By Will Lloyd
Copyright newstatesman
“Welcome to Reform conference!” boomed the voice from above. Voices were always boomingly booming out from the Tannoys at Reform UK’s conference in the Birmingham NEC on 5-6 September. It was like being heckled by Zeus for two days straight. A hungover Zeus. Such was the sense of omnipresent cosmic threat, I half expected to be zapped to dust by a turquoise lightning bolt for quietly wondering how Reform planned to pay for its stated policies: maintaining the triple lock for pensioners; restoring winter fuel payments for the same group, and abolishing the two-child benefit cap. Shhh, don’t mention any of that. Just listen to the Tannoys. Look to the deportation flights in the skies! The Zeus voice boomed loudly above me again: “Goooood morning!”
It was 2.17pm on the second day of the conference. The improbably tanned Dr David Bull appeared on the main stage. Reform’s chairman is a hybrid of Douglas Murray and the late Dale Winton, though more menacingly right-wing than both of them. (This is saying something: you wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve heard about Winton’s politics.) I tried to avoid looking directly at Bull, for my own safety. If you reflected concentrated sunlight off his teeth, the resulting beam would be enough to turn a skyscraper to ash. Bull looked a little sheepish after Zeus messed up the timekeeping. “He’s called Showbiz Mitch,” said Bull chucklingly of the announcer. “And he’s clearly been on the wine!” Thousands of Reform UK members in the stands around me tittered indulgently. Showbiz Mitch had been on the wine? Well, so had everybody else. This was, after all, the morning after the night before.
For several hours on the opening day of the conference I was worried. A reshuffle and resignation in the government had sent lobby journalists hurtling back towards Westminster – literally, in the case of GB News’ political correspondent, “Chopper”. There was an intense look of dominate-the-story on his face as he sprinted back to the train station. He seemed swollen with pure news: stick a pin his side and he would have exploded into source quotes and headlines. It was not inconceivable that Chopper ran the 118 miles back to the Commons from Birmingham just so he could say the words “Angela Rayner” on College Green.
Was this the right place to be? Reform had been labelled “camp” by a major right-wing magazine a few days before the conference began. Rather than looking at what the party has achieved as it chewed on what little remained of the Conservative Party in the past 12 months – a burgeoning membership, spectacular wins in council and by-elections, and a 15-point lead over a misfiring government in the latest polls – the Spectator decided to call Reform another word for “gay” on its cover. Maybe this wasn’t a very important gathering. Maybe the polls could be ignored. Maybe promising to deport 600,000 people is just a bit of sequinned Wildean banter. Maybe politics would go back to “normal” and dreamily cruising technocrats coloured Tory blue or Labour red would form the next government in 2029, just as they have done for the past century. Maybe it was all a bit… camp.
The conference was not a conference at all. It was a rally in a hangar that smelled strongly of fried onions and chopped hog due to a couple of food vans plonked in the middle of one of the halls. The allium smell was as physical as an arm wrestle. It hung over the attendees: 10,000 Reform Party members. I asked one, a former military man, if they were “camp”. His answer was disappointing: “Fuck off.”
I walked over to the main stage auditorium and took a seat. Imagine a basketball arena bathed in turquoise light. The seated Reformers in the glow were a spectral blue: rank after rank of staring ghosts. A cheerful man next to me, who claimed to be on Reform’s councillor candidate list, said he had once worked for MI6. I decided not to ask him if he was “camp” as well.
Above us was a jumbo screen. Every hour or so Jeremy Kyle appeared up there, gamboling about the conference floor with a camera crew, interviewing happy Reformers. He found two bearded men in three-piece Union Jack suits they bought from Amazon. They were veterans. “I hate what this country has become,” one told Kyle, who frowned.
Kyle turned to the camera. In the auditorium his manicured, familiar face was as enormous as a moon. A wave of heady nostalgia washed over me: watching Kyle gearing up to go off on a big one was like being back in 2005, before everything went wrong, with ITV2 playing in the background of an endless summer afternoon. Kyle let rip. We were definitely in 2025 now: “We lived our lives correctly. Why are we at the back of the queue?” The crowd hooted. Kyle smirked.
As evening fell, I found a man who worked for Nigel Farage. He was intelligent and decorous. He said the leader had accepted the inevitability of becoming prime minister. Something had changed inside Nige. There was a new gravitas, a new caution, a new respect for process. The bomb-throwing Farage of yore, who never saw an institution he didn’t want to tear down, had instead become Nigel the Builder, mastermind and foreman of Reform, the most significant new political force in 100 years. Farage, it was said, even drank slightly less than he used to. I shuddered. It was like hearing that Noel Edmonds had shaved his beard off.
Soon the afterparty began. Seats were cleared in the auditorium, creating a dance floor. After an initial school disco feeling of desertion and apathy, the room began to hum. Nigel was coming. He appeared on stage in an eyeball-melting turquoise suit. “I’m sorry to disappoint you but I’m not the main singer.” Who would be? Lee Anderson? Ann Widdecombe? Enoch Powell? The crowd booed. There was a scream: “Piss off Nigel!”
“Although,” he grinned, “if I have another beer I might change my mind.” The crowd, geared up as if for a wedding in waistcoats and ball gowns and tuxedos, cheered ecstatically. “The Conservative Party! Is! Dead!” More thunderous hollering. Farage began a story. “I was almost moved to tears by this,” he began. An elderly member, in his nineties, had somehow broken through the testudo of burly security guards that surrounded the leader earlier in the day to tell Farage his final aspiration. The elderly geezer said he was only staying alive so that he could see Farage take Downing Street. I began to realise that everybody was very, very drunk.
I staggered out towards one of the bars. Some young men were there –the sort of boys who used to loiter at the fringes of Conservative Party conference. Now they were here, cannily aware that the future promised much more with Reform. They looked small and sharp, like little elves. “Who do you work for?” one of them squeaked. He was drunk too. I told him. He twitched. One of his eyes grew larger. “You… are the enemy!” He turned away and almost collapsed into a bin.
The afterparty was rocking. Somehow (money), Reform had managed to book the remnants of the Jackson 5 – billed at this late stage simply as the Jacksons – to sing and dance for this rebellious crowd. Happiness, joy and Marlon Jackson’s voice filled the air. “No other country in the world could do this!” shouted one woman. I tried to ask her if she was “camp” as well, but it was impossible to hear anything over the familiar, oddly comforting Jackson crooning. The light in the room was strange. They danced and danced and danced. They said they were going to win, that they could not be stopped. I looked at people’s faces, and for a brief moment all I could see was Nigel Farage smiling back at me.
[See also: How Labour learned to love the flag]
