Reform had clearly planned the Campest Show On Earth for their conference this year. Sparklers, club anthems and strobe lights: imagine Sir Keith Joseph was in charge of your primary school disco and you get a sense of the vibe. Unfortunately for the budding impresarios of Reform, they were upstaged. Just as their conference was starting, the inevitable happened and Big Ange called it a day. In many ways, the Deputy Prime Minister and Reform have a lot in common: a working-class support base, an obvious contempt for the smoking ban and finances which are best left, er, unscrutinised. Still there was room for only one headline and the reshuffle got it.
Many true blues had apparently turned turquoise.
A demotion for the Sage of Tottenham from Foreign Secretary to Lord Chancellor, a sideways shift for Yvette Cooper and a promotion to the Home Office for one of the only competent ministers going, Shabana Mahmood. Lammy was given the trinket of Deputy Prime Minister, which these days is a bit like being made Hairdresser-in-chief to Marie Antoinette c.1792. Anyway, there was a palpable air of stolen thunder at the NEC, but sort of in the same way that the sinking of the Lusitania is often overshadowed by the loss of the Titanic.
The event was compered by David Bull and Jeremy Kyle, who brought an exquisite Ugly Sisters in Cinderella energy to proceedings. I can only imagine that the ghost of Frankie Howerd wasn’t available. Bull in particular looked like he had recently been living in a sun-bed. Blacking up is probably a step too far even for this conference but Bull, white teeth and gold jewellery glinting against his ochre skin, came pretty close. Kyle occupied himself with a series of random vox pops, his stock in trade. At one point, he handed the mic to an elderly Australian man with a St George’s flag who called Keir Starmer “that bastard”.
The crowd was awash with “Farage 10” football shirts, which an enterprising Reform HQ were selling for £40 a pop from their conference shop. But you also noticed the traditional uniforms of the Tory grassroots; the mud-soaked Barbour jacket, the fleece gilet, the WI perm. Many true blues had apparently turned turquoise.
Meanwhile Andrea Jenkyns added further to the camp quotient by coming on stage dressed in a sparkling pantsuit and singing Faithless’s ‘Insomnia’. Watching this, it was genuinely hard to shake the idea that I might have actually concussed myself on the way in. Jenkyns finished by asking everyone in the audience to stand up and chant the words: “NIGEL WILL BE PRIME MINISTER!”. It was reminiscent of a drunk Demon Headmaster.
The lowest point was probably the arrival of Reform’s latest recruit. “Loyalty in a political party is everything”, began recent defector Nadine Dorries. Dressed in a bizarre Colonel Sanders style three-piece suit and equipped with a Kylie mike, she slurred and swayed her way through her speech. She reminded the audience that the “most overused phrase” in politics is that “the next general election will be the most important one”. “It’s like Peter and the Wolf,” she added – presumably meaning the boy who cried wolf.
The Reform audience didn’t seem overly enamoured of their new Tory recruits; applause for both Dorries and Jenkyns was dutiful rather than enthusiastic. In fact, Reform councillor and rising star of the party Laila Cunningham told TV reporters she was “sceptical” of Dorries’s defection. The next Reform UK away-day should be a hoot.
Eventually we came to Nigel Farage, who strode out to WWE walk-on music and more sparklers than you’d see on a night out at the Sugar Hut. He took great delight in skewering some of the reshuffle’s victims – praising Jonathan Reynolds as a ‘fully qualified solicitor’ and Rayner as “an accomplished property developer and speculator”. The Conservatives he simply described as ‘dead!”. There was more than a hint of the Donald here, and his catty drag-queen energy.
Speaking of which, we heard from Lee Anderson, who complained about drag queen story hour: “I tell you if any o’them had been at my school, they’d have been carted off to the funny farm.” Zia Yusuf channelled Liam Neeson in Taken as he described a new body he hoped to set up called ‘UK Deportation Command’ – a sort of British ICE. “They will find you, they will detain you, and they will deport you”.
Next came a panel on women in the Reform Party, hosted by Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, who joked that the participants should be called “Farage’s fillies”. Pearson wondered aloud what the equivalent for Labour would be; “What can we call them, Starmer’s Sleazies?” she asked the audience. “Sluts!” yelled an elderly man who was sitting behind me.
Soon Farage made his second appearance, wearing a turquoise suit which he pretended to remove, to wolf-whistles from the audience. Things suddenly took an odd turn during Farage’s second act. One by one, three young people sitting a couple of seats away from me stood up and began screaming “Shame on you Farage! Shame on you!”. As they were manhandled away by security guards, I only narrowly managed to avoid getting my laptop smashed. This was the closest we sketchwriters get to war reportage. Although, frankly, I could have told you this trio were suspicious – there aren’t too many men with ponytails at this conference. “Bo-ring!” boomed Farage into the mic, as the final protester was dragged away.
Eventually we returned to Dr David Bull who managed to win the single loudest cheer of the day with a final update from the reshuffle. “I am hearing Ed Miliband is about to be fired”, he told the crowd. “Do you want him to be fired?” “Yesssssssss!” came the deafening scream. Labour may have stolen today’s limelight but the big Reform extravaganza is only just beginning.
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