AS A fervent Brexiteer and Reform UK activist, nobody was a bigger fan of Nigel Farage than I was.
In 2016 I stood outside my local tube station in Parsons Green handing out Brexit leaflets. Our merry band were routinely spat at and assaulted. I was called an ‘Aryan bitch’ by several bearded woke men of the kind who are so populous in wealthy parts of London.
In 2019, with Brexit still not done, I campaigned at Westminster with patriots dressed up as crusaders and then stood as a Brexit Party candidate in Dulwich – a lost cause since Dulwich had the highest proportion of Remainers outside Gibraltar.
When the Brexit Party morphed into the Reform Party I campaigned for Ben Habib in Wellingborough and Nigel Farage in Clacton. What fun it was to ride on the fabled ‘Brexit Bus’ around Essex’s leafy lanes. We never spotted Nigel, who was later found to have been in Mar-a-Lago.
One Sunday we were told that he had been glimpsed at the exclusive Frinton-on-Sea tennis club but when we arrived he had disappeared – like the Scarlet Pimpernel, he was never to be found. The lady with the milkshake must have been tracking him for weeks as we never managed to spot him.
How thrilled we were when Reform MPs were elected, yet rumblings of discontent soon became deafening. Ben Habib was the first casualty of Nigel’s ego. Hugely popular with the grass roots, his loss was a bitter blow to us all. But we ploughed on.
Nigel’s authoritarian attitude seeped like poison through local organisations. Zia Yusuf had appeared from nowhere with a brilliant speech and a £200k bung but was increasingly mistrusted.
The obsession with shipping in second-rate Tories such as Andrea Jenkyns and Marco Longhi (no, me neither), watered down the brand so much that even Lib Dems are now joining.
Then as part of his reorganisation Yusuf imposed a vetting system that has put paid to many impassioned activists. In a move that left local members both stunned and disheartened, the Stafford branch of Reform UK was abruptly shut down recently by the party’s Regional Manager. At whose instigation we don’t know. Allegedly letters to the Chairman went unanswered. The closure, announced on the branch’s official Facebook page, revealed that the acting Chairman and officers were not only removed from their positions but also faced threats of disciplinary action for their attempts to manage the branch’s affairs, making it impossible for them to support candidates for the county council elections.
Ten Reform UK Derbyshire councillors resigned, calling the party ‘increasingly autocratic’. The Newcastle North branch chair resigned. In Merseyside every Reform officer stood down, explaining on X that ‘when integrity is compromised, blind loyalty is not an option’.
My own Reform group in West London of about 15 well-organised and enthusiastic campaigners who worked tirelessly during the 2024 election has now imploded.
We are the drones who go out in the dark and in the rain to deliver leaflets and without us there is no party. Glitzy rallies with fireworks do not make up for lack of policy. My observation is that most who still support Reform are ‘armchair activists’, but you cannot be a successful party without boots on the ground.
The defamatory and unproven accusations against hard-working MP Rupert Lowe are the final straw. Like Ben Habib, Rupert is hugely popular with the grass roots. Both men have time for the ‘little people’; they are the sort of men who are polite to waiters unlike some of their colleagues.
Compare this with Habib, who joshed with us in pubs, bought the coffees, remembered our names and thanked us for our help. I travelled with him on the train back to London once and when I lost my ticket, he waited for me to find it and escorted me through the barrier. Manners makyth man!
Nigel Farage has a long history of falling out with talented compadres and can be disdainful contrary to his public ‘hail fellow, well met’ persona. Wellington was loved by his soldiers as he had their backs: take note Nigel. You haven’t had ours. Certainly when I was a Reform Patron (I forked out £1,500 to attend fancy lunches at the Cavalry & Guards club), he often seemed tetchy and tired.
What makes many of us particularly furious is that our ‘subscriptions’ and donations are now being used to fund Reform UK’s appointment of an independent King’s Counsel to conduct an investigation of a popular MP who is having to fund his defence out of his own pocket.
Farage is an amazing campaigner. Without him there would have been no referendum and no Reform UK MPs. However he is simply not collegiate enough to create the coalition that we now need to destroy the dangers that our country faces.
Trump has united the right and welcomed his erstwhile detractors into the fold to create a unified movement, the like of which we have probably never seen before. The centre right needs a proper leader not a prickly narcissist who is increasingly appears to be putting his ego before the country.
