Reform uk

History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes, said Mark Twain. Right now the commentariat is looking for something that will rhyme with the famous Battle of Knutsford Heath of 8 April 1997. In that face-off, Neil Hamilton and his formidable wife Christine were ranged against the white-suited ‘anti-corruption’ independent candidate Martin Bell. Though the Hamiltons gave as good as they got for the cameras, Bell had the last laugh by comfortably winning the formerly impregnable Tory seat of Tatton in the general election held a month or so later. With a by-election now looming in Shropshire North following the sleaze scandal that engulfed departing Tory MP Owen Paterson, leftish

The vaccines make you magnetic, didn’t you know? And Covid is a form of biological warfare, released by the Chinese to weaken the West. New 5G technology is melting people’s brains and the Bank of England is owned by the Rothschilds. I am listening to three delegates from Reform UK’s first party conference, held in parallel to the Tories’ much larger jamboree just down the road. They are outside chaining cigarettes and they’re fired up. At last, they feel they can talk about this stuff without being shut down. I nod along. I’m not a scientist, I explain, and I don’t really know how central banks work. But why, I ask,

Sometimes things that don’t happen are as important as those that do. In the Sherlock Holmes story Silver Blaze, about the theft of a racehorse, the failure of a dog to bark is the central fact that allows the crime to be solved. Holmes mentions this ‘curious incident of the dog in the night-time’ to a Scotland Yard detective who is puzzled and tells him: ‘The dog did nothing in the night-time.’ Holmes replies: ‘That was the curious incident.’ There is a strong case for regarding the failure of a dog to bark as the central fact of British political life today. As I recently noted on this site, the

The departure of Nigel Farage from the stage does not necessarily mark the end of the ‘revolt on the right’ that has so shaken up British politics over the past decade. Followers of the fortunes of the Brexit party, which has now morphed into Reform UK, will know that Richard Tice has been the coming man for many months. Today Farage’s newly-appointed successor as party leader (the party doesn’t, as yet, do internal elections) sets out the ground on which he has chosen to take on the political establishment — for which one should read ‘nibble away at the Tory vote share’. And Tice has chosen to ignore the fashionable notion

Richard Tice is tall and lean, has a hint of Imran Khan around the eyes, and the ladies on reception in the office building where we meet seem to like him. Were Jilly Cooper to write a political novel then he would be its hero rather than anti-hero. Tice was, after all, the clean-cut one in the ‘Bad Boys of Brexit’, a band whose line up was completed by Arron Banks, Andy Wigmore and Nigel Farage. Tice is the chairman of the Farage-led Brexit party, a title he is finding irksome this afternoon as he would much rather by now be chairman of Reform UK, the new identity he and