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This isn’t the article I was going to write.
Everybody is aware there are seismic changes in geo-politics going on, that the landscape of British politics has changed, and that the economy isn’t behaving the way the current Government want it to, even if to many that seems like their own fault. I could and will write more on all those subjects, in future.
However ConHome has a specific role in looking at the fortunes or misfortunes of the Conservative party – and the politics of the ‘Right’. So despite having written about Reform UK on Friday, the events of the last 72 hours make it feel like that was, in effect, part one.
Here’s part two.
Before I start, I want to be clear, not least to the many Reform voters who I know read this site:
We’re not obsessed with Reform but would not being doing our job if we tried to ignore them. Their polling alone means, like or not, they’ve become part of the story and our purview at ConservativeHome.
This weekend I simply could not ignore them, my WhatsApps were unusually busy with people busily explaining to me what was “really going on”.
Contrary to suggestions in many newspapers of the ‘delight’ or ‘relish’ Conservatives and Labour will have greeted the fall out between Rupert Lowe MP and his party leadership this is not about indulging that or even revelling in it. It is about explaining what I’ve been told from the inside.
The Conservatives still carry the self-inflicted wounds and brutal consequences of protracted in-fighting. Labour are suffering their own signs of it, so there should be no holier-than-thou about Reform’s current problem, but what makes it significant is that it is a totally avoidable exposure of the vulnerabilities they inherently have. Other parties do have their own big problems, this is entirely Reforms’ and almost entirely self inflicted notwithstanding our own.
I concluded Friday’s piece with my feeling, having talked to a number of Nigel Farage’s HQ workers and lieutenants, that they were ‘serious about being serious’ and that it was a surprise, to put it mildly, that Rupert Lowe the Reform MP for Yarmouth had thrown doubt on that in comments in the Daily Mail.
This morning, the whip remains suspended, an investigation is apparently under way into his behaviour towards staffers and the party Chairman Zia Yusuf, and any signs of a thaw in relations with Nigel Farage seem a winter away.
The first signs that this was more than a “little local difficulty” as the journalist, now MP-they-don’t-have Isabel Oakeshott described things on Twitter/X – was that it was all rather sniffily brushed aside by their bigger ‘voices’ and outriders on social media.
Arron Banks, who’s back on the pitch, suggested I’d spent too much time talking to Gawain Towler, Reform’s former communications man, and long standing traveller with the Farage bandwagon, until recently. The fact is I could have. I’ve always found Gawain excellent company, but in truth the people talking to me were, and still are, in the thick of trying to make Reform UK achieve its objective of being in power, in Government.
Reform’s official statement about Lowe’s suspension, seemingly in response to his Mail article criticising Farage, was both tin-eared and smacked of the whole thing being far from little or a mere ‘difficulty’.
Of course it’s not unrecoverable, but that depends on how Nigel Farage, Zia Yusuf, Rupert Lowe and the rest of those at the top, decide to play it. However this very public row, goes to the heart of Reform’s biggest obstacles. They may overcome them, but now they exist in the open.
There is, as has been mentioned by many, the feeling, and much of it expressed by exasperated Reform supporters, that Nigel really doesn’t like rivals to the limelight. The barb of Lowe describing him as a ‘messiah’ – and not in a good way – will have stung.
Farage and I even discussed this back in December when he told me he knew he needed to demonstrate it wasn’t the case, and we agreed he needed a bigger broader team to rely on to match the ambitions for Reform that their surge presented him with.
It’s telling he has expressed elsewhere that none of his MPs would have had “a cat in hells chance” of being MPs without him. It’s probably true, but interesting that he says it. I am told that the growing spotlight on Rupert Lowe has indeed been the subject of several conversations in Reform HQ, but possibly that is par for the course in politics.
“He’s not the Messiah – he’s a very naughty boy” (Life of Brian)
Part of the business of Reform getting ‘serious’ is that Farage has actually been getting match fit. Pints are mainly for photo ops, the once ever present Rothmans are less present, he’s been focussed on the project. However the business of ‘professionalising’ this hybrid company-come-party has been another issue on the problem list.
Zia Yusuf, according to some is brilliant, tireless and “the powerhouse behind the scenes”. To others, who by the way, are very loyal to the cause, the future prospects of Reform and to Farage, tell me – “he couldn’t run a bath”
To be fair, I don’t know which is true, but Yusuf is best described as marmite in Reform land, and in messages to me the critics outnumbered the fans.
Certainly resentments at the rather secretive and unsympathetic operations of Zia Yusuf and his closest team are only just underneath the surface. I didn’t even have to scratch to find them. Old habits die hard, and as a journalist I’m reassured this comes from multiple, separate sources. Online it’s been open season on a man happy to use that medium for his own brand of cut and thrust politics.
The general charge being laid publicly by some very very unhappy Reform voters, especially those who like the cut of Rupert Lowe’s jib, is being laid at Farage and Yusuf’s door. The basic thrust iss variations from the prosaic to the unprintable of “we thought you were different and now you are behaving just like the others. We are very disappointed”
That and the fact that it’s all unfolded in public rather than behind closed doors. Farage claims it’s testimony to their transparency – I’m not sure that dog hunts.
As she smiled and then knifed Lowe on Talk TV Isabel Oakeshott – Richard Tice’s partner and possibly other half of his political brain – said:
“Poor little Rupert. He’s quite new to politics. This is what happens to people who are amateurs at politics. They become MPs and suddenly they think – ‘Yay, look at me, I think I could be Prime Minister”, they all do it, bless him.”
The withering scorn aside, the fact is Reform is relatively new to politics and the House of Commons. So far, it’s done very well. Labour and the Tories are acutely aware of that. But in essence Reform’s very pitch is “Yay look at us, Nigel could be Prime Minister”
If they are serious, and rows like this one undermine any pretence to that, they need to fix this in such a way that those issues I mentioned are put firmly to bed.
How they do that right now, is far from clear.
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