Reform should ignore bad faith criticism

Early April marks the 1st anniversary of Reform taking a polling lead. The party then surged over 30 per cent after the local elections but has since come down from its plateau and is now scraping around the 25 per cent mark, while still leading in the polls. This raises the question of why it is stuttering. 

I suspect that its current sluggishness is largely the result of two things. The first is that immigration is not in the news. Small boat crossings always peak when the weather is fairer and therefore the first 3 months of the year offer little easy fodder for Farage. Net migration has plummeted over the last couple of years, largely as a result of tighter policies around legal immigration to end the Boriswave. As such, it has been a while since there has been good cause to make much of an issue of immigration. Perhaps as the air warms, and the long hot evenings return, crossings will pick up, the violent consequences of mass migration will break out, and the resulting carnage will bolster Reform’s numbers.

The second reason is that due to the energetic foreign policy of Donald Trump there has been little space for any other issue in the newspapers. Since Christmas, the United States has bombed Nigeria, decapitated the Venezuelan regime, threatened to annex Greenland, and now has begun a war with Iran which is threatening to cause a global recession. The world’s premier superpower is also threatening to withdraw from NATO and is unclear about whether it wishes to escalate the Iran campaign into a full-scale invasion. Farage has very little to contribute here. Nobody in Britain is capable of getting the Americans to alter their course but Mr Brexit has always, fairly, been seen as the British political figure closest to Trump, both in personal familiarity and political outlook. This is a disastrous position to be in now that the administration is flailing for a way to achieve victory in Iran, and blaming the Europeans for not helping as British consumers bleed at the pump. With no quick victory in sight, every week that passes increases the political benefit of distance from Trump.

Political advice suggesting that this man should dictate your party’s statements on this war is akin to a style guide for a suicide note

Last week, Sebastian Payne, the former head of the conservative think tank Onward, looked at Reform’s polling difficulties in The Times. He ventured that there was a lack of clarity on Reform’s position in many policy areas, and on the crucial matter of the Iran war he was confused by the absence of Nadhim Zahawi as a potential foreign policy spokesperson. He wrote: “Despite the war in Iran, Reform has no foreign affairs spokesman. Nadhim Zahawi, the presumptive occupant of that position, has become the invisible man since his defection from the Tories earlier this year.” Zahawi’s position on Iran is not a mystery. On February 28th, Zahawi told Kate Ferguson of The Sun that we should “make all of our assets available” to the US and “join the bombing if needed”. 

Political advice suggesting that this man should dictate your party’s statements on this war is akin to a style guide for a suicide note. 

If we lived in the sunny world where the Royal Navy was the crucial missing part to this military operation, then one could argue that deploying carriers to reopen the Strait of Hormuz would hasten an end to the conflict, lead to a new peaceful Iranian regime, and Britain teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony. Sadly, neither of our carriers were actually available to use, because they are always being repaired, and the Americans told us nothing about the war before it started. Regardless, it is doubtful that the United States has the appetite for fighting to reopen the strait, as evidenced by Trump’s incoherent demands that someone else do it for him. Given the terrible effects on the global economy and lack of will or ability to fix this problem militarily, having Nadhim Zahawi sound off about the need for escalation of this conflict would be a monumental act of self-harm.

Payne’s interest in Zahawi’s foreign policy view is part of a broader complaint that Reform favours gimmicks over hard policy stances. Every politician on earth must entertain some degree of gimmickry and attention grabbing, but it is true that “it isn’t clear whether [Farage] will sell himself to voters as a libertarian tax-cutter or a nationalise-water-and-steel interventionist.” That said, the current government is also unclear what approach it wants to take on economic questions, and since ruling out broad based tax rises has been buffeted from budget to budget by OBR forecasts and their backbenchers’ unwillingness to accept any cuts to welfare. The issue is that all the options are unpopular. Voters will not accept cuts to entitlements, many of them feel they are overtaxed anyway, and our borrowing costs are a frequent cause of crisis. Taking an ideological line has little benefit for an opposition party until the election has arrived.

Beyond Reform not giving him enough policy to criticise, Payne offers two other critiques. The first is that Reform is recruiting poorly. I would agree that they should not have accepted a foreign policy spokesman in waiting but when it comes to local councillors this is a bit snotty. There are about twenty thousand local councillors in the UK. They are paid less than ten thousand pounds, most of their budgets are spent via statutory requirements, and the remainder of their power is in bickering over planning applications. It is therefore unsurprising that despite Reform’s best efforts, some of their selected candidates are not former Goldman Sachs employees with a sideline in helping orphans and writing chin-stroking works of conservative philosophy. It is not an appealing job, and all parties attract fruitcakes and busybodies when they select for it. 

Under the header of poor selection, Payne also cites Simon Dudley, the recently sacked housing spokesperson. Dudley was fired for, clumsily, arguing that post–Grenfell regulations had become an undue burden on housebuilders. Payne is very much in the YIMBY camp and believes the under supply of housing in the southeast of England is a major problem. London’s housing starts fell from 32,160 in 2023-24 to 3,990 in 2024-25 right as the Building Safety Regulator came into being. Dealing with this involves telling the country that the post-Grenfell legislation is over cautious and that we do not need to make building near impossible because of 72 deaths. This is exactly the sort of hard trade off Payne appears to call on Reform to make when demanding policy yet here, where a Reform spokesperson agrees with him directionally, he gives this as evidence of their poor hiring. 

Payne’s final complaint is that Reform has become too tetchy with journalists. Payne is a journalist but looking past that he specifically argues “Robert Jenrick did himself no favours when he told Times Radio’s Kate McCann that she may ‘need your head checking’ when she asked him about sexism.” What Kate McCann really did was read out a list of Tory politicians Jenrick had criticised for their actions, point out their gender, then make a totally spurious accusation of sexism. If journalists wish to behave like this, it is totally reasonable that politicians are rude to them. Indeed, it would be a betrayal of voters to accept these attempts to manipulate them.

There are of course problems with Reform as it currently stands. As I have let slip, their foreign policy stance veers close to self-destructive, the constant firings seem hair trigger, and eventually they will have to decide which unpopular economic policies they want. But when debating these things, a line needs to be drawn between those who are actually interested in Reform performing well electorally, and those whose writing is informed by a long-held desire for a Conservative parliamentary seat. The views of the latter are very unlikely to hold useful direction.