Reform: decline and fall

That Rupert Lowe has been forced out of Reform is probably the least surprising event of the year. I’ve been predicting it for many months. It was totally inevitable. If you’re telling Nigel Farage what he does not want to hear, your remaining political life is measured in months, not years.

This time, though, the Messiah has bitten off more than he can chew. It may now be game over for the party as a whole. Reform is playing in the big leagues now with international eyes on it. Doing the dirty on your most popular MP, when you only have five to begin with is, shall we say, ill-advised. Farage was perhaps hoping for a quick hit job then for it all to blow over, but this is going to linger and there will be serious consequences.

The first of them is that Farage has single-handedly killed of any likelihood of high profile defections. Tories already probably learned that lesson form the Reckless/Carswell experience, but this is the refresher course. The second is that Reform has now lost the backing of the online right commentariat, and upset the online activist base. Rupert Lowe may not be known to the casual Reform supporter, but he is known to anyone who follows politics and influences others.

This episode has also exposed Reform as quite a nasty bunch. That this was done at all is one thing, but the way they’re going about it, in such a dishonourable underhanded way, attempting to destroy a man for the crime of disagreeing with the leader, is something else.

The real killer, though, is that we now have absolute confirmation that Reform is categorically not going to make any of the internal reforms Lowe and Habib were pressing for. The party is not going to democratise nor is it going to get serious about policy - and in offloading Lowe, the party has a whole, has moved leftward on immigration. This means that Reform will go into the next election again with no real grassroots activism, no policies to speak of, and a tarnished reputation. Converting all those 2024 second places is no longer assured.

Of course, anything can happen between now and 2029, but Farage has unwittingly started a civil war in the party. We've only really seen love taps so far, but when this bunch really go after each other it will get super nasty - and damaging in its own right. A messy court battle is certainly on the cards.

In the meantime, we could see Farage throwing Yusuf under the bus in an attempt to restore confidence, at which point I wouldn’t put it past the two-faced Tim Montgomerie to stick the knife in and quit, saying the party has a racism problem (or something equally spurious). At this point, Reform donors begin to pull the plug, and all the grubby gossip starts leaking out. Reform will struggle to expand its parliamentary presence and Lee Anderson will probably lose his seat.

If this was Farage’s best effort to professionalise the party, then it’s been an abject failure. The party looks more shambolic and amateurish than ever.

As such, I do not see a scenario where Reform recovers from this mess. A Rupert Lowe coup might do it, but I don't see how that can happen when Reform is a privately owned entity designed to prevent hostile takeovers. The wildcard could be a Habib/Lowe breakaway party but that would hit the rocks in about two years of operation. The rivalry between them and Reform would be mutually destructive.

Reform loyalists are hoping this will blow over but some wounds won’t heal. Matt Goodwin says “There is only one movement in British politics capable of reaching the 32% that is required to win a majority and save this country. Everybody needs to get behind that”. But there’s a serious question Reform cannot answer. If the party does not exist to get a grip on immigration, what is it actually for?

As it happens, I understand the logic in what Farage thinks he is doing. This is a careful triangulation of party image, and let's be frank here, Lowe was not making that easy. The gulf between the party line and his has been apparent for months.But the thing is, Farage is cocking it up. He's essentially doing what Cameron started doing in 2005, whereupon he threw the Eurosceptic wing under the bus and rebranded the party with the eco-friendly scribble tree logo. Both Farage and Cameron skipped Politics 101 which says you don't throw your own activist base under the bus if you want to survive. It cost Cameron a win in 2010, and it may well cost Farage his entire party.

Moreover, if you represent a contentious point of view, you do not simply abandon it. You make the arguments and you present the data and you make damn well sure you win the argument. To simply dump it because it's problematic to growth is absolutely pointless. Why are you even in politics if that's what you're going to do? This is the equivalent of Vote Leave deciding that on reflection Brexit isn't very popular and pivoting to "remain and reform".

If Farage wanted to grow the party beyond the populist constituency, then it was up to him to improve the party's standing in the public eye by developing serious policy so that Reform would look like a potential government instead of a protest party. The party should be offering a complete constitutional overhaul, getting people excited about the prospect of a democracy that works, new infrastructure, new jobs and investment and affordable energy. But there is no philosophy behind the party thus there no strategy, without which the party was only ever going to operate in pundit mode. People might well agree with Farage the pundit, but that's a long way from seeing Reform as a viable prospective government.

My hunch is that even had Reform not erupted into civil war, the polls have been over-egging Reform (as they did Labour in the run up to the general election), and we were about to see Reform polls receding anyway. It was gradually becoming clear that Reform MPs aren't worth their salt, and that Farage is only interested in the showbusiness.

With Farage at the helm it was only ever going to be a messianic cult, and one that would never nurture internal talent capable of replacing him, and with Farage and Yusuf being the sole shareholders, it is unlikely any successor would have met the approval of the activist base. The party has been drifting off point ever since Yusuf came along. Now that Lowe and Habib are out of the picture, there is only dead wood after Farage.