Reform UK functions in precisely the same way as the Brexit Party functioned before it, and Ukip before that: a decaying circus of tiny male egos battling for dominance. If, by some ludicrous stroke of stupidity and bad luck, they ever ended up in government, the country would grind to a halt within the week.
After months of being told Reform was on the brink of power – always a laughable proposition – they’re now falling apart for all to see. The party is in a civil war, they’ve lost an MP, and its leader has been revealed for the Putin apologist he’s always been. Suddenly the great remorseless Reform juggernaut has juddered to a halt in the mud.
This is all as it has ever been. Douglas Carswell became the first Ukip MP in the Commons when he defected to the party from the Conservatives in 2014. Within a year he was engaged in subterfuge against Farage’s leadership, eventually calling for him to go.
“He has made some history,” then prime minister David Cameron told Carswell at PMQs, “because as a party of one he has managed to have a backbench rebellion, which is something to be admired.”
Nothing has changed in the intervening years. Any organisation Farage leads is defined by paranoia and egomania. You might as well hire Gollum as your party organiser.
The Metropolitan Police announced on Tuesday that they would investigate Reform MP Rupert Lowe for reported threats against party chair Zia Yusuf. This was one of several allegations made against Lowe by the party last Friday, which he denies, including workplace bullying and “evidence of derogatory and discriminatory remarks”.
The allegations appeared, with fortuitous timing, exactly a day after Lowe accused Farage of “messianic” tendencies, and a few weeks after Lowe was selected by Elon Musk as his preferred leader of the party. Lowe might now join former deputy leader Ben Habib in a new breakaway right-wing party. For a party with five MPs to establish a parliamentary splinter group is almost as impressive as Carswell’s backbench rebellion of a single person.
Meanwhile, Farage’s usually effective political antenna seems to be malfunctioning. One of his most accomplished skills is to know how to stay just on the right side of public opinion and yet drag it remorselessly toward the right. So even in the 2010s, when he was saying how “awkward” he felt on trains when people spoke foreign languages, he was canny enough to distance himself from Theresa May’s “Go Home” anti-immigrant vans.
But recently that intuitive sense of how far he can go seems to have deserted him. After Trump’s disastrous meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House, many of the right-wing figures who had previously celebrated his win, like Andrew Neil, retracted their support. Even Trump sycophants like Boris Johnson and Kemi Badenoch made sure to say that “no one liked what happened in the White House”.
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Labour's unpopularity comes down to one thing
Read MoreBut Farage is so desperate for Trump’s approval, and so obviously admiring of Vladimir Putin, that he simply couldn’t help but betray his own political interests. “If I turned up at the White House,” he told LBC, “I’d make sure I was wearing a suit.” The Ukrainian leader had “overplayed his hand” and was “very unwise”.
In fact, it was Farage who overplayed his hand. While occasionally posting lip-service to Russian culpability, he has persistently tried to defend Putin by insisting that the West provoked the war. This time he turned decisively against public opinion.
It’s possible that none of this will make a difference. The upcoming Runcorn and Helsby byelection could still see a Reform win. The party’s polling seems largely unaffected by the Lowe-Farage split, probably because no sensible person has any idea who Lowe is. More in Common polling this morning put the party level with Labour on 25 per cent.
But look a little closer and there is evidence things are starting to sour. That byelection is a pretty hard task for Reform. At the general election, they secured 18 per cent in the seat to Labour’s 53 per cent.
A victory for Farage is close to being priced-in by Westminster journalists but is actually a tremendously difficult thing to achieve. If he fails, it would be seen as a massive setback – a refutation of the sense of inevitability he has cultivated since the election.
Reform polling seems to be stuck. It surged last autumn, creating a sense of remorseless momentum. But since the New Year, it’s become clear that Farage has hit his high water mark at the low 20s. Basically, the Labour or Tory floor is his ceiling.
Since his comments on Zelensky, Farage’s personal popularity has taken another battering. More in Common found he had fallen from a high of -8 to -18 over the course of March.
The basic fact about Reform is this: they will never be in power, because the first-past-the-post system will always punish small parties with broad support, just as it punishes the Green Party, or did the Alliance during the Thatcher era. Farage can claim as often as he likes that Reform can win the next election, but he can’t and they won’t.
In fact, his party will continue to tear itself apart in a series of petty and meaningless squabbles defined more by the toxic egos of the men involved than by any kind of meaningful political principle or difference over strategy. Meanwhile, it is becoming increasingly obvious what he truly is: an apologist for Russian aggression. A populist clown, who, if he ever managed to secure power, would do as much to damage Britain’s reputation and economy as his idol Donald Trump is currently doing to America.
He’s a joke, surrounded by fools. And people are increasingly seeing the punchline.
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