“Probably the most popular politician” — the newest recruit to Nigel Farage’s Reform Party was describing themselves. With that introduction, there could be no doubt. It was, of course… Well, hang on a moment. Why don’t you have a guess? Someone who was once probably Britain’s most popular politician. No peeking.
Farage had opened the morning’s event with a complaint that sketchwriters keep describing Reform as a one-man band. This was quite unfair. We could see the other members of the band in the front row, laughing loyally at the Dear Leader’s jokes. There were Danny Kruger, David Bull, Richard Tice, Lee Anderson and the Cambridge theologian James Orr. You could get a pub quiz team out of that lot. Or a really terrible podcast.
So they exist, although they’re rarely allowed to open their mouths. Tice’s last appearance was to apologise for something he’d said in a previous one. Kruger has announced that Reform will be copying Donald Trump’s second term, rather than his first, a position that looks madder with every piece of news coming out of the US.
But who would be next to join the row of nodding dogs that will turn Britain around? Only someone who was once probably the most popular politician in the country! Last chance to have a guess! Farage was cueing up the video reveal. That’s right, it was… Nadhim Zahawi!
I’m afraid some of us laughed. Former Tory chairman Nadhim Zahawi, a man who as Chancellor of the Exchequer was under investigation by his own department over his tax affairs, and who threatened legal action against reporters who asked questions about this! Who agreed, while in that job, to pay the revenue a £1 million penalty, and failed to mention this to any of the three prime ministers he worked for! Who accepted a job from Boris Johnson and then denounced him two days later! Or, according to taste, “probably the most popular politician” in the country.
In he marched, to give a speech about the appalling mess the country is in. “Nothing works today!” declared the man who was a Conservative MP for the 14 years the party was in government. Children should “be taught facts, not harmful fictions at school,” declared the Education Secretary (2021-22). The country was “crushed into the dirt by ever-growing taxes”, said a man who could have helped with that by paying what he owed when he owed it.
“I have been reflecting on the successes and failures of my own party’s time in government,” Zahawi went on. “My analysis is that a huge culprit is…” You? Your colleagues? Of course not.
What a gift it would be, as Robert Burns observed, to see ourselves as others see us. I had completely forgotten that in 2022 Zahawi actually stood for the party leadership. He thought he should have been prime minister! He wakes each morning and sees, in the bathroom mirror, a brilliant businessman, a noble politician, a wise statesman. A man cruelly denied the chance to achieve true greatness because his colleagues couldn’t recognise quality. Because the officious taxman with his silly rules insisted on being paid a few million more. Because pigmy journalists refused to listen to his lawyers when he said his tax affairs weren’t being investigated. Is there something else he should have had? Some other appointment that a former chancellor might expect? Let’s come back to that.
There were a lot of questions about the awful things Zahawi had said about Farage in the past, but the two men laughed it off. “These accusations of racism, of -isms of all kinds, get thrown around every single day,” Farage said. “But they get thrown around so much that, frankly, they almost become meaningless.” Likewise the Reform leader was asked about a past comment that Zahawi was simply interested in “climbing the greasy pole”. This, of course, explained why he was joining Reform.
It’s only a few months since the Reform conference was told that the Covid jab had given the Royal family cancer. Now Zahawi, minister for the vaccine roll-out, was joining the party. Had he been assured that the party had abandoned its vaccine conspiracy theories? That was a “stupid” question, Zahawi said angrily, without quite explaining why.
Zahawi brings several things to Farage: a sense of momentum, that Reform is the party on the move; reassurance, that a second-generation immigrant who once called the party dangerous no longer thinks so; and of course experience. “I’ve seen at close hand some of the mistakes prime ministers have made,” Zahawi explained. More than that, he’s been one of them.
They were asked again about Elon Musk’s X, with its new function of stripping the clothes off people in any photograph you give it. “You can do this on PowerPoint!” Zahawi volunteered, offering another example of the skills he brings to Reform. We can expect the party’s presentations to get significantly spicier in the months to come.
But what might Reform have to offer Zahawi? Here we got to it. What do other former Chancellors of the Exchequer have that he doesn’t? We asked if a peerage might be coming. Both men looked shifty. “No promises have been made,” Zahawi said. “No promises have been sought.” The Tories later claimed he’d asked them for a seat in the Lords and they’d refused. But that can’t be true. Nadhim Zahawi, once probably the most popular politician in Britain, had denied it, and that’s a denial, as the taxman can tell you, that you can take to the bank.
