When Labour’s chancellor, Rachel Reeves, delivered her spending review in the House of Commons this week, she kept her best quips for Reform UK, showing yet again that it is Nigel Farage’s party setting the political agenda in Britain.
The spending boost unleashed by Reeves was weighted towards the working-class battlegrounds of England’s north. This was received in the bars and tea houses of Westminster as an attempt to counter the rising threat of Reform, which leads in polls.
How it is received in the rest of the country may yet have a bearing on whether Farage’s party can maintain the seemingly inexorable recent rise in its fortunes.
Reeves also threw a focus, and no little scorn, on another aspect of Reform that Labour has recently begun to parrot as a serious risk: a sense of chaos that Labour says is only ever around the corner when it comes to Farage.
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“Perhaps [Farage] should spend some more time focusing on the priorities of the British people and less time in the Westminster Arms,” Reeves told the Commons chamber, causing the pint-loving Reform leader’s jaw to drop in mock astonishment.
Then came her punchline, mentioning yet another well-known Westminster hostelry: “Although ... after this week, perhaps the Two Chairmen pub might be a better fit.”
Reeves’s jibe was a clever reference to a recent row at the top of Reform that led to the temporary departure last week of its former chairman, Zia Yusuf, who has been credited with professionalising the party and greasing its boost in polls. A practising Muslim, Yusuf had quit in anger after receiving abuse online for dismissing a call for a UK burka ban by Reform MP Sarah Pochin.
Within 48 hours last weekend, a regretful Yusuf had returned in a new position, while Farage promised to split his former chairman’s old job into two separate roles: a front-facing one to galvanise members and a backroom operator to run its operations.
Yusuf, a 38-year-old former Goldman Sachs banker, had a reputation in Reform for abrasiveness with its staff. This week, Farage appointed smooth-talking broadcaster David Bull to fill the member-facing chairman void he had previously identified.
Bull, who comperes Reform rallies, is a favourite of the membership and is also unlikely to ruffle backroom feathers as Yusuf did. Yet he brings his own unique style of baggage.
Bull is a former presenter of television paranormal show Most Haunted Live. In an interview following his appointment this week on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, presenter Richard Madeley asked him if he believed in ghosts.
With a straight face, the new Reform chairman replied with a bizarre story about how he had driven through a forest with a paranormal presence in his car, before suggesting a ghost, possibly his dead grandmother, possessed another man who then attacked him.
If Bull’s appointment was an attempt by Farage to eliminate a sense of impending unruliness that had threatened to engulf Reform’s upper echelons, then it is easy to see why Labour views this issue as one of its rival’s weak points.
Whether this matters to voters is another question. After polling a creditable 26 per cent in a Holyrood byelection last week, Reform is targeting big gains in parliamentary elections next May in Scotland and also in Wales. In the latter it has a realistic chance of being the largest party, although its rivals may yet co-operate to keep it out of government.
It will also fight a slew of local elections that day in England where it will be expected to win control of a swathe of local councils.
Reform needs cash, however. Its coffers were emptied by recent election battles, and the Conservatives have been raising funds at three times the rate of Farage’s party.
The Reform leader has shown himself capable of setting Britain’s political weather. That doesn’t mean, however, that there are no clouds on the horizon.
