And the wider implications for the British Right.
A year ago Nigel Farage and Reform were riding high. They edged past the crucial 30% mark. Polling showed them at or very near the point of forming a majority government. If Labour kept falling, and the Tories too, they could possibly even get a significant majority.
Keir Starmer was detested. Kemi Badenoch was unconvincing. What could stop Nigel now?
Only the cracks were already showing.
Rupert Lowe and Ben Habib had already been forced out of the young party. Lowe’s expulsion in March 2025 was a particular shitshow of incompetence, factionalism and self defeating amateurism.
A party that calls the police on its own MP over an internal feud doesn’t look serious or sane. Farage, Tice and Zia Yusuf came out of the affair far more damaged by it than Lowe was. Yusuf’s accusations of bullying and threats from Lowe led to a police investigation that deeply embittered the target and set him on a path of vengeance that continues today.
Since the police found no evidence to substantiate the claims Reform were left with multiple self inflicted wounds:
- A party with only a tiny handful of leaders gave the impression that all of them were unbalanced egomaniacs unable to work together without poisonous acrimony, exactly the sort of factionalism that always turns off the voting public.
- The gleeful leftist media were given lots of opportunities to ‘report’ the disaster in loving detail in as damaging a way as they could.
- Farage and Yusuf ended up looking like obvious liars given the twists and turns in their explanations of the rift and the conclusions of the police investigation.
- Lowe was made an enemy, losing the party its strongest voice on deportations out of fear of the topic (a miscalculation, given shifting attitudes on that). Even without the extreme acrimony caused by police involvement, this was the party leadership discarding a useful speaker AND a policy option in ways that would turn off rightwing voters.
- Lowe then formed Restore, which while still small in the national polling (4%) can drain off significant votes Reform need.
All this was when they were topping the polls, with the Lowe and Habib debacle a slow acting poison already in the bloodstream of the Reform body. The Habib schism was, like Habib himself, more restrained, moderate and unspectacular, but still a completely unnecessary self-wounding.
The last year has seen a lot worse.
What was a Reform march past dead Tories towards a frightened Labour, has become a long, depressing slog in circles, or even an 1812 retreat while harried by an enemy that refuses to directly engage.
Partly, it’s not all Reform or Farage’s fault.
Labour completed a successful career assassination of the Sin Eater Keir Starmer. Like the medieval practice of sin eating, Labour’s collective poisonous faults and sins were ingested by one man, and his removal supposedly removes them too. For many of the more intellectually challenged and BBC addicted British voters, the move seems to have worked, facilitated by an incredibly biased light touch towards his successor, Guilt Free Andy (as steeped in all the same vileness as Starmer was).
The globalist media have also gone all out to utterly destroy Reform, which they accurately perceive as the biggest threat to the policies they cherish. Reform have been put under a level of media scruriny and attack that no other party is suffering. Everything from playground comments 50 years ago to secretly recorded private conversations after extraordinarily sinister Channel Four sting operations have been deployed to dig up dirt, any dirt, and fling it in Farage’s face.
Financial scandal has been the main weapon here. Farage has been subject to debanking efforts. Parliamentary rules on declared income have been applied to a generous private gift from when Farage wasn’t even an MP-a standard of predictive propriety not applied to any other figure in British politics and not required by the standard rules as applied to others.
Essentially, media companies (State funded media companies) have colluded with non-Reform political parties and the Labour government to try to nobble the electoral chances of an outsider party threatening to become the next government, an actual electoral conspiracy for which I may lack the receipts and textual confirmations but which is glaringly obvious to those who understand how the self-protecting system really does work.
This isn’t Reform financial crimes sitting around waiting to be discovered. It was for the first ‘scandal’ a private matter outside the bounds of Westminster and not ordinarily subject to Westminster rules, and for the second (the Channel Four donations sting) a conspiracy of entrapment on the part of a State funded media outlet against the party most threatening to the one currently leading the British State.
Reform are guilty of being idiotic enough to let themselves be entrapped by Channel Four in speculative chat that looks very bad, but there was no existing crime being investigated. It was entirely a sting operation designed to create the impression of crime, for the political aim of destroying Reform.
The first of these attack lines was sufficient to prompt Farage to stand down and call a by-election, which he of course stood in and won. While critical of many Farage moves that one seemed clever to me. It allowed him to make a dramatic announcement on TV that all stations showed giving him a free broadcast in which to respond to his attackers. And the Establishment response of refusing to stand candidates against him did not make him look bad at all-it re-established the idea that Reform are the alternative for Britain, with every other party part of the system seeking to keep this rebellious force out.
The second, though, coincides with more self-inflicted confusion. When Zia Yusuf got Lowe ousted, it was a move an Establishment Tory might have made, a ‘Polite Right’ expulsion of someone speaking a little too loudly, accurately and brazenly about an actual rightwing policy the Establishment Right considers embarrassingly unmentionable. Now, though, the Establishment Right former Tory figures drawn into Reform (particularly Jenrick) want Zia Yusuf gone. There are reports that Jenrick has been refusing to talk to Yusuf for months, and that “Senior Reform figures, including chair Lee Anderson and leader Nigel Farage, have reportedly used derogatory language regarding Yusuf, and some insiders are calling for his removal due to his “destabilizing” presence and aggressive style.”.
The just concluded Reform Conference was a disaster. These factional and personal disputes were bubbling as the party struggled to explain to itself its failures over the last year. The inexplicable decision to hold the conference in a Muslim dominated city with an entrenched leftist leadership (including, importantly, leftist control of the local police force) backfired spectacularly as radical leftist agitators protested outside and infiltrated the conference itself. This in turn led to a young female heckler having to be forcibly removed.
A situation not helped by having two OAP Reform voters, obviously from the most mental health issue wing of the party’s support, physically assault the girl as she’s being ejected. It was nothing that wouldn’t be common among leftists, and barely mentioned in passing afterwards, but that look on the Right gets amplified a thousandfold by a delighted leftist media. In short, a PR car crash.
The way that incident was managed connects directly to the way the internal personality clashes have been managed too. Farage has been the most consequential outsider in British politics over the last 30 years, and might be considered a generational talent in terms of his ability to drive a party from nothing to significance in a short space of time….were it not for the fact that the record now is also well established regarding his exceptional ability to drive them off the end of a cliff at the end of that journey.
Putting Farage at the head of your team is like a mediocre athlete being given performance enhancing drugs. He can take you to Olympic gold that way, but you’ll probably be disqualified and never enjoy the victory. Yes, this is partly because the game is rigged anyway (the other parties can cheat and steal with impunity to get where they want, and they aren’t given drug tests either) but partly it is also because Nigel will be sloppy, will take shortcuts, and will be a complete idiot in terms of doing the things needed to change a sudden turbo-boost into actual wins.
There’s some degree of seriousness missing in Farage’s make-up that suits him far better to the role of sardonic jester mocking the inadequacies of others (often his most effective work while he served as an MEP during Britain’s membership of the EU) than party leader seriously considering how to govern instead of and unlike those inadequates. He’s a natural disruptor, not a natural organiser, unifier or leader. In this he’s been compared to Trump. Both are good at mocking the enemy. Both can seem bold and fearless and even very funny when in full flow, and that attitude isn’t a bad one to adopt in relation to the ossified hypocrisies and obvious absurdities of the mainstream globalist, progressive and leftist Establishment.
But in Trump there is substance underneath the showman, both a businessman’s successful acumen in assessing cost and return, and a genuine patriot’s burning conviction regarding what genuinely benefits the nation. Farage lacks this substrata, and only pretends to its existence. He knows what is absurd from the enemy, but he doesn’t know what would make him substantial.
A truly substantial leader would have found a way to swiftly expel the real lunatics and always retain the real talents. Farage polices the reputation of his parties very intensely-but in all the wrong ways. It’s not that he doesn’t care what the party looks like or that he’s too amateurish to know there should be a united message. It’s that he ignores what should be addressed and addresses what should be ignored. He expels large numbers of decent people in panic purges, but doesn’t know which Tory recruits are useful (the late, murdered Anne Widdecombe) and which are useless (take your pick among the obvious names).
Thus none of his vehicles gets the solid policy bedrock that Pete North has been screaming for, unheard, for so long. Not the really deep version that tries to anticipate responses and obstacles and how each policy must interlock.
And thus every one of them is marked by moments where Farage’s own shallowness is fatal, as when a young girl has her hair pulled and blows delivered on her head while Farage, obliviously, shouts ‘boring, boring, boring’-a reaction perfectly justifiable if there aren’t, simultaneously, those images of the heckler being assaulted. He had his stock response to disruption, and he chortlingly offered it at exactly the wrong moment. To be fair, he may well not have seen what was happening.
Trump, though, is never that oblivious. I’ve seen it. He asks for leftist protestors to be ejected. He can mock them. He addresses the crowd about it. But it’s calm. It’s watchful. It’s not anger-it’s amused contempt. This gives the point without creating a disaster. He’s following what is happening. Farage turned away, laughing to himself, where Trump would have been looking towards the incident, and therefore able to adjust, able to see it going wrong and say something better. This is just really basic instinct or really basic training. Don’t let yourself get caught out.
The young girl by the way is probably a total bitch. A rabid leftist nutjob. It doesn’t matter. Do the job and pay attention. Because any slip by the populist is going to be crucified in the press.
It’s linked back to the very start of the Reform-Restore split.
How did Farage, Tice, Lee Anderson, Zia Yusuf, and Rupert Lowe all let the Yusuf-Lowe split get to the point it did? Are these adults? Are these grown men who want power? Are these men who want to save their country from leftist policy and madness? How were they unable to sit down and thrash out a deal between themselves putting the aim of getting into power before personal rivalries and hatreds and disagreements? How did it get to the insanely oblivious point where calling the police made sense to them? If you were serious about saving your country you might well keep your fucking mouth shut after fifteen minutes of rolling around on the floor punching and kicking each other.
How could they not see how calling the police would look, and how it damaged ALL of them.
Men as wicked and dead inside as Gordon Brown and Tony Blair knew they had to do a deal and pretend to be friends to get their side into power. That lasted TEN YEARS. Years of seeing what they wanted to happen, happen to the rest of us. To the country. Everything they believed was false. Everything they did was damaging. But fucking hell they were serious about getting the chance to do it.
People on the Right are never that serious about getting the chance to do it.
It’s almost inconceivable to me how the British Right can be as inept as they are. These are all people who, on the surface, are far more successful than myself. When the Tories stumbled from one ridiculous disaster to the next, constantly destroying themselves, tearing down their own leaders, scheming for the top job then not having a clue what to do with it, leaking to the media, pursuing Globalist policies which any working class Conservative voter could and did tell them were wildly unpopular, deciding to mimic Tony Blair at the point where Blair became despised, or later, deciding to oppose Brexit or fail to deliver it, any rightwing voter could have told them they were building enormous levels of resentment for never delivering rightwing policies. Immigration was just one of many examples. COVID was another. All the time they had ‘strategists’.
These people were being paid to advise them, and it seemed like none of them had ever spoken to a real person or had the faintest idea what real people want.
I understand of course that these aren’t really the top layer of power, and that like the hacks in the media are more a middle rank nomenklatura following orders….but imagine if any of them had possessed the imagination to defy those orders. Wouldn’t that have been better than what actually happened?
Farage has long tried desperately to play within the guidelines determined by people who despise him. He’s not neglected the image of the party he’s leading, he’s policed it relentlessly in ways that destroy himself-ousting those who should not have been ousted, welcoming those who should not have been welcomed, and desperate to be considered part of the club, the respectable club, that views him with utter detestation. This leaves Farage roundly condemning working class movements of resistance to the Establishment, when really their existence should be used as an opportunity to describe WHY direct action movements are growing. A perfect opportunity to condemn the Left and the mainstream for the desperate slide towards civil conflict their lack of listening has caused, is turned into a vote losing repetition of the same responses we would get from a Tory or a leftist.
When Farage calls working class protestors who wear balaclavas to peacefully protest open borders “disgusting”, he loses votes. This is obvious. It is equally obvious that when he does this, when he shares the Establishment response, he gains nothing. They will keep calling him names and conducting sting operations to destroy him. There aren’t floating voters or convertible leftist voters who suddenly think ‘hey, Reform are ok’. They will continue to think and say ‘Reform are fascists’.
Still desperate for respectability, Farage risks becoming nothing but an example of Clown World thinking:
Many people see these statements from Farage and tell me to prefer Restore. I hate the statements and feel like doing so. But Restore cannot hit 30%. Show me evidence they can and I would switch (presuming they kept out Jew haters that is). Nobody has that evidence because it doesn’t exist. And Restore and Lowe are no more competent.
In my local area I have at least seen some competence. The Reform councillors in my area have started well. They are addressing Labour corruption. Reform secured local votes for 5 million people in my area who were being denied those votes. We then delivered Reform victories with those votes. I now have an excellent Reform Mayor after a detestable Labour one. A council merger nobody wanted has been stopped. A development project that would have directly impacted where I live negatively has been stopped. Saner, smarter options are being followed instead.
It’s not perfect, but it shows some improvement still possible within the existing system, and some point to voting for Reform, regardless of the flaws of Farage.
The British Right, though, need to do so much better. The old still clueless Tories still haven’t heard the lesson. The shallow clown Farage needs to clasp the sceptre of real lesdership and be a British Trump or step out of the way, because Old Tory snobbery and ineptitude in new Reform colours is not what we need. And the Restore cosplayers and Lowe need to grow up too. Offer alliance without preconditions. Have a real discussion about it.
If any of them genuinely are on the Right, they need to look at how Labour became New Labour, not the way Cameron era Tories did (copying the policies) but the way a smart operator would (copying the discipline, copying the methods, copying the unity).
Blair and Brown hated each other. Together, they imposed a leftist revolution in the British constitution which has enabled every evil we face today.
Can the pathetically squabbling British Right ever learn what this means? A Reform turnaround depends on them doing so. They could play smart.
Stop the circular firing squad on the Right. Stop the internal fighting within Reform itself. Thrash out the policy details. Decide the concessions that allow giant egos to cooperate. Either heal the rifts or ignore them. Concentrate on attacking Labour. Work out a way to compensate for leftist tactical voting. Use every sting and scandal as an opportunity to expose the bias and corruption of the media. Put victory before personality.
Everything else is amateur hour.
By Daniel Jupp at Jupplandia.
