Reform party

Will any party stand up for ‘Nick’?

Meet Nick. He is 30 years old, has a good job and lives in London. He keeps himself to himself. He isn’t political. At least he never used to be. And yet the struggle of Nick has become the struggle of our age. For Nick, the social contract has broken down. Nick embodies a generation for whom achieving the same life quality as their parents is a distant dream  After he has paid his taxes, student loan and the rent for his Zone 4 shoebox, Nick’s take-home pay is meagre. He knows where his money goes: on the benefits, social housing and remittances of one Karim, 25, an aspiring grime

Welcome to Scuzz Nation

Reform’s success in last week’s local elections has been attributed to many causes. Labour’s abolition of the winter fuel payment for pensioners. The hollowing out of the Conservative party’s campaigning base. Nigel Farage’s mastery of social media. But if you want an emblem of why voters turned their back on the political establishment let me give you Goat Man. In one ward in Runcorn, the seat Labour lost to Reform by just six votes, residents found that no one would listen when a neighbour filled his derelict house with goats and burned the animals’ manure in his garden. Despite repeated appeals to authority, no action was taken. If the council

Portrait of the week: Reform party’s victories, Duke of Sussex’s defeat and Deliveroo’s takeover

Home In a day that upset the apple cart of party politics, Reform won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election by six votes, with 38.72 per cent of the vote, compared with Labour’s 52.9 per cent last year. Of 1,641 wards in England up for election, Reform won 677. The Tories lost 676, winning only 317. The Lib Dems gained 163, winning 370 in all. Labour lost 186, winning 99. Reform won control of ten of the 23 councils in contention. The Liberal Democrats won three councils. The Tories lost all their 16 councils. Dame Andrea Jenkyns, a former Tory minister, was elected Reform mayor of Greater Lincolnshire; Luke Campbell, the

Britain’s decline is a threat to democracy

Democracy was born in the public square. The Athenian agora was the central meeting place of an engaged citizenry where business was transacted, social life flourished and a common direction for the people was determined. The idea of a public square – where individuals operate in a relationship of trust and shared endeavour – is embedded in the life of our democracy. But today, increasingly, our public squares are squalid, lawless, derelict spaces, as Gus Carter records in our cover piece. Shoplifters go unpunished, fly-tipping is unpursued, drug-taking and dealing are commonplace. The busy commercial and social life of the high street a generation ago has been supplanted by rows

Matthew Parris

Kemi shouldn’t play the Trump card

I doubt I’m alone among Spectator readers in feeling a certain slight but nagging discomfort when I hear those on the left in British politics tearing into the present President of the United States. Why so? one asks oneself. Have I a shred of sympathy with this monster? No. Can I do other than deplore the attitudes and personal behaviour of this moral toad? Of course not. Do I for a minute agree with the way he’s handling the presidency – that machine-gun fire of executive orders and constitutional improprieties?’ By no means. Could I by any stretch of the imagination endorse the preposterous policy goals Donald Trump is wont

The secret behind Reform’s local election campaign

It is an irony of Brexit that, since we left the EU, British politics has become more European. The local elections on Thursday will put another nail in the coffin of the two-party system that has dominated the UK for 100 years. Labour and the Conservatives now poll a combined 45 per cent of the vote: half the country want someone different. ‘Welcome to the age of five-party politics,’ says one Tory candidate. Alongside 1,600 council wards up for election, there are four metro mayoralties too. The reintroduction of first-past-the-post means that contests in the west of England, Cambridgeshire and Hull are four-horse races. Ten years ago, Ed Miliband’s ‘35

Reform vs Labour: who’ll win the battle for the north?

When MPs and peers were recalled to parliament for an emergency debate on renationalising British Steel, one man was the talk of the terrace: Nigel Farage. Out by the river, a Labour peer congratulated the Reform leader for ‘leading on everything’. After all, Farage had been in Scunthorpe days earlier calling for steel nationalisation.  Since I started covering British politics for The Spectator ten years and six prime ministers ago, there have been plenty of times when an insurgent party appeared to be on the rise. In 2015, the ascent of Ukip contributed to David Cameron’s decision to call a referendum on EU membership. Then in 2019, the success of

Trump has breathed new life into Davos Man

So bad was the debut of this Labour government that many think it has already failed. But now, I suggest, there is at least a chance it will succeed. If it leads industrial recovery based on defence and security, tackles the flawed basis of large areas of welfare spending and sweeps away planning restrictions to build more, it will have confronted problems which the Tories evaded for years. Labour can do this, of course, only if it abjures the beliefs that Sir Keir Starmer has espoused throughout his political career, but that seems to be exactly what his managers, led by Morgan McSweeney, are now (rightly) forcing upon him. Rupert

Portrait of the week: Spies in Norfolk, rats in Birmingham and Denmark ditches letter deliveries

Home Three Bulgarians were found guilty of spying for Russia as part of a cell that plotted to kidnap and kill targets in Europe, under a fellow Bulgarian who lived in a former guest house in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. The court heard that the spies reported to Austrian-born Jan Marsalek, who sought refuge in Moscow after the collapse in 2020 of Wirecard, the German payments company he helped run. Walgreens Boots Alliance, the US owner of Boots the chemist, was taken over by a private equity firm, Sycamore Partners. The government introduced the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which will enable councils to seize land. The cost of a first-class stamp

Why Nigel should listen to Rupert

I was thinking lately of Robert Kilroy-Silk. For younger readers, and people who were never students or unemployed, a quick refresher course may be needed. From 1986 to 2004 Kilroy-Silk was the presenter of a BBC daytime television programme called Kilroy. It had something of a cult following because of its unintentional hilarity. The live audience was carefully ring-mastered by Kilroy-Silk, who wandered around the studio with a microphone asking people what they thought about various ‘ishoos’ of the day. For some of us the main entertainment came from the fact that there was never quite enough room on the audience banquettes and so we watched for those moments when

Letters: Wokery is a form of dictatorship

Democracy rules Sir: I share the sentiments of both Rod Liddle (‘Trump displays weakness, not strength’, 8 March) and Douglas Murray (‘How MAGA turned on Ukraine’). I am one of those peculiar political animals who finds himself in agreement with certain elements of the right, including those represented by Donald Trump, on just about everything except Ukraine. Nevertheless, I see his election as an essential antidote to the poisonous ideology of the woke that has all but conquered the rest of the West in terms of the manner in which we live and are governed. Nor is the US immune. Without wishing to quibble with a courageous and eloquent speaker

Nigel’s gang: Reform’s plan for power

A year ago, Reform party aides found themselves in a cramped office in Victoria, London, bickering about chairs. ‘There weren’t enough seats to go around,’ recalls a staffer. These days there are no such issues. Leading in the polls and with five MPs in tow, Nigel Farage’s party has moved to Westminster’s Millbank Tower. This 1960s block peering over the Thames is where Tony Blair’s landslide victories were fought for and won; the new tenants are intent on dismantling most of his legacy as they plot a path to 10 Downing Street. Look at any opinion survey and Reform is hard to dismiss. Having won 14 per cent of the

Could a Tory/Reform pact be looming?

In 1603, James VI managed to do what few thought possible. The self-styled first King of Great Britain succeeded in bringing the ‘auld enemies’ of Scotland and England under one monarch. That union of the crowns is a topic of chatter and inspiration for the British right these days. Admirers of Nigel Farage now talk about the ‘James I model’. The idea is simple: could the two warring tribes of the Conservatives and Reform be brought together under one leader? The next general election may be nearly four years away, but it’s telling that such conversations are already taking place. With every new opinion poll, Conservative MPs grow a little

Can Reform turn more Tory donors?

15 min listen

Tuesday night’s Reform fundraiser was designed to spook the Conservative party, says Conservative peer and journalist Paul Goodman on today’s episode. He talks to Cindy Yu and James Heale about whether Kemi Badenoch can keep her cool under Reform’s domination of the airwaves. Produced by Cindy Yu.

Labour is starting to panic about Reform

‘We’ve had enough of living in two-tier Britain,’ bellows Nigel Farage to cheers from an 800-strong crowd at Chester’s Crowne Plaza Hotel, where he is holding court. ‘There is not a single person on that Labour frontbench who’s ever worked in private business,’ the Reform leader declares. ‘So, is it any wonder they’re making such a Horlicks of it?’ Chester is the sixth stop on Farage’s new year tour, which was initially intended to sound a steady drumbeat in the lead-up to May’s local elections. Since those plans were made, however, Labour has announced a devolution shake-up that could allow various councils to delay their elections by a year. ‘It’s

Is Reform unstoppable?

Lying in bed pissed on Boxing Day night, I was visited by the ghost of Christmas Future, dressed in a grey jacket with a velvet collar, hovering over my pit cackling and in a similar state, alcohol-wise, to myself. It seemed very happy, this ghost. It led me to a graveyard where it pointed, in jubilation, at a headstone which had the words ‘Kemi Badenoch 2024-2026’ on it. ‘You shouldn’t joke about people passing away, Nigel,’ I told this phantom a little sententiously. ‘She’s not actually dead, you idiot,’ replied the wraith, lighting a fag. ‘It’s a metaphor.’ When I awoke 12 hours later, my mobile phone flashed a message

Right move: will Britain benefit from the global conservative turn?

The world appears to be turning on its axis – and moving hard to the right. The New World is tilting hardest. In Argentina, Javier Milei is taking a chainsaw to bureaucracy. In the US, Donald Trump is poised to deport migrants, deregulate the economy and drill, baby, drill. Canada’s tendresse for the maple-syrupy liberal Justin Trudeau has chilled into a bitter determination to oust him in favour of the anti-woke, pro-growth ‘true conservative’ Pierre Poilievre.  And where the New World has led, the Old is following. Giorgia Meloni is now Europe’s most consequential leader – upholder of some pretty traditional values with a strikingly hard policy on migration. Germany goes to the polls next

James Heale

Rachel Reeves’s new year’s resolution

On Christmas Day, 12 million people watched the will-they-won’t-they couple Smithy and Nessa finally marry after 17 years in the finale of the hit BBC comedy series Gavin and Stacey. Yet for all the cheery sentiment, it’s a depressing thought that – statistically – in the real world the characters would be earning roughly the same amount at the series’ end in 2024 as they were at its beginning in 2007. Rachel Reeves’s task this year is to spring Britain from its low-growth trap. The early signs are not encouraging. Those captains of industry whom she once so assiduously courted are turning hostile. The Confederation of British Industry says private