In 2000, Nigel Farage attended a Ukip conference held at Birmingham’s Motorcycle Museum. This was still deep in his and the party’s rudderless, baccy-stained era. They were better known for the insults they attracted than their politics – “swivel-eyed”, “fruitcakes and loonies”, “cranks and gadflies”. And the chaotic conference of that year was typical of Ukip’s general management at the time – a winding chronicle of factionalism, feuding and office break-ins.
A generation later, the annual conference for Farage’s new vehicle, Reform UK, deflected nicknames and sneers. They’ve upgraded the venue to the Birmingham NEC (thank you very much) – a bigger and brighter spot than the Tories have managed to book in the city for next week. And the event was slicker than anything Ukip ever put together. The pilsner flowed. The music pounded, pensioners nodding along to big beat. A huge, creaseless Union Jack loomed stage left. And Farage looked good – American-daytime good. Gone is the chalky, amphibian pallor of Noughties Nige, replaced by honeyed tan and a gunmetal-grey side-parting.
And – as laboriously punned throughout the conference – in the evening, we were treated to a Reform party. Approximate theme: day at the races, meaning blazered gents and powdered ladies. The stage withdrew, and the hall became a discotheque, with the open-top battle bus parked in one corner as its VIP lounge. Boozing on the top deck were the party’s “famous five” MPs and their attendant WAGs. As the night wore on, the conference became nothing so much as a cavernous regional nightclub, complete with dancefloor snogs to “Wonderwall”.
Beyond the orgy of self-congratulation, there was business to be done. This conference marked Reform’s evolution from a private company held mostly in the pocket of Nigel Farage, to something more like a regular political party. Reform will now apparently have a vigorous vetting process, rising above the Facebook xenophobes who marred its election campaign. The party also now has a constitution, voted through by an enthusiastic show of hands. Farage clearly hasn’t forgotten the early Ukip days, though. He has been careful not to give too much power away: any no-confidence motion to remove him would require the signatures of 50 per cent of the membership,. One recent joiner told me it amounted to little more than a “token democracy”.
As part of this restructuring, Reform also wants to turn its 80,000 members (almost as many as the Liberal Democrats) into activists. The audience was urged to join the ground campaign, and the party boasts that 266 constituency branches are already open or opening. Louise, a disillusioned “Labour girl” who joined the party in early August, was using the conference as an opportunity to help establish an association in Taunton. In fact, she told me that she’d already begun, hosting a meal at her house with seven or eight other like-minded locals. The next such gathering has 14 sign-ups, and she hopes to persuade her husband to stand as a council candidate. Perhaps from these little platoons a political army can be fielded.
This conference was chiefly a bureaucratic exercise. But a distinct political ideology thrummed beneath. Part of this is straightforward native reaction. It is the pub-politics of “I want my country back”, as Lee Anderson – the former Conservative MP who defected to Reform in March this year – is so fond of saying. I counted three “contemporary” (broadly defined) cultural references throughout the conference: Bob Monkhouse, Status Quo and the cancelled comic Jim Davidson, who was sitting up top on the VIP bus. He got a very big cheer when Anderson celebrated him as “the greatest cultural hero of our time”. Not all of this was harmless taproom chatter though. After Anderson repeated his claim that “Mayor Khan” had “given our capital city away”, a woman screamed from behind me: “Revoke his citizenship!” I don’t think she would have said this about Ken Livingstone.
Anderson’s was the most raucous in a chain of mostly content-less speeches. Anne Widdecombe hollered, Matt Goodwin bored, and Ant Middleton was just plain weird (“When they distract you, they can control you”). But something resembling a coherent political outline did emerge in the address given by Rupert Lowe, one of the party’s new MPs. Lowe has rosy cheekbones, the hauteur of a cold English drawing room and a prep-school disciplinarian manner. With its big-name quotations (Socrates! Tacitus!), his speech smelt of the classroom. But it received some of the biggest claps of the conference. And in it you could discern not only a political analysis, but a historiography.
The axial year is 1997. Before then, we had the prelapsarian world of “the Thatcher legacy”, a phrase which drew generous applause. But after that, New Labour “conspired to undermine our… constitution”, opened the doors on immigration and established the “rule of lawyers”. Quangos proliferated, the economy was over-regulated and the tax burden swelled (so the argument goes). We fell under the influence of international institutions like the EU, WEF and the “Bilderberger” caste. Under this system, we have forced an “experimental jab on millions of people”, deified the false god of Net Zero, and flooded our country with legal and illegal immigration.
How to restore our lost country? Singapore is the model. Lowe’s working suggestions also included the reversal of devolution, repealing the Human Rights Act and slashing corporation tax. He raised the stakes even further to close with the portentous offering: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” If this is where the chunky arrow in Reform’s logo is pointing, it is nothing more than Thatcherism pepped up with conspiratorial innuendo. And it is aimed at the same class that “Maggie” (as Lowe calls her) won the hearts of: the English petite bourgeoisie.
There is a deeper paradox at play here. After his speech, I asked Nigel Farage how Reform can win in the 89 Labour seats in which it placed second at the election. He drew attention to Reform’s slogans of “family, community, country”, which he says “appeal very much to an old Labour target”. But his party lionises the prime minister who did the most to melt these bonds into air. When I asked Anderson how Reform can appeal to working-class voters, he said, “The biggest thing Thatcher did to get the working-class vote and keep the working-class vote is she allowed people to buy their own council houses.” But that is the policy at the root of Britain’s new age of rentierism, which condemns even the most dedicated striver to remain a tenant for life.
Reform’s success at this conference was operational. Their personnel has moved beyond the cavalier amateurism that plagued Ukip. They have money, and an entrepreneurial strategist in party chairman Zia Yusuf (“He could be my next prime minister,” one woman whispered to me during his speech). They have a strategy to win hundreds of local councils next year and potentially dozens of seats at the Welsh and Scottish elections. However, even as they grow, their lazy and recycled ideas will have to grow with them if they are to ever live up to the imperative in their name.
[See also: Can Reform UK become a real political party?]
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