Nice Tice

“Cleaning Up Britain,” proclaimed the natty logo at Richard Tice’s press conference on Wednesday. And let’s face it, if that was what you wanted to do, there are few better places to start than Reform Headquarters, funded as they are by payments from overseas-residing cryptocurrency millionaires. 

Sadly, it turned out that this wasn’t the kind of cleaning up that Tice had in mind. “Littering, fly tipping has become the norm!” he declared. “We all want to be environmentally friendly,” he went on, taking a brief break from his usual demand that the country burn more fossil fuels. Next month, he revealed, the party will organise a day of litter-picking. 

What was going on? Reform is too young a party to have traditions, but I think we know what the party is — and isn’t — broadly about. If you’d asked me that morning what Reform’s approach to recycling was, I’d have told you the party thought that separating paper from glass was for losers. Now Tice was earnestly discussing bottle deposit schemes. I couldn’t have been more surprised if Nigel Farage had stuck his head round the door to warn about the risks of daytime drinking. 

Then light dawned. While the leader divides his time between not-quite-inciting race riots and peddling get-rich-quick schemes to the gullible, Tice is in charge of what might be called “detoxifying” the brand. A few months ago he apologised for the party’s approach to special needs kids and invited us all to police our language. Now he was telling us we needed to care for the planet. Meet Nice Tice. It was quite unnerving.

Tice is the closest thing Reform have got to cuddly, in the sense that his resting facial expression isn’t a snarl 

I found myself reminded of a press conference a couple of decades ago when David Cameron, then a cuddly new Conservative leader, announced that the party was going green. At the end we were all presented with saplings to plant at home, because the Tories struggled to imagine adults who didn’t have the kind of houses where an extra tree wouldn’t be noticed. 

Tice is the closest thing Reform have got to cuddly, in the sense that his resting facial expression isn’t a snarl. There’s Danny Kruger, but the party acts as if it has concluded that he shouldn’t be allowed to face journalists, for fear that he might share the thoughts floating round his head.

When it came to saying who was to blame for all the rubbish, Tice wasn’t afraid to name the culprits: McDonalds! Greggs! KFC! My bingo card for 2026 didn’t include Reform declaring war on the Greggs sausage roll. Did we know that two and a half million cigarette butts are chucked on the ground every day, dozens of them not by Farage?

Of the Reform leader there was no sign. It is now 50 days since the once unavoidable Farage has held a press conference. By an astonishing coincidence it is 42 days since the Guardian revealed that Farage had received a £5 million gift from a crypto billionaire. Farage has claimed that he needs the money to pay for his security, which seems to be largely devoted to ensuring no one can ask him how he funded his various houses.

Tice was asked about this. Was Nigel frightened of scrutiny? “Nigel Farage is not scared!” Why had he gone to ground? “It’s part of actually showing that Reform has talent across the whole board,” Tice claimed, not entirely convincingly. (Farage would later hold a pseudo-press conference up in Makerfield, with invited journalists whose scrutiny included asking the Dear Leader if he agreed that Brexit was a good thing, that Andy Burnham was a bad thing, and that Rupert Lowe’s Restore Party was the worst thing of all. It didn’t scream “brave”.)

So, what about that “gift”? How, Tice was asked, was Farage accepting money different from the case of Nathan Gill, the party’s former leader in Wales, who went to prison for taking bribes? “He was found guilty,” Tice said. “Nigel’s not for sale.” This is an interesting way of describing a man who is paid up to £30,000 a speech. 

Farage had claimed the revelations about his secret funds were the result of a Russian intelligence hack. Had he reported this to the security services? Answering that question, Tice said with a straight face, “will probably just help our enemies.” It’s possible he meant the Labour Party.

Was he confident that Farage hadn’t taken any other secret donations? Tice squirmed. It wasn’t, he explained, his job to check the bank accounts of “every single member” of Reform. Or even the only member who matters. The party’s approach to financial probity seems to be “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Was that slightly unsatisfactory? Tice had a reassurance to offer: “You’ve got to trust us!” The clean-up of Britain may be a while off yet.