It was the very late morning after the night before. One of the many ways in which Reform’s conference differs from those of other political parties is that it doesn’t schedule 9 am events in the pretence that everyone wasn’t up all night drinking. Indeed the conference makes a virtue of its after-hours events. The performers at the previous evening’s event had been the surviving members of the Jackson Five. That had led to an awkward moment as the crowd found itself cheering a large photo of much-missed entertainer Michael Jackson.
But you can’t stay in bed all day when you have a country to save, so it was time to get on with hearing about the ideas that will turn Britain around. “The Reform Party knows how to party!” declared James Taylor, the president of the US Heartland Institute, in the awed tones of an American who had just encountered British drinking, “and knows how to get to work in the morning.” It was eight minutes after eleven.
Some of his colleagues had been at work earlier. Lois Perry, the director of his group’s British arm, revealed that Nigel Farage had given her three glasses of champagne for breakfast. He’d also advised her not to speak after drinking, but she’d decided to ignore that.
She had some views about why successive governments were trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. “Why are they doing it?” she asked. “It’s nothing to do whatsoever with the environment. It’s to control us. It’s to tax us. It’s to take our money and to take our liberty.” Take our what now? “Electric cars can be remotely controlled!” That sounds a bit … “Not a conspiracy theory!” Oh, OK.
Climate change would be good because we’d be able to grow lemons and oranges in Yorkshire
If the Friday of Reform’s conference was about telling the world that this was Britain’s next government, the Saturday was a reassurance that the party’s lunatic element is still in good health. Rival parties that were watching — and they all were — will have found their cups running over with examples of good old-fashioned crankiness. Taylor had opened by explaining that climate change was being boosted by “globalists”. Perry expanded on this: “There’s someone sitting in a white cage somewhere, stroking a white cat and laughing at us,” she said.
The host of the event where Perry was explaining her not-conspiracy theories was Christopher Monckton, who conclusively proved two decades ago that climate change isn’t real. He has also conclusively proved that the ejection of hereditary peers from the House of Lords wasn’t legal and didn’t happen, and it seems likely that he’s got conclusive proofs of quite a few other things, should you find yourself cornered at a party by him.
It tells you something about Reform that the role of centrist on the panel was taken by a man from the Institute for Economic Affairs. “You do need to keep sensible green opinion onside,” he said, though that car may already have departed, under remote control from the globalists.
One of the interesting tensions at the conference has been between the Reform speakers making big promises about the future and those who after this year’s local elections actually find themselves running local government, and realising that actual politics involves hard realities. There was a version of that on Saturday morning, as the man from the IEA explained that even if, by some incredible chance, Monckton was wrong and everyone else was right, climate change would be good because we’d be able to grow lemons and oranges in Yorkshire. Fifty feet away the National Farmers Union was holding its own event. For its members, climate change is already affecting crops in much less helpful ways.
But perhaps British wheat is just suffering from false consciousness. Monckton blames our education system for that, but you won’t be surprised to learn he has a plan to fix it: “Getting rid of the BBC!” At this, the woman behind me screamed, actually screamed: “Yes! YES! YEEEESSSS!” I determined to on no account have what she was having.
An audience member gave a tale of woe and Monckton sympathised. “I too came from a poorish family,” explained the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, eldest son of Major-General Gilbert Monckton, 2nd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley.
He is sure that kids are being fed woke nonsense in the education system. Fortunately, he has a solution for that, too, to record all lessons in primary and secondary schools, and film all university lectures. “That would stop the communist propaganda dead.”
An audience member warned that this wouldn’t be enough. He’d looked up climate change on the internet and been told it was real. “This is what we’re up against, the entire Google search engine thing.”
This was, in fairness to Reform, a fringe event, so it’s not necessarily the case that Monckton speaks for the party. He told us there was “a sporting chance” that Farage would put him in his Cabinet with the energy brief. But then he told us a lot of things.
The inevitability of Prime Minister Farage isn’t the only thing the conference is certain of. I lost count of the number of people who told me the government is on the brink of going to the IMF for a bail-out. And then there’s Covid.
Aseem Malhotra, a doctor with some distinctive views on the pandemic, is definitely an approved voice, invited to speak in the main hall. “Covid jabs have likely killed or seriously harmed millions of people across the world,” he said to a room full of people who, and I’m not judging here, fitted into quite a few of the risk profiles for Covid-19. “Not a single person should have been injected,” he went on, to applause.
Not that Malhotra is a conspiracy theorist or an anti-vaxxer! Perish the thought! “Have you heard anything anti-vax or conspiracy theory here?” said a man who also claimed the vaccines were pushed by Big Pharma and made Bill Gates half a billion dollars.
There was more: “It’s highly likely that the Covid vaccines have been a factor, a significant factor, in the cancer of members of the royal family.” It will be interesting to see which of the Reform-backing papers splash on that astonishing revelation on Sunday.
What do Reform members think of all this? They gave Malhotra a big ovation, but it’s hard to know. There’s one thing they’re sure about, though, and that’s immigration. Sarah Pochin, Reform’s newest MP, explained that the rise in reported rapes over recent decades coincided with the rise in immigrants living in the country.
And yet there was something that the crowd wasn’t quite getting. When were they going to hear from someone with the courage to say that we should just kill all the asylum seekers? It wouldn’t be long. The afternoon’s big attraction was Reform’s own Nelson Mandela, “Britain’s favourite political prisoner,” Lucy Connolly.
She was introduced by Allison Pearson, who did a decent job of making her look quite reasonable, if only by comparison. Pearson at one stage accused the police of having “tampered” with the evidence against Connolly. Her co-host Liam Halligan swiftly corrected that: “There was a distortion.”
Connolly said she wanted to work with Reform “and overhaul the prison system”, arguing that people needed mental health provision rather than jail. That’s not the Reform line: Pochin had earlier promised to build more prisons, as well as deporting foreign prisoners. And inviting domestic ones to conference.
Elsewhere, the party’s leader was signing Reform football shirts. They usually cost £40, but a signed one was £100. That seems like a lot, but it comes with a big saving to the NHS. Every signed shirt has been touched by the very hand of Nigel, which means it can cure leprosy and scrofula. Where we’re going, we won’t need vaccines.
