperate to see a behind-the-scenes cultural shift that minimises the chances of further embarrassments. And, alongside that, a step up in the infrastructure and personnel to match. Farage’s team express frustration that this is precisely what they have been doing, but some are telling them internally they need to move more quickly. Both James Orr, the party’s head of policy; and Dan Jukes, Farage’s right-hand man, will be missed profoundly by those inside the party.
Privately, some wonder if Orr may yet return. Jukes, who has been a pivotal and loyal figure in Team Farage for years, was already dividing his time between the UK and the United States as his wife and baby are on the other side of the Atlantic. Perhaps, some senior figures suggest, his immediate future might be in America. Does he return when the general election is nearer?
Let’s see. Reform leave Birmingham winded and wounded by the last few days, their days in the sun overshadowed. The question is how they deal with this and respond to it, in the coming weeks and months.
