It’s a very serious and rancorous time in Britain. Social strife is simmering. The asylum system is at breaking point. The lines on the economics graphs are all going in unsettling directions – the ones you’d prefer to see going down are going up, and vice versa.
And inevitably the Overton window is shifting. Though perhaps not in the way any of us expected. Reform is currently odds-on to form the next government. Nigel Farage’s party meets for its conference in Birmingham this week at 35 per cent in the polls. But that’s not because it’s bracingly right-wing. Or not just. It’s because Reform is camp. At a time when misery reigns, lanyard-class moralising is everywhere and the ‘grown-ups’ have so obviously stuffed everything up, we want a cheeky, up-yours, never-mind-the-knockers revolt against our agonisingly earnest political masters. This is the panto Overton shift.
Reform seems to grasp the appeal of camp instinctively. From Farage on down, there is a glorious kind of naffness about the party. There was his AI-created gangster rap promotional video, in which a fur-coated, blinged-out Nigel struts his stuff in a choreographed routine before Clacton Pier – ‘Prime minister of the pub and pint’. We have the Farage-branded ‘Reform FC’ no. 10 football top, which sold 5,000 units in one day. At the big Reform event unveiling the party’s deportation plans, he stood in front of a massive airline departures board marked ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS BOARDING.
The rest of the party has run with the camp ball too. There is a strong aesthetic of fluffy TV to the operation. Reform’s new chairman, Dr David Bull, is a former host of Watchdog, Tomorrow’s World and Most Haunted Live! On his press round for the new role, Bull revealed to Richard Madeley on Good Morning Britain how he had once been strangled by a ghost. Just perfect.
Reform seems to attract celebs of the daytime bargain-basement variety. TalkTV host Russell Quirk is standing for a council seat in Brentwood. Jeremy Kyle is to host a roving mic at the Reform conference. Other Reform, or Reform adjacent, names include Holly Valance, Thomas ‘bosh’ Skinner and the king of panto himself, Christopher Biggins.
We’ve forgotten that the low-rent bonhomie and chubby-cheeked mirth that we see with Reform – that is Britain. All the progressives’ cancelling and thought-policing worked for a while, because it chilled and intimidated. The progressive activists thought they could win the culture war simply by saying that they had won it. Now the John Bulls and Greasy Joans are stirring again.
The low-rent bonhomie and chubby-cheeked mirth that we see with Reform – that is Britain
GB News, Farage’s home from home, has leaned into the cheery aesthetic. It comes naturally. We’ve seen Farage himself beginning a striptease accompanied by Right Said Fred performing a rendition of their 1991 hit ‘I’m Too Sexy’. Firebrand host Patrick Christys shifts seemingly effortlessly between fervent diatribes about the state of the nation to ‘cute’ content about his recent marriage to his co-host Emily Carver and their imminent baby. Tune in to GB News at random and you’re more likely than not to find a celeb in the studio.
A friend and I used to play a little game of trying to imagine the Platonic ideal of a Reform-related GB News segment – e.g. ‘Vicki Michelle of ’Allo ’Allo! and Timmy Mallett join Ann Widdecombe to discuss the latest OBR figures’. But reality kept outpacing us. The apex of all this was when Farage was joined in Barnsley by Paul Chuckle of the Chuckle Brothers, to be serenaded by Bell & Spurling, who got to no. 7 in 2001 with the football ditty ‘Sven Sven Sven’. On this occasion, they had penned a paean to Farage titled ‘Nigel Says’ – ‘Nigel says just how it is’.
Reform is also not shy of physical grandness and eye-catching stunts. One of its new councillors, Sarah Lang of Trevethin in Pontypool, recently arranged a ‘big community clear-up’ litter-picking exercise, attired in a tight garment that displayed her generous bosom to full effect. No doubt Farage is keeping abreast of all these developments.
The crucial thing about Reform is that it is mostly not self-aware. Being self-aware isn’t camp. It’s arch, or worse, ‘campy’. Farage is not this. He loves what he is and is what he loves – gloriously, unembarrassedly seaside and suburban. Interestingly, in Tim Shipman’s third Brexit book, No Way Out, he describes a Leave Means Leave event in Doncaster where Farage’s current deputy, Richard Tice, ‘wanted people on stilts, he wanted jugglers and he wanted camels… he wanted a whole circus because he thought this would be a fantastic way to get the media drawn in’. But this is too artful, too orchestrated, too knowing. When you set out to do this deliberately you run the risk of straying into Ed Davey territory. The Lib Dem leader’s watery stunts during last year’s election campaign were too calculated to be camp. He looked as if he was trying too hard. Camp, conversely, really means it. It has an essential innocence. So, despite appearances, yes, Lee Anderson is camp, but only in that sense.
Margaret Thatcher had this quality in spades; so completely on top of the important things, with unconventional, hard-fought-for and hard-thought-out opinions – and so blissfully banal about the trivia of life. Running her finger along a dusty sill and sighing: ‘A woman just knows.’ Neil Kinnock was feted by then-fashionable bores such as Billy Bragg. Mrs T? Vince Hill and Lulu.
One of the joys of Reform’s embrace of campness is the po-faced way progressives react to it. We saw this back in the day when many of them seemed to blame Have I Got News for You for the rise of Boris Johnson. The progressive middle class cannot take daffy ingenuousness on its own terms; they always sniff some whiff of a plot.
These are people, after all, who genuinely believe that working-class people are one-toothed goons who respond like clapping, honking sea lions to whatever they’ve just seen on television. That’s why soap operas have become strange attempts to meme reality to fit progressive dogma. And, hilariously, progressives often splutter that the right has a nefarious scheme to make a long march through the institutions of light entertainment, masking its true sinister motives. It’s particularly amusing because it is the reverse of the truth. The strange takeover of even the lightweight media by progressives – Lorraine Kelly going all in on trans, Loose Women kneeling for BLM – has hidden the truth about Britain from us.
Aside from Farage, are there any other contemporary contenders for the camp crown in British politics? Starmer is too dismal, Badenoch too grave. Maybe Your Party might swing it? No, there is something too proud and ranty about the Corbyn/Sultana axis. It is banal, true, but it is gruff (although the looming spat between the trans and Islamist wings of the enterprise has much comic potential). In international politics, the king of camp is, of course, Donald Trump. He has leaned into camp without, one senses, remotely understanding it. Which is the campest thing of all. Anyone who was surprised when the MAGA movement adopted the Village People’s ‘Y.M.C.A.’ simply hadn’t been paying close enough attention.
Neil Kinnock was feted by then-fashionable bores like Billy Bragg. Mrs T? Vince Hill and Lulu
Growing up, I was stewed, steeped, marinated and in fact positively pickled in what we might call the jolly Reform aesthetic. Holiday camps, singalongs, banging knives and forks on the table to the signature tune of Sports Report. But as I matured, I learned to be embarrassed by it, or to view it ironically. (It was a while before I twigged that we were supposed to think the decor of the Trotters’ flat in Only Fools and Horses is funny, for example.) And from there it’s just a tiny step to seeing only the bad of camp, or seeing something sinister in it.
One of the things naughty observers like me enjoy about the current excitement over flag-raising is how it gives conniptions to what we might call the FBPE crowd, the progressives and public-sector panjandrums who have ruled the roost for decades. They see a Union Jack or a flag of St George and get visions of Bavaria in 1933. So, my first thought on seeing Bell & Spurling drop another boisterous hymn to Nigel is not ‘This is fun’ but ‘Won’t this drive Emily Maitlis and Rory Stewart absolutely bananas?’ The class dynamic of British society is laid so unavoidably bare on such occasions, like the gaping innards of a patient on the operating table.
We hear endlessly of ‘our communities’. The word ‘community’ is every politician’s favourite self-righteous epithet. Well, Epping and its Pink Ladies hotel protest is an actual community, which organised spontaneously to take action. The British man and woman has been derogated in a way nobody else can be. Their raising of the flags is simply a way of saying: ‘Hello, remember us?’ Nobody rattled on about Ulsterisation and Balkanisation when the country was awash with Progress Pride or Palestinian flags.
It’s time for the embarrassment at camp displays, which crept up on us in the 1980s and 1990s, to stop. This is a very different time, and different prerogatives prevail. British identity, in all its gaudy glory, must be treasured.
There may be more enlightening cultural experiences, but there is nothing more fun than a good end-of-the-pier show. And yes, the horrible, serious realities of the country’s problems will have to be tackled if and when by Reform, and planning for that really cannot be a pantomime affair. But right now, in these grim times, we need the romping Reform.
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