Reform party

At this weekend’s Reform conference in Birmingham, the opening speech will be given by a man who wasn’t even a member of the party until four months ago. James McMurdock stood in what was once a Tory safe seat. Against the odds and after three recounts, he won, and is now Reform’s accidental member of parliament.  The day after the general election, Reform leader Nigel Farage held his celebratory press conference alongside fellow seat-winners Lee Anderson, Richard Tice and Rupert Lowe, announcing their new gang of four. Half an hour later, from a Westminster pub, they learned that they would be five – after McMurdock, a supposed ‘paper candidate’, was

Nigel Farage is in some ways a victim of his own success. It was the political threat he posed during the coalition era that more than anything else caused David Cameron to pledge to hold an in-out referendum on EU membership if he won a majority. It is safe to say that without his persistence, we would never have left the European Union. Yet Farage is now politically redundant and what’s so strange about that is that he did it all to himself. When Farage declared that the Brexit ‘war is over’ after the government announced its trade deal with the EU on Christmas Eve, my first thought was that

Right-wing protest politics has just catastrophically over-reached in America, but it is suddenly back in business in Britain. Its dominant figure, Nigel Farage, has a new political start-up and is sounding rather pleased about it. Earlier this week the Electoral Commission finally — after more than eight weeks of humming and hawing — gave him permission to rebrand the mothballed Brexit party as Reform UK. ‘It is excellent news that the Electoral Commission has approved our name change application. The need for Reform in this country is greater than ever,’ tweeted the new Reform UK leader (an unelected post, naturally). Given that the Brexit party has not only been in