Copyright newstatesman
The path had disappeared. Google Maps told me Guildford Rugby Club was somewhere ahead, in the darkness between the trees, but the ground underfoot gave way to clumpy grass and mud. The air was thick with rain, the trees thrashed. My suit trousers flapped wetly at my ankles, my shoes gurgled. My glasses were covered with rain, as was my phone. Google Maps was a smear of colour. A nearby goose made a noise that I interpreted as a threat. I realised I was probably going to fall into a lake. Then, eventually, floodlights – the rugby fields! But they were fenced off. I skirted the edges of the compound, skidding down a muddy bank until gravel crunched against my shoes. At the main entrance, the Reform members present were dry and comfortable because obviously they all drove here. The monied conservatives of Surrey would not think of doing anything else. By taking the train and walking from the station, I had failed immediately as an attendee. They furled their umbrellas and politely ignored me, the soaked pillock of the woods, and we queued together for An Evening with Richard Tice. The 200 people crowding into the rugby club were archetypal Conservative Club members, the affluent retirees that Reform needs to convince. Guildford and Godalming are very different places to the constituencies represented by Tice (Boston and Skegness) or Nigel Farage (Clacton). Reform has yet to win a core Tory seat. Out on the rugby pitch, the halfway line is said to divide the constituencies of Godalming and Ash (held for the Conservatives by Jeremy Hunt) and Guildford (which fell in 2024 to the Lib Dems, Surrey’s traditional protest vote). Yet the crowd at the rugby club despises the “nice” Lib Dems. “They’re not nice, they’re communists,” said a man; a woman called them “snake-like”. A Reform chair said that anyone who misbehaved would be deported to the Guildford end of the pitch. At the bar I spoke to a man in his sixties who had been a Conservative member for ten years and voted Tory in every election until 2024. He thought a Tory-Reform pact was likely, but Farage was the charismatic leader he wanted. In the audience, as we waited for Tice to emerge, I spoke to a woman in her thirties who saw the Tories as “posh”. Like Labour, she said, they were anachronistic, a relic of a class-based politics that no longer applied, bullshitters who expected allegiance and did not deserve it. In front of us sat a septuagenarian wearing a flag as a cape; the flag read “Make Britain Great”. Tice was introduced as “a local man” and a “self-made entrepreneur”, which is certainly one way to describe a man who spent 14 years as the CEO of his grandfather’s property company. Tice told the crowd that the government has borrowed £100bn this year (which is true) and that this was “an unsecured loan by the government on every one of your homes” (which is not true, and does not make sense). For many Reform supporters, immigration and deportation are the only issues, but in leafy Surrey there was a greater monster. Net zero simply had to be stopped. When the people of Lincolnshire had learned that a solar farm was planned for their area, Tice “literally had local folk weeping, in tears”. He comforted them – he was already interfering in energy policy, telling energy companies that if they bid into the current round of renewable subsidies, they will be cancelled by a future Reform government. Hundreds of people in their sixties and seventies applauded as Tice promised to ensure that oil and gas continued to burn far into the futures of their grandchildren. They were incensed, too, by the prospect that Britain would lose the Chagos Islands, in a deal that will cost the UK a projected £101m per year. This is a weird thing to care about – the pensions system spends more every six hours – but in these issues Reform supporters find solidarity. A 75-year-old man said this was his first go at joining a political party. Another man had gone to the recent Reform conference “mainly to fact-find”, he said, “and what I found was my tribe”. There is a great line in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, in one of the book’s many drinking scenes: “At the bar a florid man in a black suit was predicting the imminent collapse of the nation. He gave it three months, he said, then curtains.” John le Carré wrote that in 1974, a year before Nigel Farage enrolled at Dulwich College. Le Carré’s florid man would sound like Farage today: Folks, I’m gonna level with you. Markets. And we’ve said that all along. Yup. Lotta money. Simple. Billion quid. Y’know? Three months, yup. Lock, stock and barrel. Bloody ridiculous. Yup, yup, yup. These types have always been with us – the tipsy, know-it-all bloviators whose core tenet is that the country has gone to the dogs, the whole thing needs to be smashed up. On stage at the rugby club, Tice breezily predicted that there would be a sterling debt crisis within this parliament. Curtains. In 1990, as the US Republican Newt Gingrich pioneered a nasty, polarising political style, members of his party were sent cassette tapes that would help them to copy his venomous diction. They were instructed literally to “speak like Newt”. Tice speaks like Farage. Blokey, frank, short sentences. They love to say “folks”. They speak in surnames, like they did at boarding school – Tice has played a blinder! Towler’s a rascal! – but they’re not plummy. Tice is tall and his hair looks expensive, but he says “pain in the arse” and “you couldn’t make this stuff up”. Perhaps they have transcended the class system, but not in a nice way. Numbers? You don’t need numbers. Tice talked about “real money” and “serious cash” and “a whole bunch of money” and “masses, masses of money”. Without numbers, anything can be true. “We’ve got AI, and some of you will work in that,” he told the audience of suburban retirees. Sure they will. He’s been to Israel, apologised on behalf of every UK citizen – I don’t recall asking him to do this – for our failure to accommodate their football hooligans. And then he’s auctioning wine, and he’s a natural at it, bubbling with prices, enjoying fleecing the room. He gets a woman in the audience to pay £175 for a House of Lords pinot noir. I later discover it retails at £15 a bottle. Back in the car park, I asked an older man if there’s a way to the station that doesn’t involve wet leaves and terror. A true Surrey gent, he offered me a lift in his Jag. He is called Neil and he joined the Brexit Party almost as soon as it was formed. Neil, who looks like a grandfather from a Werther’s Original advert, was brought up in a Conservative household but lost interest in the Tories at some point in 1987. Thatcher was not enough. “I’m a hardcore libertarian,” he told me with an earnest smile. He is also, he suspects, “probably the most anti-net-zero person in the country”. Neil’s Jag began to feel a little less comfortable as it whisked me to the station. Not physically – the climate control was excellent, ironically, and I believe he popped the heated seats on – but because of what it represents: respectable middle England maturing into quiet, insistent rage against a system that even the comfortably upholstered feel has failed. Neil is one of the people David Cameron, thinking himself respectable, derided as “fruitcakes” in 2006, and by whom he was removed from power a decade later. They are older now, but their revolution is far from over. [Further reading: Knife crime is creeping into Middle England]
