“The first word I want to say,” Richard Tice began, “is ‘Sorry’.” We groaned inwardly (and in some cases outwardly). When a politician begins like that, it’s usually a bait-and-switch before they reveal that they’re apologising for promising to only deport ten thousand people, when they’ve actually now realised they can deport twenty thousand. How wrong we were. Reform’s deputy leader was, if not entirely sincere, as close to sincerity as he is capable of getting. He really did want to say sorry.
This in itself was a major news event. The Reform approach to politics is that apologies are things to be demanded from other people, not given yourself. The Nigel Farage view seems to be that once you start apologising for things you’ve said, you’ll never be able to stop. And looking at the things he in particular is alleged to have said, he probably has a point.
For Tice to be breaking that rule, things were clearly serious. But what would be the subject of this moment of contrition? We weren’t short of possibilities. In recent days, a Reform mayoral candidate has been revealed to have expressed the view that David Lammy belonged in the Caribbean. Meanwhile Tice had accused Farage’s schoolmates of fabricating their accounts of his unusual take on the Third Reich — a defence the party leader himself had declined to endorse. And of course there was the conviction of Reform’s leader in Wales of taking Russian bribes.
As it turns out, it was something else entirely. “Four weeks ago, when I gave a press conference, I offended a number of people talking about SEND.” The penny dropped. This particular moment of plain-speaking was when Tice suggested that parents were faking their children’s special needs diagnoses to avoid VAT on school fees, and described the sight of children wearing ear defenders in class to help them focus as “insane”. Not surprisingly, this has gone down badly with parents of kids with special needs. But quite astonishingly, Reform turns out to care what those parents think.
“We never stop learning in life,” Tice said, sounding like the kind of California hippy who will be deported on the first day of Farage’s Glorious Rule. He began talking about the frustrations of parents who want help for their children. In my notebook, I find I have written “IS HE ACTUALLY BEING SINCERE?” And he really did seem to be. It was hard to understand. Everything we’d seen up to this moment suggested that Reform doesn’t care about the sort of people who send angry emails complaining about its MPs’ language. I couldn’t have been more surprised if Tice had announced he was opening his house as a Christmas centre for refugees.
You may say Tice is a dreamer, but he’s not the only one
He was still talking. There had, it seemed, been quite a response to his statement. “Amongst all of the emails that I got were some remarkably helpful suggestions,” he said. These were presumably the ones that didn’t finish with the word “off”.
“I think we can do better than shout at each other,” said the man from the Shouting At Each Other Party. “Imagine the optimistic scenario,” he went on. “Imagine a system where children don’t have to travel in a taxi every day.” He was going the full John Lennon now. “Imagine parents not feeling they have to fight the system.” Was that a piano I could hear in the background? You may say Tice is a dreamer, but he’s not the only one.
It was all, frankly, very weird. If Tice had wanted to secretly signal to us that his kids were being held hostage by people who had warned him not to contact the authorities, this was the speech he would have given.
He even invited us to police our language. “Imagine,” he said, “that we didn’t call children ‘disabled’, but we learned from other nations where people are called ‘differently abled’.” Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform, was warning us that labels can hurt! I couldn’t have been more surprised if my dog had asked my opinion on Modern Monetary Theory.
In the front row, Lee Anderson was staring very intently at a patch of floor. Farage himself was nowhere to be seen. That doesn’t mean he disapproves, of course. It’s possible that he is in full agreement with this new direction for his party, and was at that moment attending the opening of a multi-faith centre for cross-cultural dialogue and vegan crystal healing in Clacton.
What does it all mean? The obvious answer is that Reform has discovered the limits to a political appeal of complaining about modern life. You never know in politics what the voters are going to notice, and this turns out to be one of the things.
Fortunately for those of us who were worried that the universe had been turned on its head, some things are untouched by Tice’s new compassionate approach to his fellow human people. Take, for instance, the question of what you can say about black people. Reform has declared that questions about what Farage might have said at school are too boring to be answered. But with Reform, there are always more comments to examine.
Let’s take those ones about Lammy. Is it OK to say that a black man should “go home to the Caribbean”? Apparently it is. “He’s a Cabinet minister,” Tice said. “Whether we think he’s doing a good job or a bad job is just part of politics.” It really is a mystery why racists keep joining Reform.
Maybe, in time, Tice will apologise for this position too. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
