The Reform egos have landed
Saturday, March 15, 2025 at 10:27 Following the vicious squabbling at Reform UK, here’s a reminder of something I wrote in January 2022, five months before Boris Johnson was forced out of office by his Cabinet colleagues.
Commenting on the then PM’s precarious position, I wrote:
It’s a reminder of why I never got directly involved in politics. The problem, as I saw it, was that most politicians (and this goes back to my student days) spent far more time fighting their colleagues than challenging the ideas and philosophies of their political opponents.
Those on the same side of the political fence might agree on most issues but if one stood in the way of another they became sworn enemies and would do almost anything to bring their colleague down. Adult politics, it seems to me, is much the same and I have never wanted any direct part of it.
The Reform shenanigans also explain why I’m sceptical of grassroots membership organisations. As I commented here in response to a recent paper by Chris Snowdon:
Grassroots or membership organisations are not without their problems. For example, internal politics. This is not exclusive to such organisations but the odds on internal politics getting in the way is exacerbated because the smaller ones are often run by an elected committee whose members may have been voted in by a very small minority of members.
Such elections can throw up some freak results, including the election of ‘activist’ candidates - unrepresentative of the majority of members - whose primary aim is to disrupt the status quo.
Sometimes that can be a good thing. More often than not it’s like a cancer that threatens to destroy the organisation from within. Either way, it can be hugely disruptive and often very damaging to the organisation.
Democracy, then, has its flaws, but dictatorships rarely work well either. Even the most benign regimes rarely remain benign for long. Power corrupts, smouldering egos erupt, and the outcome is all too predictable.
Funnily enough, I’ve just discovered that I ‘muted’ Reform's Rupert Lowe on X several months ago. I’m not sure why (I have nothing against him personally) but I generally mute people if their opinions begin to make me feel uncomfortable, or if they post so often they start to dominate my timeline.
In Lowe's case it may have been a combination of the two, but I honestly can’t remember. Either way I’m not taking sides because I’m neither a member of Reform nor did I vote for the party in the general election.
As I said to a friend (who stood for Reform in the election), I couldn’t vote for the party because there were too many dodgy candidates and I didn’t like the aggressive, bullying behaviour of one member of the leadership group.
(It wasn’t Nigel Farage, to be clear, or Rupert Lowe, but it felt gauche and amateurish and as a result I am still struggling to take the party seriously.)
I said this to my friend long before the current brouhaha which is why I’m not surprised by what has happened. I am however a bit surprised it has happened quite so soon.
To be honest, I think this is probably a Westminster bubble story that will have relatively little impact on the current polls which put the party in second place behind Labour and just above the Conservatives.
In fact, I would think that regardless of recent events Reform has every chance of doing well in both the local elections and the forthcoming by-election that will follow the resignation of former Labour MP Mike Amesbury.
Beyond that however I can't help thinking that a party that can’t keep five MPs united and on the same page will struggle to build a stable platform for further growth, let alone form the next government.
In the (very) unlikely event that Reform was to win hundreds of seats, the spat between Farage and Lowe would be dwarfed by even bigger schisms.
Reader Comments (1)
It is a terribly sad state of affairs when politics becomes so exclusive that none of the parties are worth voting for.
There used to be a time when you knew who to vote for but now they are all trying their best to be the same as each other and all of them think picking on the poor, the defenceless, and the socially excluded is the way to gain popularity and votes.
Meanwhile the excluded groups damned and abused by main parties have no one to represent them.
What a terrible state to be in when parties work to be the best at marginalising and stigmatising groups instead of trying to find ways to improve lives in an all inclusive way.
Freedom is slavery, war is peace, wealth is poverty, and politics is fair. Welcome to the weird and frightening 21st century where governments are run by children with infantile ideas and influenced by ideological activists pushing divisive policies through via the back door while ensuring anyone who disagrees is ignored or ridiculed.