Reform’s Disaster Capitalism

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 drive past the Tory event. But Reform hadn’t factored in traffic restrictions. ‘Lots of the roads were shut off. We got stuck down this narrow side street,’ Adam Wood, a Reform activist, recalled. ‘The police weren’t too happy with us.’

Wood, a business development manager from Rotherham who joined Ukip aged eighteen, stood for Reform in local elections in Yorkshire in May 2022. He got 89 votes. In the Wakefield by-election the following month, Reform received less than 2 per cent of the vote. ‘There were only five of us working on that,’ Wood told me. ‘A lot of us were clamouring for Nigel to come back. We knew we could never do what we wanted without him.’ As we spoke outside the main auditorium at Reform’s conference earlier this month, three middle-aged men walked past. All were wearing turquoise Reform-branded football strips with the same name on the back: Farage. He’s number 10. The playmaker.

Reform has just four MPs but the party has dominated the political narrative since last year’s general election. It is now consistently polling at around 30 per cent, well ahead of Labour. In May’s local elections, Reform won 677 seats, two mayoralties and outright control of ten councils. More than five thousand people bought tickets to the conference at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre, a cavernous space tacked onto the city’s international airport. The ‘momentous event’ had many familiar trappings: a busy fringe programme, a smattering of business sponsors, ambitious young men in sharp suits. But it also felt different from any party conference I’d attended before. The queue that snaked around the conference perimeter on the first morning had a giddy, almost nervous energy. It was overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, white. The biggest constituency, men in jeans and T-shirts, wouldn’t have looked out of place at one of the rock concerts advertised on the NEC’s hoardings.

Inside the main hall, the queue for the bar was already twenty people deep at 10.30 a.m. Senior executives stayed away but a phalanx of lobbyists and VIPs milled around the Heathrow Airport Lounge. JCB, the construction equipment manufacturer and longstanding Conservative donor, had brought its latest model, the Pothole Pro digger. A cranky campaign group opposing Covid vaccines had a stand. The most prominent display in the hall was selling gold bullion. A photograph of a beaming Farage loomed over it: ‘Protect your wealth in uncertain times.’ Last year, Direct Bullion paid Farage £280,000 to record a handful of promotional ads that ran on GB News. Nearby a firm was selling cryptocurrency. Another stand selling gold gave me a chocolate coin and an invitation to ‘explore the opportunity’. The co-owner, a burly white Zimbabwean, told me gold was ideal for hiding money ‘from the prying eyes of banks’. When I said I was a journalist he quickly started talking about Know Your Customer checks. ‘We take compliance very seriously,’ he assured me.

Lee, an IT contractor from Kent, had taken the day off work to come to his first party conference. He had been out the night before, drinking with a right-wing vlogger he had met online. The former prime-time comedian Jim Davidson was at the same bar. ‘Reform does the best parties,’ Lee told me. He used to vote Conservative but ‘never Ukip’. So why Reform? ‘Immigration. It’s out of control.’ He was heading to his first fringe event of the day, on ‘securing the borders’. I tagged along. On a makeshift stage, James Frayne, a Conservative strategist, was explaining to a full house that Reform’s stance on immigration aligns with public attitudes. In recent YouGov polling, 38 per cent of respondents rated Reform ‘best at handling asylum and immigration’. Voters, Frayne said, were ‘coming round’ to the idea of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights and introducing caps on immigrant numbers, but Reform’s language ‘needed to be more careful’. Frayne’s fellow panellists were not exactly circumspect: a feverish Telegraph journalist called the BBC ‘the belly of the beast’ and rejoiced that ‘things that might have been impossible to discuss a year ago are now being discussed by the man who will be our next prime minister.’ Matthew Goodwin, a presenter on GB News, read off a litany of violent crimes committed by asylum seekers and implored the audience to ‘take back your country’, promising to ‘weaponise these issues all day long’. It was time to ‘start putting the security of the British people and our children first’. Lee, sitting a few rows from the front, was nodding along furiously.

Farage was due to close the first day, but around noon a booming tannoy announced that his speech was being moved forward. With Westminster in tumult over Angela Rayner’s resignation as deputy prime minister, he wanted to make sure he hit the lunchtime news. I hurried to the main conference hall. On stage, the former Conservative minister (and now Reform mayor for Greater Lincolnshire) Andrea Jenkyns was dressed in a sequinned jumpsuit and singing a song she’d written called ‘Insomniac’. ‘Is this god-awful Labour government giving you sleepless nights and insomnia too?’ she asked. The auditorium cheered. After the Trumpian entreaty to ‘drill, baby, drill,’ Jenkyns handed over to ‘our next prime minister’. In a scene that could have been taken from Pop Idol, Farage emerged in a cloud of smoke and pyrotechnics. He grinned, milking the applause. The speech was pedestrian by his standards but it didn’t need to be electric. The words, now widely reported, wrote themselves. Starmer’s government was ‘deep in crisis’. Labour MPs would defect to Jeremy Corbyn’s new party. Reform – ‘the party that stands up for decent working people’ – needed to be ready to win a general election in 2027. Before introducing the party’s latest Tory defector, the former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, Farage said he would stop illegal immigrants arriving on small boats within two weeks of winning power. The crowd roared in approval.

Farage’s rhetoric on immigration is more considered than his political opponents usually admit. There are nods and winks – the notorious ‘breaking point’ poster a week before the Brexit referendum – but Farage himself seldom crosses the line into outright racism. Reform rejects the label ‘far-right’; last year, the BBC apologised for describing the party as such, following a complaint from Tice. But the rhetoric has been more strident in recent months: in March, the then Reform MP Rupert Lowe was censured for endorsing mass deportation of illegal immigrants on social media. By the summer, Farage was saying that ‘nobody in London understands how close we are to civil disobedience.’ He pledged to deport 600,000 immigrants and later confirmed that he would be willing to deport Afghan women to the Taliban. ‘Nigel knows how to push the conversation, but he also understands that you have to do it gradually, bring people with you,’ Andy Wigmore, the former director of communications at Leave.EU, told me. Wigmore, one of the original ‘bad boys of Brexit’ with Farage and Arron Banks, is now based in Washington, where he works for the Republican lobbyist Gerry Gunster. He says Farage is learning from Trump’s White House. ‘Milei. Meloni. Orbán. Nigel. They are all going to adopt the Trump strategy. They’re not extreme anymore.’

Most of the people I met in Birmingham were temperate, if on the cynical side of sceptical. They wanted the small boats stopped, but also investment in the NHS and higher wages. They were fed up with a political system they see as sclerotic and corrupt. For many, the conference was a social occasion. ‘This is my holiday,’ Andy Walker, an avuncular former policeman, told me. He was manning the stall for Yorkshire and the Humber in the bustling membership enclosure. The previous night, he had been drinking with Lee Anderson, the MP for Ashfield and another host on GB News. ‘We’re the party with characters.’ But Reform’s darker vistas were also visible. A young American woman who lives in London told me she couldn’t understand why Farage had appointed the businessman Zia Yusuf as the party’s new head of policy. ‘How can you be against Islamisation and have a Muslim in a position like that?’ (In June, Yusuf briefly resigned as party chairman after facing a torrent of racist abuse.) On the second morning, I spoke to a man wearing a black T-shirt with an image of a Crusader and the slogan ‘For England’. He was reluctant to speak to a journalist (‘We hate you’) but relented when I promised not to use his name. (‘I’ll sue you if you do. I’ll go to the Free Speech Union.’) He told me he made online videos under a pseudonym. ‘Discord? Reddit?’ I asked, trying to sound as though I knew what I was talking about. He laughed. ‘Reddit? That left-wing cesspool?’ I would never find his content, he said, due to ‘all the infosec I use’. But he was willing to chat. Britain is on the cusp of race war, he told me. If that prospect saddened him, it didn’t show. ‘We are talking about inter-ethnic violence.’ He compared the situation to the Troubles. ‘It’s already happening.’ I asked where I could find evidence of this upsurge in sectarian violence on British streets. ‘Nobody wants to report it,’ he said. ‘It’s only X.’ Things were so bad that women were becoming politically active, even though ‘from evolutionary psychology women don’t want to get involved in politics.’ He saw Farage as ‘a stepping stone’. He was sympathetic to the splinter parties on Reform’s right: Lowe’s Restore Britain, which advocates ‘remigration’, a sanitised word for mass expulsions, and Ben Habib’s Advance UK, which has been endorsed by Elon Musk. What about the far-right populist Tommy Robinson? He liked ‘Tommy’ but disagreed with him on the question of identity. ‘Tommy is a civic nationalist. He believes you can become British. I think you need British ancestry to be British. A lot of people here think this,’ he added, his eyes scanning the hall. They alighted on the brightly coloured GB News stand about twenty feet away.

It’s tempting to dismiss such voices as an extreme fringe. Most accounts of the conference treated them as curios, focusing instead on Reform’s new-found professionalism and energy. But many of the most conspiratorial voices came with Reform’s imprimatur. There was a fringe session on leaving the World Health Organisation. A speaker from the TaxPayers’ Alliance told another fringe event, sponsored by tobacco lobbyists, that smoking is an economic boon, its medical harms ‘exaggerated’. On the main stage Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who advises the US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, said it was ‘highly likely’ that the Covid vaccine was ‘a significant factor in the cancers in the royal family’. During a live recording of a podcast for the Telegraph, Allison Pearson accused the police of having ‘tampered’ with evidence in the case of Lucy Connolly, who served ten months in prison for incitement after tweeting ‘Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards’ in the wake of the fatal stabbings in Southport last year. (Pearson’s co-host, Liam Halligan, swiftly corrected her.) No wonder party members felt empowered to call for a Reform government to investigate the centre-left Fabian Society for manoeuvring behind the scenes to turn Britain into a socialist state, or to wonder aloud whether the World Economic Forum was secretly running the world.

Perhaps Reform’s most tangible achievement so far has been to unsettle the consensus around climate change in British politics. In 2019, the Conservatives passed legally binding commitments to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. In March, the current leader, Kemi Badenoch, declared the 2050 deadline ‘impossible’ and refused to commit to a new timeline. Starmer has been accused of watering down Labour’s commitment to clean power, while Reform claims that as much as £45 billion can be saved by stopping all net zero initiatives. On Saturday morning, I sat through a fringe meeting that asked ‘Is Climate Realism Inevitable?’ It was sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a US think tank that began life as a tobacco-funded operation to discredit the risks of second-hand smoke and has now moved on to climate change denial, with the backing of ExxonMobil and others. Framed by a giant Union Jack and a lurid, green-tinged backdrop of clouds and bright skies, Heartland’s president, James Taylor, declared climate change ‘a Trojan horse for socialism and communism’. Lois Perry, who runs Heartland’s UK operation, went further. Carbon dioxide, she claimed, is ‘not a pollutant’. Electric cars exist so that ‘this neo-Marxist, communist shambolic government can control us.’ Balance, of a sort, was provided by Andy Mayer from the Institute of Economic Affairs, the think tank that ‘incubated’ Liz Truss. He didn’t dispute climate science, but offered a Panglossian vision of four degrees of warming in which ‘Britain would be like Italy in the 1980s.’ Viscount Christopher Monckton then asked the audience if anyone thought net zero policies should be continued. Only a couple of hands went up. ‘You’re fired,’ he said.

Corporate Britain has been cautious about coming over to Reform. The party still lags behind the Conservatives – and Labour – when it comes to political donations and is dependent on a handful of rich benefactors: of the £3 million Reform has registered this year, at least £500,000 was from the party’s now honorary treasurer, the property developer and former Tory donor Nick Candy; another £613,000 came from converting previously received interest-free loans – provided by Tice – into donations. Fiona Cottrell, an old girlfriend of King Charles, has given £750,000 over the past year. Her son, George, who has served eight months in a US jail for wire fraud, is among Farage’s most trusted lieutenants.

But while the prospect of $100 million from Musk has receded, there are signs that Reform is making inroads with business. The most recent Electoral Commission filings show new cash donors from the financial world, once the Tories’ preserve. Analysis by the New York Times earlier this year found that more than half of Reform’s donations in 2024 came from people with homes in low-tax jurisdictions or with offshore business interests; 40 per cent came from climate sceptics or investors in fossil fuels. This would seem to be one of Reform’s obvious vulnerabilities: polling conducted earlier this year by Persuasion UK found that voters were significantly less positive about the party when they heard that it had backing from oil and gas interests.

Reform has influential friends on the global radical right. Preston Manning, who founded the Reform Party of Canada in 1987, was Farage’s surprise guest speaker on the opening night. Outside the £25-a-head after-party, I met Tony Gilland, chief of staff at Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a Brussels think tank which has received more than €6 million in funding from Viktor Orbán’s government. A veteran of Frank Furedi’s Revolutionary Communist Party, Gilland is now a member of Reform. James Orr, a former City lawyer turned Cambridge theologian who has recently set up a pro-Reform think tank called the Centre for a Better Britain, has been a close friend of J.D. Vance since 2019; last year, Politico described him as the vice president’s ‘English philosopher king’. According to a leaked document published by the Sunday Times, the CBB is seeking to raise £25 million before the next election, including from sources linked to the MAGA movement. It will operate out of the same Millbank building as Reform but has also set up a not-for-profit entity in Texas and claims it has charity partnership status in Canada. While foreign funding of parties is banned in the UK, there is no such prohibition on think tanks. The Electoral Commission is currently assessing whether or not the CBB is in breach of electoral law.

Reform has been accused of lacking policy: its critics say it’s a party of Farage and his epigones, with few firm plans for running the country. This isn’t entirely true. An overarching Reform theory of government is emerging: Monday Club Toryism allied with the deracination of what Trumpists call ‘the administrative state’. Britain, in this telling, has been captured since 1997 by a Labour and Conservative ‘uniparty’ – a term repeated by almost every speaker – that has strangled the sovereign nation-state in a miasma of illegitimate laws and regulations. Arron Banks has advocated a ‘big beautiful Reform bill’ which would remove all Blair-era justice regulation. Farage reportedly wants to strip the Financial Conduct Authority of its power to regulate the banking industry. During a fringe event, Jenkyns proposed banning public sector workers from striking. Truss’s Thatcherite tribute act was adduced not as a cautionary tale but as testament to the need for radical action. Orr talked about discussions he had had with the head of the Heritage Foundation, the Washington think tank behind Project 2025, and hinted that Reform should cloak its full intentions: ‘It’s not always good to show your opponents your hand.’ The zeal for ripping out the wiring of British democracy – little of which has any statutory basis – is shared by many of Reform’s rank and file. ‘The Human Rights Act. The Supreme Court. We’ve had enough of it all,’ one member told me. ‘Brexit never happened. We still haven’t taken back control.’

The rise of an insurgent, Poujadist party in British politics was overdue. Dissatisfaction is rife. Wages are stagnant. Growth is anaemic. The politics of Brexit papered over the reality revealed by the 2015 general election: Britain now has a multi-party politics. That Reform’s initial incarnation, the Brexit Party, topped the polls in the 2019 European elections – with the Conservatives winning less than a tenth of the vote – no longer looks like an aberration. Reform’s total dependence on its leader is a weakness, however. Farage’s parties tend to be fissiparous and the next election could be four years away. Reform is built in his image, and although its corporate structure has changed so that he no longer owns it, Farage still has complete control. A board created earlier this year has little real power. At the conference, there were some nascent signs of dissent. A councillor at one event complained that policy formulation was remote and opaque. ‘How am I supposed to answer people’s questions on the doorstep?’ Reform’s willingness to accept Conservative defectors isn’t universally popular. ‘It’s entryism,’ I overheard a campaigner from the group Net Zero Watch tell a colleague. Members question the wisdom of putting former Tory MPs in senior leadership positions. Farage’s rejoinder – that Reform needs people with government experience – seems to cut against the grain of his party’s radical promise. And Reform’s folksy disaster capitalism – Tice compared cutting council spending to fishing out coins from the back of the sofa: ‘You just dig deeper than anybody else, and you find a pile of cash’ – has yet to be subjected to serious scrutiny.

But the party has many advantages that Ukip lacked. Polling by More in Common this year found that its potential ceiling is 42 per cent. Talk of pacts, or even mergers, with the Conservatives has faded away. The Telegraph and the Express have already decided that Reform is the true keeper of the Thatcherite flame. Fleet Street support is in any case a declining commodity: many of those I met said they only watched GB News and social media. Farage is a TikTok phenomenon. Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been a huge boon. In Birmingham, I met a former Breitbart journalist whose videos from anti-asylum seeker protests in Epping had racked up 46 million views on X. Reform is well placed to appeal to fragmented communities, already distrustful of mainstream institutions and now consuming a daily diet of online media that confirms their worst suspicions. In the emerging paranoid style of British politics, even such established realities as anthropogenic climate change are endlessly contested. At the same time, the Westminster lobby system provides a veneer of normality, regardless of how far – and how fast – the Overton window shifts.

Farage returned to the conference stage on Saturday afternoon. Behind him a running ticker on the number of Reform members had passed 242,000. Even in success, old habits die hard. ‘Can we please air our disagreements between each other in private and not in public,’ Farage implored. When he said he needed five thousand candidates to stand in next year’s local elections, the crowd rose to their feet. ‘This is the people’s army in operation,’ he grinned. I left as the national anthem started up. Outside the auditorium I met Nick Lockett, a barrister and Reform candidate for Westminster council. He was wearing a large turquoise rosette and a Panama hat. ‘I was originally a Thatcherite,’ he said. ‘After Thatcher I didn’t have a political home. Until Nigel came along.’