“The government is falling apart as we speak!” For a line in a party conference speech, it was pretty close to being true. As we sat in the huge hall of the Birmingham NEC, the big news was happening back in London, where Angela Rayner had just resigned, triggering a huge Cabinet reshuffle and what will probably be a nasty deputy leadership election. Political reporters who’d come up that morning were already heading back, suspecting that a speech by Reform chairman David Bull was not going to make even the inside pages.
After a summer of overshadowing the government, Reform now found itself overshadowed in turn. Nigel Farage’s speech was moved from 4pm to lunchtime, in the hope of getting at least a bit of coverage. That meant it was delivered to a partially empty hall, with people unaware of the change attending other events instead.
On another day, Andrea Jenkyns striding on stage in a sequined jumpsuit belting out a song she revealed she’d written herself would merit a sketch on its own. Today we’ll simply have to note that if, as she assures us, “Britain is broken”, then perhaps we’re entitled to ask whether any responsibility for that lies with the government of which she was, really not very long ago, such an enthusiastic supporter.
This is, in every sense, a party conference like no other. Take the shops. At Labour you’ll find a bookstall selling biographies of ministers from the 1970s. At Tory conference you can buy rather nice cufflinks. At Reform, you can buy cryptocurrencies and gold bullion. There were two stands selling the latter, staffed by young men who bulged out of their polo shirts in a way that suggested that when they’re not pumping gold, they’re pumping iron.
Well, parties can’t necessarily be held responsible for the people who pay for space at their conferences, although what’s this? “Nigel Farage Recommends Direct Bullion,” proclaims the largest stand on the conference floor. Some might see hawking your name out like this as beneath a man who wants to be prime minister, but I’m on board with it. Keir Starmer should seek similar sponsorship, perhaps from Black & Decker — “Tools like Dad made” — and Kemi Badenoch could endorse Stanford — “They would have been the best years of my life”.
Over in the main hall, Bull had acted as warm-up man, equipped with a huge gold handkerchief in his front pocket, possibly sold to him by Direct Bullion, to tell us that the party was on the brink of electoral triumph. Seasoned politicians rarely discuss polling numbers, which can go down as well as up, but Bull sees no need for restraint. He read them all out, promising that Reform was on the point of winning 450 seats in Parliament. There are battery farms in East Anglia that don’t count their chickens with this much enthusiasm.
His presence highlighted the event’s pantomime air, which was enhanced by the enthusiastic use of pyrotechnics and flashing lighting. “Rayner has resigned!” he declared, like Buttons revealing that a wicked witch had been crushed by a house. Or at least a house purchase.
Jenkyns’s speech evoked a different kind of mass event. “I wanted to see for myself,” she said, describing her early engagement with Reform in the tones of a student explaining why they accepted an invitation from their flatmate to a Bible study. “What was it all about? Ladies and gentlemen, I too was caught by the Reform wave. And at last, I am home.” She could have been about to make an altar call, except that everyone present had already accepted Nigel as their lord and prime minister.
Although what do they want? If Reform supporters are strangers to the liberal elitists of the hated fake news mainstream media, they are almost as alien to the party’s big figures. Bull and Jenkyns tried out various lines that must have seemed sure-fire applause-getters when they were written down but were dead in the hall. VAT on school fees? Taxes on non-doms? Fracking? None of these seemed to animate Reform members. Even the attacks on Net Zero, and the government’s evil plan to harness the power of sun and wind to light our homes, generated little excitement.
Only one subject really got them energised: immigration. Bull promised to deport a million people, which went down a storm. Farage later promised he would stop small boats crossing the Channel within two weeks of becoming prime minister, which should probably be taken in the spirit of Donald Trump’s pledge to end the war in Ukraine in one day.
He had arrived on stage amid dry ice and flares, more like a game show host than a politician. His speech, delivered with notes around which he was clearly riffing, opened with an attack on “a Cabinet of wholly unequipped people to run our country”. And, he didn’t add, anything Labour can do, Reform can do better.
“This is a strong unified party that speaks with one voice!” Farage declared. And that voice is his. The party shop displayed football strips with the names of other key figures like Richard Tice and Rupert Lowe James McMurdock Lee Anderson, but the only shirts actually on sale were Farage ones.
That lack of personnel is one reason to raise an eyebrow at the claims of imminent power. A year ago Farage’s party won a historic five seats in parliament. He’s since won a by-election, and somehow that has taken his total number of MPs to four.
Farage rejects all this, and directly took on the idea that this was a “one-man band”. He pointed to Tice and Jenkyns, before promising that “many more talented people will come.”It’s certainly hard to imagine many less talented people.
That brought him to his newest defector, soon-to-be-Baroness Nadine Dorries. She walked on and launched into a long and, politely, confused speech about how awful the Conservatives had been. She too struggled to rally the crowd around her message, although it was the somewhat niche one that the Tories should never be forgiven for the way they’d treated Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
She had a warning for Reform, too: “Loyalty in a political party is everything.” Few people know as much about denouncing their leader as Dorries. Farage, perhaps realising this, came on stage to bring her meditation to a close.
“In the street people point at me,” he told us with characteristic modesty, “and say, ‘You are the last chance we’ve got to get this country back.’” He’s the messiah, and what’s more, if you use the code NIGEL10 you can get an exclusive discount at Direct Bullion.
