Peter Geoghegan

Reform UK​ held its first conference in October 2021. The party was polling in the low single digits. Only a few hundred people turned up. Richard Tice, who had replaced Nigel Farage as leader seven months earlier, had chosen to hold the event on the same day – and in the same city, Manchester – as the Conservative Party Conference. He hired a battle bus with a sound system to...

Sir Paul Marshall​’s emergence as a right-wing media tycoon has been rapid. A decade ago he was a Lib Dem donor; now he owns the house journal of the Conservative Party. Immediately after he bought the Spectator for an inflated £100 million last September, its chairman, Andrew Neil, resigned, signing off with a barbed tweet about editorial independence. ‘You can have all...

The​ 29th UN Climate Change Conference begins in Baku on 11 November. For the third year in a row, as a recent editorial in the Financial Times pointed out, COP is being hosted ‘in an authoritarian state with a dubious human rights record, and for the second year in a petrostate’ (the previous two conferences took place in Sharm El-Sheikh and Dubai). The UK has outsized influence...

In​ Transparency International’s most recent Corruption Perceptions Index, published in January, the UK fell to twentieth place, its lowest ever ranking. It’s not hard to see why: a Conservative government mired in allegations of corruption; billions of pounds in Covid contracts for politically connected VIPs; peerages doled out to Tory donors; public bodies stuffed with party...

Iheard​ the National Conservatism Conference before I saw it. Rounding a corner in Westminster last Monday morning, I was met with the high-pitched whine of a cheap amplifier turned up too loud. On the mic, the long-time anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray was ululating ‘Why, why, why, Suella?’ to the tune of Tom Jones’s ‘Delilah’. He finished with a rhyming...