It is a well known axiom of politics that once you compare your opponents to Hitler’s Nazis you have well and truly lost the argument. But that golden rule seems to have been lost on Tory party chairman Kevin Hollinrake who has rightly come under heavy fire for comparing Reform UK to the Nazis.
Hollinrake’s gaffe is a measure of just how worried the Tories are about the rise of Reform
Hollinrake posted two images on X showing a black and gold Reform logo promoting the populist party on a football shirt next to a picture of the Nazis’ golden party badge – a special award instituted by Hitler on becoming German Chancellor in 1933 to honour the party ‘alte kampfer’ (old fighters), the first 100,000 loyal Nazi members who joined after the party’s foundation in 1919.
Hollinrake evidently thought better of the post as he swiftly deleted it – but he later doubled down on the smear by posting a link to the Wikipedia page about the golden badge.
After a furious reaction from Reform’s leaders, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch came out in defence of Hollinrake, feebly claiming that his post was ‘a joke’. Reform leader Nigel Farage said the post was the reason the Tories would only hold 14 seats at the next election – a reference to a dire opinion poll circulating in Tory central office last week.
Reform’s policy chief Zia Yusuf said Hollinrake’s gaffe had ensured that both Badenoch and Tory shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick would lose their seats at the election as Reform would flood their constituencies with vans and leaflets reminding voters that the Tories thought they were Nazis.
Criticism also came from the former Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who said the post was the sort of thing that she expected from Labour – not from her own party. She added that comparing Reform to the Nazis was ‘wrong, irresponsible, and highly counter-productive.’
The truth is that Hollinrake’s gaffe is a measure of just how worried the Tories are about the rise of Reform, which has consistently topped opinion polls all this year on around 30 per cent – ahead of Labour and consigning the Conservatives to a distant third place on around 17 per cent. The insurgent party has also taken a steady stream of Tory seats in council by-elections since they seized control of ten local authorities last May, and a handful of Tory MPs and ex-MPs have also defected to Farage’s party.
Is it any wonder when the Conservative party behaves in this way? A facile comparison of a democratic British political party with the genocidal National Socialists who plunged the world into the second world war and murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust cannot simply be dismissed as ‘a joke’ as Badenoch says. It is a monumental and offensive blunder.
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