The slow death of the Slop Right

I appreciate that a lot of my anti-Reform shtick is boring, negative and repetitive. It’s boring to even write it, but that goes with the territory of being a political commentator. But for me it tells its own story that most of the criticisms I was making two years ago (feels like an eternity) remain the same.

The party is still an overly centralised private company, reliant on millionaire donors, where members have little to no influence over what it says and does. There is still no obvious successor to Farage, it still has no technical policy competence, it has only one formal policy document to its name, they still routinely contradict themselves and each other, and policy is still whatever Farage says it is.

Meanwhile, I agree with Zia Yusuf more often than not, but other than that, there is nobody in the party who is remotely impressive. I’m not looking at a party that’s ready to take power that knows what it would do with power, and I don’t see anyone in the party who would be an effective minister. There is still no intellectual foundation, and no real evidence that one is under construction.

Routinely we are told that the party is professionalising, but that is all contingent on your definition of the word. They have professionalised the electioneering and the presentation layer, but not the political organisation. It is still very much Farage and his hapless entourage - and I don’t really see that dynamic changing with Yusuf at the helm.

For me, the Channel 4 sting operation was quite instructive. You do have to wonder why James Orr, supposedly a fearsome intellect, recruited for the purposes of building an intellectual foundation, was reduced to grubby back room deals to raise money. It was never his function. But that tells us everything about the culture of the organisation, where everything is done in the leader’s own image.

Die-hard supporters will say they do not care about any of this, because the objective is to “smash the uniparty”, which is a wholly understandable (if a little nihilistic) objective. I don’t see that it gets us anywhere if it produces an incompetent and corrupt government that won’t last a year without imploding under the weight of its own lack of preparedness.

I don’t think any of this is lost on the wider electorate. There’s a reason Reform peaked in the polls some time ago, there’s a reason it underperforming in by-elections, and there’s a reason it is bleeding support. More and more people are waking up to what it actually as, as opposed to what they hoped it was. While there are the makings of a political party there, it will remain a dysfunctional personality cult, and it’s no use pretending otherwise.

That doesn’t mean people won’t pretend otherwise. Some people have invested their heart and soul into it, in the hope of toppling the regime, and those people will be in denial until the day it goes pop. I can understand it too. In order to toil away in politics, you have to buy into a delusion otherwise it would seem wholly futile. We’d never have left the EU had people been realistic about the chances of leaving the EU in the early days of Ukip.

But this isn’t that. It’s not about whether the right can win a vote. The objective here is a ruthlessly competent, government that’s actually on our side. For Reform, that’s too big of an ask. The culture Farage brings to the party does not result in competence, and you can never wholly trust populists because policy is only ever calibrated for the week in which it is useful.

I have always know that Reform was a cul-de-sac. Attempts were made to give it direction at the very beginning, but that all came to nothing, and the moment Farage came back into the fray, it became a futile endeavour. All it can really do is sabotage the Tory party. While that is useful purpose in its own right, it doesn’t really get us anywhere. We are still lumbered with the most detestable politicians of all time.

What we’re now faced with is a fragmented right, with no party capable of winning in its own right, and no party that could form the kind of government we need. You can’t build a bridge with rotten timber.

It's not just Reform which is dead in the water and holed below the waterline either. We can now say much the same about Restore Britain. If you examine Rupert Lowe's blistering attack on Reform around the time of his departure, he set out certain benchmarks of how a serious party should operate. His own endeavour now fails by every single one of his own metrics.

The party now stands as a similar cult of personality, with a similar lack of coherence and coordination, with Lowe taking a similarly hands-off approach to Farage, leaving the day to day running of messaging to proxies who don't even align with his own politics.

Not only is the party not attracting serious people, it is actively repelling them. Through its own ineptitude it has managed to alienate supporters on both wings of the party, while the quality of its output has been on a declining trajectory since day one. It also has serious reputational problems on account of the conduct of its activists.

Lowe's promise of putting together a "serious alternative" by 2029 is, putting it politely, not on target. Right now, all it's on course to achive is to deny Reform up to fifty seats, which makes it look like its only reason to exist is to prosecute a vendetta against Farage. Being that the case, Reform could very well choose to concentrate efforts on Great Yarmouth to split the vote just enough for Lowe to lose his seat. Lowe does not enjoy a big majority.

As it happens, I do see the utility in costing Reform a number of seats. Lowe is absolutely correct in saying that Farage should never be prime minister and Reform has no plan. It all just seems a little redundant being that Reform is a self-sabotaging enterprise that cannot withstand the misdeeds and incompetence of its own leadership.

Taken in the round, that leaves the right irreparably fragmented, incoherent and unelectable. Any hopes of dislodging the incumbent and "smashing the uniparty" in 2029, or before, are now ashes. It would now appear that the decline trajectory has to run its course to its inevitable conclusion. Consequently, our last hope is to take this to the streets. We are not voting our way out of this mess.