Everyone is talking about Reform: Rachel Reeves complains that Nigel Farage ‘doesn’t have a clue’ how to make the economy grow. Kemi Badenoch says Reform is offering ‘knee-jerk analysis’ rather than thought-through policies.
The obvious rejoinder is that Reeves doesn’t have any growth and Badenoch doesn’t have any policies, so these criticisms are a bit rich coming from them.
Reform supporters can also fall back on the old adage of public relations that there is only one thing worse than being talked about and that’s not being talked about.
Incredibly, given its struggles to achieve any cut-through at all until a year or so ago, Reform is currently the most visible brand in British politics. Just today the party and its leader are the focal points of two splashes in heavyweight newspapers. The Telegraph leads on Farage being poised to help Peter Mandelson forge good links with the incoming Trump administration, while the FT’s splash is about Reform treasurer Nick Candy’s vow that Reform will disrupt UK politics ‘like we have never seen’.
Candy also told the FT that Reform was going to ‘raise more money than any other political party’ and that it would have more members than the Conservatives within three months.
No wonder the Westminster establishment is pondering whether to outlaw major donations to parties by wealthy foreign nationals via the British arms of their companies. For it is a rumoured impending $100 million donation to Reform from Elon Musk that has really set the cat among the pigeons. Even if the richest man in the world donated just a tenth of that sum, it would still give Reform massive extra campaigning firepower. Commons Leader Lucy Powell has confirmed that new legislation is in the pipeline to ensure political donations are ‘fair and robust’.
And yet rushing through a new law specifically to disadvantage an insurgent party is a terrible look for any incumbent in a democracy – the sort of thing one might expect of a Balkan thug regime on the skids rather than of His Majesty’s Government.
Given Farage’s enormous following on social media platforms, he could obviously make hay with the idea of Reform being persecuted by a failing establishment that deserves to be swept away. After all, the refusal to allow him to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday or to nominate a single peerage despite Reform’s electoral showing in July look like other examples of a political cartel rigged against new entrants. And with Candy pointing out that Musk is far from the only billionaire pondering giving money to the party, Reform may well soon accumulate a larger war-chest than is available to Labour or the Tories anyway.
Badenoch has taken a more sensible and upbeat stance, telling the BBC’s Amol Rajan that she believes in competition and sees it as her job to raise for the Tories a sum to match anything donated to Reform.
The Tory leader sounds less rattled by Reform than do Labour high-ups right now. She has gone public about her strategy that I described on this site recently as ‘Operation Slow Burn’.
‘It’s going to be slow and steady. It’s the tortoise strategy, not the hare’, she told Rajan. This idea that ‘slow and steady wins the race’ is of course the moral of Aesop’s famous fable about the tortoise and the hare.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work. For example, I used it to guide my own approach in a seaside charity fun run just yesterday. Alas, the younger, fitter hares just dashed away from me at the start and kept going at high speed all the way to the finish line.
If Reform proves to be that sort of hare then all the establishment parties are going to be in very big trouble indeed.
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