A wedding.

A couple had arranged to marry at Manchester Register Office. This would ordinarily have presented relatively few constitutional difficulties, except that Manchester Register Office happens to occupy Heron House, and Heron House now also contains Andy Burnham’s exciting new northern branch of the British government dubbed ‘No. 10 North’.

Burwin had booked the venue before the Prime Minister decided it would also make an excellent place from which to rewire Britain, so she did what anybody does when their wedding unexpectedly ends up sharing premises with the executive branch of government: she asked the Prime Minister if he could possibly not come in.

The problem was not Andy Burnham himself. He was welcome. It was the armed police, security barriers, bollards and assorted paraphernalia which tend to follow a serving prime minister around and which might interfere with the photographs.

Burnham agreed to stay away. Everyone was happy. It was good PR.

It was also, accidentally, a fairly good metaphor for British government during the summer recess.

Read more

It should perhaps come as little surprise that, as Reform begins to sag in the polls and months of scandal finally start to acquire a cumulative weight, the party has decided that what it really needs is Robert Jenrick standing in front of the cameras announcing something enormously stupid.

In this case, a welfare policy designed to save £50 billion a year.

There are several problems with this.

The first is Jenrick himself.

For those unaware, there is currently a Metropolitan Police investigation into donations made to his 2024 Conservative leadership campaign, including £37,500 alleged to have originated from an impermissible overseas source. Jenrick denies wrongdoing and maintains that his campaign complied with electoral law, but it is nevertheless an unfortunate piece of background scenery for the man Reform has chosen to send out and explain how other people are costing Britain too much money.

The second problem is the policy.

Attacking people on benefits is one of the oldest surviving forms of pub-bore politics. It is essentially monkey tennis with a Treasury calculator: announce that millions of people are taking the piss, attach an enormous number to it, say something about hard-working taxpayers, selectively ignore pensioners, and wait to see who applauds.

The party is at a low ebb after months in which one controversy has arrived before the previous one has finished leaving. Its polling has deteriorated. Its senior figures remain surrounded by questions about money, donations and internal relationships. Nigel Farage himself increasingly seems to generate as much difficulty for Reform as he does attention.

So the obvious response is to hijack The Grid of anti-Reform stories currently circulating and replace it with something much simpler:

• People on benefits are costing you £50 billion and we’re going to stop it.

Whether the policy is remotely capable of producing that figure is another matter.

Lastly, there is the question of why Jenrick was chosen to announce it.

There are several possible explanations, none of which can presently be established as fact.

He is the party’s so-called “Treasury spokesperson”. This much can be established. But perhaps Reform—or those increasingly influential around it—has begun to recognise that Farage is becoming a liability and sees Jenrick as the more respectable, conventionally political alternative.

But then perhaps the opposite is true: Jenrick is useful precisely because he looks like the reasonable alternative, and putting his name on an extravagant and potentially unworkable policy neatly ensures that he owns the consequences if it collapses under scrutiny.

Or perhaps there is nothing quite so elaborate happening at all. Perhaps Reform simply understands that a former cabinet minister standing behind a £50 billion number looks rather more like government-in-waiting than Nigel Farage shouting into another microphone.

For now, all possibilities remain speculation.

But they sit within a much broader feeling of unease inside and around Reform which returns us to the rather simple observation I made several weeks ago.

Nevertheless—

All of it needs to be picked apart.

Read more

Not a sham election, mind you.

The ballot papers were real, the returning officer was real, and the public cost of opening polling stations, printing notices, employing staff and counting the votes was real—estimates suggest anywhere between £200,000 and £450,000. A record 34 candidates were sufficiently real to spend several weeks campaigning and competing for the privilege of inevitably losing their deposits.

The counterfeit element was the question Nigel Farage claimed the election would answer: he used the election as a mandate for an audit of his and his party’s own questionable finances.

The result proved nothing.

The people of Clacton being asked to choose their Member of Parliament versus Farage insisting that they were also deciding whether he had been unjustly persecuted over the scrutiny of his financial affairs is not remotely the same thing.

The electorate of one Essex constituency cannot determine whether parliamentary declaration rules were followed. It cannot trace the provenance of money, inspect private correspondence, cross-examine donors or replace the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

Farage had taken a regulatory question and fed it through the machinery he normally uses to convert scrutiny into persecution. First, resign from Parliament. Then trigger a by-election. Describe the resulting contest as a struggle between “the people” and “the establishment”. Finally, treat re-election as retroactive permission for whatever caused the scrutiny in the first place.

It was democracy reimagined as a kind of political car wash: drive in carrying several million pounds’ worth of awkward questions and emerge at the other end declaring himself spotless.

Obviously—

That’s not how scrutiny works.

Going into the byelection itself provided its own challenges for Farage.

Nobody expected him to lose. Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the other major parties declined to participate in what they regarded as a political stunt. A Survation poll conducted in the constituency put Farage on 73% once undecided voters were removed, with Count Binface on 20%.

This demonstrated that Farage remained popular in a constituency he had already won and was likely to defeat a man wearing a waste receptacle on his head when nobody from the main political parties stood against him.

The contrast with the country outside Clacton was rather less flattering. In a national Ipsos poll, 33% of British adults said they would prefer Count Binface to win, compared with only 21% who preferred Farage. Another 32% wanted neither of them.

The same poll found that 74% believed the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards should investigate whether Farage had broken the rules. 73% said that investigation should continue even if Clacton returned him to Parliament.

This was the rather important detail missing from Farage’s proposed coronation.

The public did not accept the premise that winning an election would settle the matter. Even many people prepared to vote for him evidently understood that constituency elections and forensic accounting are different branches of human activity.

Indeed, a constituency can elect an MP but cannot grant immunity. A majority can express political support but it cannot determine facts. Farage could have won every vote cast in Clacton, but it still would not have revealed where the money came from, what was agreed, when it was agreed or what should have appeared in the register.

Unfortunately for Reform UK, while Nigel Farage was asking the people of Clacton to provide him with a clean bill of health, the paper trail had begun developing ideas of its own.

The central defence of Farage’s £5 million gift from cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne had always depended rather heavily on time.

Farage received the money in early 2024. He returned as leader of Reform UK on 3 June and stood for Parliament at the general election a month later. His argument was that these were separate periods in his life: when the money arrived, he was not really a politician at all.

As he explained on the Triggernometry podcast, between 2021 and 3 June 2024 he regarded himself primarily as a broadcaster, celebrity television personality, financial-products promoter and influencer.

The political career apparently restarted rather abruptly on the morning he announced that he was taking Richard Tice’s job.

This distinction matters because MPs are required to register certain benefits received during the 12 months before their election where those benefits relate in some way to their political activities. Farage’s defence has been that the Harborne money — and benefits allegedly provided by his longtime associate George Cottrell — fell outside that definition because he was not engaged in politics when he received them.

The problem was that The Sunday Times reported something slightly inconvenient for Farage.

According to the newspaper, Farage had been discussing his prospective return to the leadership of Reform with Tice in March and April 2024. Not June.

The newspaper reported that the discussions produced an arrangement under which, if Farage returned as leader, Reform would repay or write off more than £1 million in loans owed to a company belonging to Tice. The negotiations were reportedly overseen by Cottrell, the Farage associate previously convicted of wire fraud in the United States, and discussed most recently here:

Farage disputes the description of this as evidence that he had already decided to come back. Reform’s position is that the arrangement was conditional — essentially a contingency plan establishing what would happen if Farage returned—rather than proof that he intended to do so.

Farage subsequently acknowledged that the conversations had taken place, explaining that he would have been “a bit of a mug” to contemplate becoming leader without first understanding Reform’s liabilities. He continued to insist that he had no intention of returning at that point and said the discussions came after Harborne’s gift.

It’s an exquisitely narrow argument.

Farage, according to the narrative, was not planning to return to politics. He was merely discussing the financial arrangements that would apply when he returned to politics, with the man whose leadership he would take over and another man who was helping to finance him.

The details make the story stranger rather than clearer.

According to The Sunday Times, former Reform treasurer Mehrtash A’Zami was summoned back to Britain by Cottrell and told that Farage was making a comeback.

In mid-May, A’Zami met Farage and Cottrell in office space on the fourth floor of a townhouse near Buckingham Palace, where the proposed repayment arrangements were discussed.

[NB: Again, for a party whose aesthetic has traditionally involved storming the gates of an out-of-touch metropolitan elite, there is a certain grandeur to conducting the financial planning for the revolution in a townhouse near Buckingham Palace]

Tice had kept Reform afloat through loans from his company, Tisun Investments. By this point the party owed it £1.08 million. Previously, according to the accounts, those loans had been interest-free and repayable when the party’s finances allowed.

Under the proposed arrangement, that changed. There would instead be a schedule by which Tice’s company received repayments or converted outstanding loans into donations until the balance disappeared.

It should be noted that there is nothing inherently improper about a political party repaying money that it owes. Nor is converting a permissible loan into a donation inherently suspicious. Indeed, Electoral Commission guidance expressly provides for loans to be converted into donations, provided the changes and qualifying donations are properly reported.

The interesting part was what happened next.

Farage initially announced that he would not stand. Then, on 3 June, he changed his mind, returned as leader, demoted Tice to deputy and announced his candidacy in Clacton.

Seven days later, Reform made the first £200,000 repayment.

Except, according to the Sunday Times investigation, it did not pay the money into the account of Tisun Investments — the company to which Reform actually owed the debt.

It paid £200,000 into Richard Tice’s personal bank account.

The public records nevertheless indicated that Tisun had been repaid.

Reform says this was an accounting mistake rather than an attempt to deceive anybody, and party sources told the newspaper that Tice subsequently transferred the money into his company. The Electoral Commission acknowledged that there had been a reporting error and said its database was being amended.

The former treasurer, A’Zami, gave a rather less reassuring account, saying that when he discovered what had happened he attempted to correct the record but was prevented from doing so. A’Zami said:

“I was not allowed to make it right.”

Reform has denied breaking electoral law and has pointed towards the treasurer’s responsibility for financial reporting. The money was meanwhile moving in both directions.

Around the same period Reform was beginning to repay Tice, substantial sums were arriving through another Tice company, Britain Means Business.

The Financial Times subsequently reconstructed part of the sequence: Fiona Cottrell, George Cottrell’s mother, transferred more than £1 million to Britain Means Business, which in turn made large donations to Reform while money was being repaid against the party’s debt to Tice.

The Metropolitan Police are investigating whether donations connected with the Cottrells disguised their true source. Reform, Tice and the Cottrells deny wrongdoing.

Nevertheless, it was not the only financial connection between George Cottrell and Richard Tice.

In December 2024, it was found that Cottrell paid £78,100 into Tisun Investments, by which point Tice was already a serving MP. Tice described the payment as a corporate “bridging loan” connected with his property business and said it was therefore not something he was required to register as a personal financial interest.

The timing supplied another few arrows for the increasingly ambitious diagram.

In January 2025, Tisun Investments donated £613,000 to Reform UK. The following month approximately £655,000 arrived in Tisun’s account in what Tice said was an overpayment connected with a property purchase. Around the same period, Cottrell’s loan was repaid. Tice has maintained that these were ordinary business transactions unrelated to politics.

The distinction matters because the £78,100 loan was itself referred to Parliament’s standards commissioner — and on 29 July the Commissioner declined to open an investigation, saying the complaint supplied insufficient evidence to justify examining a potential breach of the MPs’ Code.

That does not make the transaction suspicious by default, nor does its proximity to political donations prove that they were connected.

It does, however, make the increasingly simple question of who finances Reform UK? surprisingly difficult to answer without first locating a whiteboard.

None of this arrangement, taken simply as a collection of relationships, proves illegality.

It merely begins to resemble less a donor register than the wiring schematic for a Soviet submarine.

Making matters more complicated was R20 Advisory, a company founded by property tycoon Robert Tchenguiz, which donated £50,000 to Reform and then another £50,000.

On its own, that would barely register in the modern British political funding system. Accounts examined by the Observer, however, showed that R20 Advisory owed more than £67 million in interest-free loans to unnamed related companies.

Although there is no suggestion that R20 Advisory was legally prohibited from donating to Reform, the story is revealing nonetheless.

The argument about political donations is not confined to whether somebody has committed an offence. It is also about whether voters can work out where the economic power behind a donation actually resides.

An apparently simple £50,000 entry on the Electoral Commission register can sit at the end of a corporate structure involving tens of millions of pounds of intra-group loans and an ultimate owner, in the case of R20 Advisory, in the British Virgin Islands.

The law is in the process of being tightened partly because of precisely this problem.

The Representation of the People Bill proposes stronger tests requiring corporate political donors to demonstrate genuine UK links and sufficient UK-generated revenue. The independent Rycroft Review went further, recommending that corporate donations be constrained by post-tax profits rather than revenue.

Reform’s defence is straightforward: it says it conducts stringent checks and accepts donations in accordance with Electoral Commission rules.

That may be true — but “technically permissible under Britain’s famously transparent political-finance system” is not quite the populist battle cry it once imagined needing.

Incidentally, Farage has not been the only senior Reform figure attracting the attention of Parliament’s standards machinery.

On 28 July, Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards Daniel Greenberg opened an investigation into Richard Tice.

This investigation should be kept separate from the party’s financial controversies. Parliament has not suggested that it concerns the Cottrell transactions or Tice’s companies.

Tice says it concerns whether he should have declared a relevant registered interest while participating in a debate involving Israel. Rule 6 of the MPs’ Code requires members to be open about relevant interests when participating in parliamentary proceedings.

For Tice, however, he summarised the matter on X somewhat more dramatically:

Except, that would not be what the commissioner had announced. Richard Tice MP — investigation opened 28 July 2026 — Rule 6 — “Failure to declare an interest.”

That is literally all the Commissioner has publicly said about the substance.

Parliament explicitly says that, beyond the information on that page, the Commissioner does not comment on the details of an ongoing inquiry.

Rule 6 itself says MPs must be “open and frank” about any relevant interest when taking part in proceedings of the House or committees, or when communicating with ministers and other public officials. The test is essentially whether an interest could reasonably be thought by others to influence the MP’s words or actions.

The extra detail — that the complaint concerned Tice allegedly failing to mention a registered interest in connection with a debate involving Israel and Israeli influence, reportedly connected with a funded trip to Israel — came from Tice himself and subsequent press reporting, not from the Commissioner’s announcement.

The Commissioner is investigating whether I failed to declare a relevant interest is an entirely different proposition to I am being investigated for standing against antisemitism.

The latter is entirely Tice’s own editorial contribution.

What it says, however, is that by the beginning of August, Reform’s two most senior figures found themselves in the unusual position of attacking the standards system while simultaneously requiring increasingly detailed explanations of their compliance with it.

The response was not retreat. Instead, it was counterattack.

On 7 August, Farage and Tice filed proceedings against the National Crime Agency, alleging that somebody within the agency had leaked private banking information concerning suspicious activity reports to journalists.

They are seeking damages of more than £25,000 and want the NCA to identify those to whom the information was allegedly disclosed. The NCA says its Professional Standards Unit is investigating the complaint and that it would be inappropriate to comment further while that work continues.

That legal case may eventually establish whether confidential information was improperly disclosed. It does not establish that the underlying reporting was improper.

These are two separate questions, a distinction in danger of becoming the unofficial slogan of the entire affair.

And then the argument moved from the information to the people reporting it.

On 8 August, The Guardian reported that prominent Reform member and Brexit campaigner Arron Banks had commissioned private investigators to examine Gabriel Pogrund, the Sunday Times Insight editor whose team had been investigating Farage, Cottrell and Reform’s finances.

Banks did not straightforwardly deny commissioning the work. Asked about it, he responded: “When you live by the sword, you die by the sword.”

Banks alleged that The Sunday Times had used hacked material in its reporting. The newspaper strongly denied this, describing the suggestion as false and defending its work as legitimate journalism. Reform UK said it had neither known about nor sanctioned the surveillance.

Three days later came another development.

On 11 August, it emerged that lawyers acting for Richard Tice had written separately to The Guardian over its reporting on his financial transactions and indicated that they would seek disclosure of documents which could reveal the identities of confidential journalistic sources.

Tice’s position is that confidential financial information may have been improperly leaked from the NCA and that he is entitled to discover how private information about him reached journalists. Press-freedom campaigners, politicians and media organisations countered that forcing reporters to expose confidential sources would strike at one of the central protections underpinning investigative journalism.

Tice responded to some of the criticism on social media:

“These lefty journos want war. They’ve got war.”

It was an interesting escalation.

Questions had originally concerned money.

By election week, a substantial part of Reform’s response was instead concerned with how anybody had found out.

For Farage, though, the political narrative was obvious. The banks, the media, Westminster regulators and perhaps elements of the state itself were no longer institutions examining questions surrounding a political party seeking government.

They could instead be presented as components of the establishment attacking a disruptive outsider. The problem is that the longer the story continues, the more exhausting the proposition becomes.

Back in Clacton.

Farage had transformed scrutiny into persecution, persecution into a by-election and the by-election into a referendum on whether voters believed the persecution. The financial story could therefore be escaped by making the political story bigger than it.

There was only one problem: while Reform was trying to escape Westminster by running towards its electorate, part of its electorate was running towards Rupert Lowe.

Restore Britain is a peculiarly serious problem for Reform because it attacks the party at precisely the point where Farage needs to change direction.

• To win a general election, Reform must eventually persuade millions of people who do not regard themselves as members of an insurgent movement to trust it with the machinery of government.

• To prevent Restore stealing its existing supporters, it must continually demonstrate that it has not gone soft.

These objectives are not especially compatible.

Lowe, expelled from Reform after his spectacular rupture with Farage, founded Restore Britain in February. The former Reform MP had already accused Farage of running the party in a “messianic” fashion. Farage had responded by dismissing Restore as effectively one angry man on the internet.

Unfortunately for Reform, the angry man on the internet started receiving votes.

Restore took 6.8% in the Makerfield by-election and then 8.7% of first-preference votes in the Greater Manchester mayoral election, finishing ahead of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats there. It remained a small party nationally, but that is almost beside the point. In dozens of marginal constituencies Reform would not need Restore to win. It would merely need Restore to remove enough Reform votes for somebody else to win.

On 2 August, Lowe therefore offered Farage what was described as an ‘olive branch’ in the form of a 12-minute video where Lowe said the “patriotic right” was hopelessly divided and proposed that Restore and Reform find a way to cooperate.

There were conditions. Quite a few, actually.

Restore wanted mass deportations; bans affecting burqas, cousin marriage and what it calls sharia courts; restrictions on halal and kosher slaughter; a referendum on restoring the death penalty; and guarantees that former Conservative ministers would not serve in a future government.

This last demand presented a particularly enjoyable logistical difficulty for Reform, which has spent considerable effort recruiting a number of former Conservative ministers and countless councillors.

Farage’s response was unexpectedly conciliatory.

Asked about cooperation, he said he would do what he could to create a “sane centre-right alliance” capable of defeating Labour and said he was open-minded about conversations with people pursuing broadly similar objectives.

[NB: The definition of ‘sane centre-right’ was left to perform quite a lot of unpaid labour given that the man Farage was contemplating an alliance with had just made a referendum on restoring the death penalty one of his conditions for cooperation]

Following this, Farage said he had been in contact with Lowe.

Lowe responded by accusing him of “outright lying”, publishing a screenshot showing a message from Farage reading “Will call later” and saying the promised telephone conversation had not happened.

“The offer remains open,” Lowe said.

It’s obviously touching that the patriotic right had moved from civil war to peace negotiations and back to accusing each other of lying before most people had finished lunch or read the latest polls.

By early August, the year-long Reform polling lead had evaporated in some surveys.

One YouGov poll cited by the Financial Times put Labour and Reform level on 22% with the Conservatives only a point behind on 21%. Restore sat around 4%.

The number may sound trivial until one remembers how first-past-the-post works in this context: a rival party does not need to become popular enough to beat you. Sometimes it merely needs to become popular enough to make sure you cannot beat somebody else.

That was the strategic trap confronting Farage as he campaigned for his triumphant vindication in Clacton, and all of this was happening while Farage was trying to explain why discussions about his return to politics months before his return to politics did not mean he was planning to return to politics.

This was the wider context in which the people of Clacton were being invited to deliver their verdict, with a by-election result to help simplify everything.

The problem for Farage is that it hasn’t done that at all. He returns to Parliament with the original questions unanswered and several new ones accumulated during the campaign.

But in the end, Clacton did what everybody expected Clacton to do.

It elected Nigel Farage.

Again.

Farage received 22,239 votes, giving him a majority of 12,784 over Count Binface, who finished second with the unexpectedly substantial total of 9,455. Farage took just under 63% of votes cast; Binface took about 27%. Turnout was 44.37% down from 58.7% at the 2024 general election.

There is no serious interpretation of these figures in which Clacton suddenly ceased to be Farage country. His core support remained remarkably durable.

There was no conventional opposition candidate capable of forming a government, no serious national party machine attempting to remove him and no plausible alternative MP around whom voters hostile to Farage could naturally coalesce.

For all the spectacle, however, remarkably little had actually been settled.

The Treasury may have recovered a small sum from candidates who lost their deposits; people whose collective contribution to British democracy ranged from the earnest to the inexplicable, while the British taxpayer was left with an election reported to have cost approximately £250,000.

But the spectacle of overwhelming personal vindication that Farage said it was still provided no grand explanation to all the questions being asked of him.

It just means it could ultimately form the basis of a second by-election after some (although not all) of the questions have been investigated.

Ironically one of the strangest — and more positive — outcomes has actually materialised. Having been re-elected as its MP, Farage now gets to return to Parliament and face the questions he tried to dodge by calling this by-election in the first place.

The parliamentary standards investigation into whether Farage should have declared the £5 million gift from Christopher Harborne was suspended when he ceased to be an MP. Now that Clacton has returned him to Parliament, the investigation can resume.

The conclusions of this could matter more the second time around and may be more politically consequential. A second victory may not be as inevitable as the first.

Incidentally, Farage was not even present when his victory was announced.

Several hours before the returning officer declared the result, he appeared instead at an overnight Reform event on the rural fringes of the constituency — inevitably nicknamed “Farage Fest” — where he announced that he had already won.

This was not particularly controversial. The result was hardly one of the great unresolved mysteries of psephology.

More interesting perhaps was his explanation for why he would not attend the official count.

Farage told supporters that he had been advised by Essex Police that there was an “organised campaign to disrupt and degrade the result.”

Reform subsequently went further, saying Essex Police had advised Farage not to attend because of a “credible threat”.

Essex Police did not publicly confirm Reform’s version, of course.

It is understood that the force did not advise Farage, or any other candidate, not to attend the count. Police said instead that they had a “proportionate and robust policing operation” in place to ensure the safety of everybody participating.

Acting returning officer Ian Davidson was similarly calm. There was a substantial police presence, including Gold Command oversight, but he said there was no reason the count could not proceed safely and emphasised that whether a candidate attended was a matter for the candidate.

The other 33 candidates managed it.

Count Binface, observing the absence of the actual winner, subsequently declared himself the winner among candidates “who bothered to turn up”.

[NB: Not to mention the small irony that Farage had repeatedly said the contentious £5 million gift which landed him in this mess was intended to pay for his personal security. You might therefore have assumed that £5 million bought sufficient security to attend an election count in Essex. Evidently the package did not extend that far]

Another, perhaps simpler, explanation was provided by Farage himself:

“I’m damned if I’m going to stand on a stage, having won a resounding victory, a ringing endorsement of all that I’ve tried to fight for, and you’ve tried to fight for, and be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies.”

There is something revealing about the language.

Farage explicitly said he was not scared of the people he believed intended to disrupt the declaration. His objection, at least as he expressed it, was also that appearing before them might demean or humiliate him.

But democracy is occasionally undignified.

It contains hecklers, protest candidates, ridiculous candidates, people who dislike you and people whose opinions you may consider worthless. A declaration is not a coronation. It is the slightly awkward moment when everybody who stood in an election occupies the same democratic space and waits to discover what the electorate has done to them.

That seems particularly relevant when you have voluntarily resigned your seat, called an election and spent several weeks insisting that the whole exercise represents the people passing judgment on you.

Farage had said only minutes earlier that he had put the question to Clacton: “you decide my future”. Clacton duly decided it.

He just wasn’t there when the decision was formally announced.

Perhaps that is the strangest contradiction of the whole exercise. Farage wanted the democratic legitimacy generated by the count while apparently having little appetite for the messiness of the count itself. The result was welcome; the possibility of sharing its stage with people capable of spoiling the spectacle was not.

And so an election designed as an act of personal vindication ended with its victor several miles away, declaring himself vindicated in front of his own supporters.

The sadness of the count itself, however, was simpler. A man who has repeatedly faced criticism over how much time he spends in his constituency had asked Clacton to elect him for a second time — and, whatever the dispute over security advice, was absent when those voters formally did exactly that.

In the grand scheme of things, it matters little. Clacton, consequential as it is for the purposes of Farage’s social media feed, does little to curtail Reform’s mistaken belief that Britain still retains an overwhelming desire for their management of the country.

Indeed, in July, YouGov found that only 22% of Britons held a favourable opinion of Farage. 68% viewed him unfavourably, while his net rating of minus 46 was the joint-lowest YouGov had recorded for him during the ten years of its favourability tracker.

Separate YouGov research published in August found only 27% of Britons viewed Reform itself favourably, against 65% unfavourably, giving the party a record net rating of minus 38.

It is worth noting that none of those figures means Reform cannot recover, but they describe a very different political environment from the one in which Farage’s party appears to be marching remorselessly towards Downing Street.

In fact, it shows a kind of fatigue.

And with the questions around his financial affairs still hovering around the freshly re-elected MP for Clacton, voters on a national level may grow wearier still.

This, in some ways, is a good thing — because CPAC in a UK context is profoundly embarrassing.

The Conservative Political Action Conference was held in the United States in 1974. For decades, it operated as an annual gathering of conservative politicians, campaigners, donors, media personalities and organisations. In more recent years, it has been increasingly absorbed by Donald Trump’s (MAGA) movement and exported as an international political franchise.

CPAC now holds or partners with conferences across countries including Hungary, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Mexico and Poland, with the organisation describing its own purpose as bringing unity to conservatives around the world and spreading conservatism internationally.

In July 2026, the revolution finally reached Greenwich—with extra dry ice.

The first CPAC Great Britain was held a couple of weeks ago between 16 and 18 July at the five-star InterContinental London hotel beside the O2. It was chaired by Liz Truss and advertised beneath the restrained slogan:

SAVE BRITAIN. SAVE THE WEST.

Organisers described it not merely as a conference, but as a “launchpad” for the policies and leaders that would shape the future of Western civilisation. This was an ambitious undertaking—especially for a movement being chaired by Truss.

The first problem was that launchpad did not immediately launch. Witness accounts across the media spectrum described a conference taking place in front of a conspicuously underpopulated auditorium.

The Guardian counted fewer than 200 people in a room arranged for approximately 500. ConservativeHome described a half-empty hall, vacant corridors and an exhibition area whose dominant visual feature was the absence of anybody exhibiting themselves in it. The Critic observed “a half-empty room in a hotel in Greenwich” with an audience “that could have come to hear about time-shares, or how to get rich from crypto, or the secrets that doctors don’t want you to know” only to find themselves “hearing from Andrea Jenkyns or Nile Gardiner or a host of names” that nobody has ever heard of.

There had been an opening prayer delivered by an American pastor. There were flashing red and blue lights. There was booming rock music. There were hats bearing the words “Make Britain Great Again”. And at the back of the exhibition hall was a golf simulator.

Liz Truss picked up a driver, missed the ball with her first attempt and sent her second sharply to the right. It was a coherent political metaphor.

The programme itself appeared to be the physical manifestation of an algorithm; featuring sessions on draining the swamp of the permanent bureaucracy, the progressive revolution, the changing face of Europe, central banks, currency debasement, the new media landscape and the deeply sinister network of people supposedly funding the Left.

Attendees could listen to the usual fare of discussions entitled Drill Baby Drill, Mine Baby Mine and How AI Can Deliver the British Counter-Revolution, or polemics by right-wing podcasters evoking evangelical apocalyptic struggles between the divine order and demonic government regulation that may have worked in the US but were met with silence here.

At CPAC Great Britain, the phrases made popular by the MAGA movement had been imported, but the emotional operating system required to run them had not, however.

That said—

The inherent absurdity of this, alongside the rows of empty seats and seeming unpopularity of the project, makes it both easy to ridicule and dismiss, yet similarly easy to misunderstand.

For movements of this kind, unpopularity apparently shown by the empty seats is not necessarily evidence of failure. They simply ‘prove’ that those inside the room possess knowledge unavailable to the sleeping majority outside it, creating a system in which every possible outcome confirms its worldview.

The empty room proves that the public has not yet awakened; ridicule proves that the movement threatens powerful interests; hostility proves that its enemies are frightened; the fact that most people have never heard of it merely proves how successfully the truth has been suppressed; A full auditorium proves momentum while an empty one proves courage; electoral victory proves the awakening of the people but electoral defeat would prove the corruption of the system.

Nothing can disprove the theory because all contradictory evidence is absorbed as further evidence of the conspiracy. Criticism becomes conspiracy. Expertise becomes sabotage. Economic warnings become the desperate propaganda of a frightened establishment.

This helps explain why figures such as Liz Truss can emerge from political failure not chastened by it, but publicly more convinced that hostile institutions brought them down because they threatened the existing order.

Several years ago, I wrote about the National Conservatives and their first attempts to mobilise in the UK.

National Conservatism, for those in the real world, is a project of the US-based Edmund Burke Foundation, established to provide an intellectual and institutional home for a form of conservatism centred upon national sovereignty, inherited traditions, religion, family and opposition to what it describes as globalism and the administrative state. Its organisers explicitly say they want to offer national conservatives an institutional base, a body of policy ideas and an extensive political support network.

NatCon occupies a similar transatlantic political ecosystem to CPAC, although it is smaller, more self-consciously intellectual and less likely to announce the collapse of Western civilisation over the sound of an electric guitar. According to its own ideology, NatCons place the nation, family, religion and inherited culture there instead. They support a state that is constitutionally limited but nevertheless strong enough to defend borders, promote national cohesion and preserve the social institutions they believe liberalism and globalisation have weakened.

Sitting between these traditions—but increasingly aligned with the newer nationalist right—is the Heritage Foundation.

Founded in Washington in 1973, Heritage describes its principles as free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values and a strong national defence. That combination made it one of the key institutions of the older Reaganite conservative coalition: economically liberal, socially conservative, strongly nationalist in foreign affairs and intensely hostile to the federal bureaucracy.

Heritage is more consequential to this story because it does not understand its role as merely publishing interesting reports.

It describes its work as providing policy solutions, mobilising conservatives and training future leaders. Its purpose is not simply to influence the political discussion. It is to prepare the movement to govern.

Its first major Mandate for Leadership, produced for Ronald Reagan’s incoming administration, contained approximately 2,000 recommendations covering the machinery of the federal government.

Heritage itself claims that Reagan’s administration implemented nearly two-thirds of them. That figure is Heritage’s own assessment rather than an independent audit, but it illustrates how the organisation measures success: not in newspaper citations or conference applause, but in policies adopted and people placed inside government. Four decades later, Heritage led Project 2025.

The project was frequently described as a 900-page conservative policy document, but the document was only one of its four pillars. The others were a database of potential political appointees, a training academy for those appointees and a 180-day implementation plan for an incoming administration. Its published aim was to assemble a body of aligned, vetted and trained conservatives capable of entering government on its first day and beginning the work of dismantling what Heritage called the administrative state.

The Heritage Foundation has long had a keen interest in the United Kingdom.

It established its Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom in 2005 to strengthen the Anglo-American political relationship and promote Thatcher’s legacy. Heritage subsequently advocated Brexit, hosted British conservative politicians and developed increasingly close connections with the nationalist right.

At the 2023 NatCon UK conference in London, Heritage president Kevin Roberts appeared alongside serving British Cabinet ministers and delivered a keynote speech entitled “The Sun Has Set on Global Europe”.

NatCon argued that withdrawal had gone too far and left the nation defenceless against globalism, mass immigration and cultural collapse. Heritage showed how the resulting movement could enter the state, take control of its institutions and make them serve a different ideological purpose.

Then, as of July 2026, CPAC provided the enormous screens upon which all of this could be presented as a popular revolution.

Several years ago, I wrote about NatCons first attempt to hold a conference in Belgium.

The conference had already lost two prospective venues (following political pressure) before finally opening at the Claridge event space in the Brussels municipality of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode. Several hours into the first day, however, police arrived carrying an order from the local mayor, Emir Kir, demanding that the conference close with immediate effect.

Kir’s order argued that the event could provoke violent reactions and serious disturbances of public order. Police prevented further attendees and deliveries from entering, although speakers and delegates already inside continued with the programme.

Belgium’s Council of State would suspend the mayor’s order overnight on the basis that it found no evidence that the conference itself presented a threat to public order.

What it did was provide the conference organisers with an almost impossibly perfect political gift: Figures at the event speaking about the restoration of the nation state while police entered the building and attempted to silence them.

This goes back to the point on conspiracy.

While the conference discussed the existence of an intolerant liberal establishment, the liberal establishment (represented at the time by the Belgian authorities) had apparently sent officers round during lunch to provide a practical demonstration of its intolerance. It was proof, in other words, of the establishment’s attempts to silence the movement out of fear.

One of the recurring figures linking these events was Nigel Farage: keynote speaker at NatCon Brussels and headline speaker at CPAC Great Britain.

His appearance at CPAC’s event in Greenwich came amid continuing scrutiny over benefits he received from wealthy associates and a separate police investigation into donations made to Reform.

The response from Farage to all of this has been less focused on denial, and more about providing counterattacks largely consisting of how the scrutiny forms part of a wider establishment “hit job” on the Reform leader.

Recently, internal Reform briefing material instructed its councillors to describe the investigation as evidence that “the establishment will try anything to stop us”.

Councillors were supplied with the further response that the British public was tired of the establishment media’s “daily routine of hit jobs and smears.” Farage had also said that questions about his finances formed part of a coordinated pile-on and that “the establishment will stop at nothing to hurt Reform.”

As in the downfall of Truss, and the Belgian authorities’ response to the NatCon conference in 2024, two years later the scrutiny over Farage’s financial arrangements was the direct result of a ‘shadowy elite’ suffocating the movement and conspiring to prevent what they call national renewal—at least according to Farage.

The difference between Brussels and the Reform donations inquiry, however, is that in the former case, a conclusion was reached after examining the authorities’ conduct. In Farage’s case, persecution is the premise imposed before the evidence can be examined.

The sequence has been simply reversed.

In the case of Farage’s financial arrangements, before the investigation has reached a conclusion, supporters are told that it is a stitch-up. Before the reporting can be read, understood and assessed, it is classified as a smear/’hit job’. Before individual allegations can be answered, the journalists asking about them are incorporated into a coordinated establishment attack.

This is a form of political inoculation: the movement supplies its supporters with the interpretation before they encounter the information itself.

By the time the details arrive, they have already been told what those details mean and subsequently, once that explanation has been accepted, almost any development can be absorbed into it.

It asks supporters to treat the act of investigation as evidence that the investigation is corrupt. It converts democratic accountability into political persecution and then uses the alleged persecution to discourage anyone from examining what is actually being alleged.

As noted previously, this is how the Right operates now—and as in the case of the death of Ann Widdecombe, it will stop at nothing to seize the opportunity to distract from the questions being asked, even as more questions are being asked.

At the centre of much of the current reporting is George Cottrell: Nigel Farage’s long-standing friend and political associate, a former UKIP fundraiser and a man convicted of wire fraud in the United States in 2017.

Farage has described Cottrell as being ‘like a son.’

Reform’s official description of him has been rather less intimate. The party says that Cottrell has never held an official role and has merely acted as an unpaid volunteer.

This is despite The Sunday Times reporting that Cottrell appears to occupy a strange quantum state in which he financed staff, private security, accommodation, transport and social-media work around Farage before the 2024 election, while also appearing at party headquarters and political events.

This would be fascinating considering whenever questions are asked about the political significance of that support, Cottrell, according to Farage, becomes an entirely private citizen performing occasional favours for a friend.

Recently, stories surrounding the Cottrell family and its links to Reform, have become the evolving focus.

The separate police investigation concerns the money attributed to Cottrell’s mother.

In May 2024, Fiona Cottrell made two donations of £250,000 directly to Reform UK.

The following month, she transferred £1 million to Britain Means Business, a company controlled by Richard Tice, who was then Reform’s leader and is now its deputy leader. Britain Means Business subsequently made two £250,000 donations to Reform in the weeks before the general election.

The Metropolitan Police investigation covers both the £500,000 donated directly in Fiona Cottrell’s name and the two £250,000 donations made through Britain Means Business.

To be clear, there is nothing automatically unlawful about a British company donating to a political party provided that it is properly registered, carrying on business in the United Kingdom and using permissible funds. Nor is it necessarily unlawful for an individual to give money to a company that subsequently makes a political donation.

The question is whether the company is the genuine donor or whether it is being used to obscure the person or organisation that originally supplied the money.

This is why the sequence matters.

Fiona Cottrell had already donated £500,000 to Reform directly under her own name. She then transferred £1 million to a company controlled by Reform’s leader. That company subsequently gave half of it to Reform under its own name.

The name visible in the party’s donation records was therefore Britain Means Business.

But whose money was it?

According to the Guardian, bankers submitted a suspicious activity report concerning the transfer to the National Crime Agency. Bankers were unable to establish the ultimate source of the full £1 million, and the National Crime Agency sought assistance from its Australian counterpart in tracing the payments.

To clarify, a suspicious activity report is not necessarily evidence that a crime has taken place, but the inability to identify the original source of £1 million that subsequently travelled towards a political party is not a trivial bookkeeping detail. It is the central question.

The story became stranger when The Sunday Times reported that George Cottrell had opened an account with Oneify, the same cross-border payments business involved in the transactions, only days before the money began moving.

And so, the immediate source of the money was no longer entirely mysterious.

On Wednesday, the Guardian reported that George Cottrell had transferred more than $2 million to his mother in three payments made between 24 and 72 hours before she donated either directly to Reform or through Britain Means Business.

According to financial-industry sources, Fiona told bankers that the payments had come from her son. The transfers—$318,878, $328,815 and $1.4 million—were roughly equivalent in value to the £1.5 million she subsequently provided to Reform and Tice’s company.

This does not establish that an offence occurred. George Cottrell’s lawyers have previously maintained that his mother made her own decisions about political donations, and giving money to a relative does not automatically make every later payment by that relative a disguised donation.

It substantially changes the question on the other hand. It is no longer merely whether George Cottrell might have supplied his mother with the money. The latest reporting says that he did.

The question is whether Fiona remained the genuine donor once the money had been transferred to her; whether Reform’s senior figures knew George was supplying the funds; and where George’s money had originally come from.

The Guardian also reported that two people involved in Reform’s pre-election fundraising recalled George assuring senior figures that money would soon arrive. One described him as acting like a “shadow treasurer”. Reform denies this completely and says it rigorously vetted all donations.

No offence has been established, and the investigation remains ongoing. The financial distance between George Cottrell and the donations attributed to his mother has become considerably shorter, however.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of George Cottrell’s involvement may not ultimately be whether he supplied any of the money attributed to his mother. No published evidence has yet established that he did.

It is the political and financial world through which Reform moves.

Cottrell’s relationship with Farage has long had a transatlantic dimension.

In July 2016, he accompanied Farage to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and was arrested by federal agents while travelling home. He later pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud after admitting his involvement in a scheme advertising money-laundering services through the dark web. In March 2017, he was sentenced to eight months in prison and ordered to pay $30,000 in restitution.

Eight years later, that relationship was still helping to carry Farage between British and American political movements.

Farage’s parliamentary register records that Cottrell paid £9,253.60 for his travel, accommodation, staff member and security when he spoke at the National Conservatism conference in Brussels in April 2024.

Later that year, Cottrell funded a £15,000 private flight taking Farage from New Jersey to Palm Beach. Farage then met Elon Musk and Reform treasurer Nick Candy at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Reform’s own statement after the meeting said that Farage had learned about the “Trump ground game” and expected further discussions with Musk.

The connection was therefore not merely ideological.

Cottrell was paying for the practical movement of Farage between the institutions of the European nationalist right and the private Florida residence around which Trump’s incoming administration was assembling.

Then came the cryptocurrency.

According to the Financial Times, a Polymarket account registered under the name “GCottrell93” received approximately $8.8 million in cryptocurrency from two separate wallets in October 2024.

About $7 million arrived from a wallet funded through the OKX exchange, with the remainder arriving through another chain connected to ChangeNOW. The beneficial owners of the money were not identified.

The funds were then used to bet on Donald Trump winning the presidential election. Following Trump’s victory, the account generated approximately $4.46 million in profit before almost all the original funds and winnings were withdrawn into further wallets whose beneficial owners were also unclear.

The FT did not establish that Cottrell was gambling entirely with his own money. It did not establish who supplied the cryptocurrency or who ultimately received the proceeds. Nor did it establish that any of those funds were used to finance Farage or Reform.

Those distinctions are essential.

What it did establish was that an account in Cottrell’s name was handling almost $9 million supplied through unidentified cryptocurrency wallets while Cottrell was also providing money, travel, accommodation and other benefits around the leader of Reform UK.

The two things are not proved to be connected, but their coincidence makes scrutiny of the source of Cottrell’s wealth unavoidable.

The public reporting does not identify who controlled the wallets that supplied the money or who ultimately controlled the wallets that received it afterwards. In the weeks following that victory, Cottrell paid for Farage to travel to Trump’s Florida residence, where Reform discussed American campaign strategy and possible future cooperation with Musk.

That sequence does not prove covert foreign financing. It does show why describing Cottrell as merely a private friend performing occasional acts of generosity is increasingly inadequate as a defence.

The second recent report connects him even more directly to Trump’s political orbit.

Cottrell was convicted and imprisoned in Arizona. Mark Brnovich was the Republican attorney-general of that state between 2015 and 2023.

Public financial-disclosure records filed when Brnovich was nominated for government office identify Cottrell as one of the clients from whom Brnovich received more than $5,000 for legal services. The disclosure does not state the exact amount, the precise nature of the work or what advice was provided.

Brnovich had a complicated relationship with Trump.

As Arizona attorney-general, he investigated the 2020 election but produced no evidence supporting Trump’s claims of widespread fraud. Trump publicly attacked him for failing to pursue those claims aggressively enough. Despite that earlier hostility, Trump nominated Brnovich in April 2025 to become US ambassador to Serbia. The nomination was withdrawn in October 2025.

The Serbian and wider Balkan connection is one further detail that links Cottrell’s world to Trump’s.

I wrote previously about Cottrell’s interests in Montenegro, and how an investigation by openDemocracy found that businesses belonging to several prominent Reform and Brexit-linked figures were registered at the same modest office address in the coastal town of Tivat.

They included companies connected to billionaire Reform donor Christopher Harborne, former Brexit Party communications director Gawain Towler, former party treasurer Mehrtash A’zami and digital campaigner Samee Bhatti.

Across the border, a company linked to Jared Kushner—Donald Trump’s son-in-law, former senior White House adviser and one of the most influential members of his political family—had secured a 99-year lease to redevelop Belgrade’s bomb-damaged former Yugoslav military headquarters into a $500 million luxury complex.

Serbia’s parliament later passed special legislation to advance the project despite mass protests and an investigation into allegedly forged documents used to remove the site’s protected status. Kushner’s company eventually withdrew in December 2025.

Further south, Albania granted strategic-investor status to a €1.4 billion Kushner-linked resort on the former military island of Sazan. Meanwhile, Trump ally Richard Grenell had already served as Washington’s special envoy for Serbia–Kosovo negotiations.

And somewhere in all of this was Mark Brnovich.

Again, to be clear, there is nothing inherently criminal about several companies employing the same local accountants or registering businesses at the same office. On the other hand, it is an extraordinary concentration of people connected to an elite transatlantic political movement whose activities were supposedly rooted in the frustrations of ordinary voters.

The relationship between Cottrell and Brnovich was complex.

According to The Sunday Times, Cottrell was seeking a presidential pardon-effort for his wire-fraud conviction—and had developed a close relationship with Brnovich.

The paper connected the legal work disclosed in Brnovich’s records to Cottrell’s wider effort to obtain clemency from Trump.

Cottrell said that the legal advice was unrelated to his criminal case. There is no published evidence that Brnovich promised to secure a pardon, improperly attempted to influence Trump or entered into any corrupt arrangement with Cottrell.

The independent evidence therefore establishes the following:

• Brnovich’s federal financial disclosure listed George Cottrell as a source of more than $5,000 in compensation for legal services provided through Boies Schiller Flexner.

• Brnovich was subsequently selected by Trump for an ambassadorial nomination.

• Cottrell was separately seeking a pardon from Trump, according to The Sunday Times.

What has not been established is that the payment purchased—or was intended to purchase—access to Trump’s clemency power.

That limitation matters.

But the surrounding context matters as well.

A Reuters investigation into Trump’s second-term pardon system found that the traditional Department of Justice process had increasingly been displaced by personal appeals and politically connected intermediaries. Applicants and their representatives sought access through Trump allies, donors and figures capable of presenting their convictions as examples of political persecution.

That reporting does not demonstrate that Cottrell’s own pardon effort was improper. It does, however, explain why hiring a politically connected Trump ally is relevant.

The request was being made within a clemency system in which proximity, narrative and access increasingly mattered—and Cottrell’s closest political relationship was with one of Trump’s most persistent British allies.

Farage had already presented Brexit and Trump’s election as parts of the same “global revolution”. He spoke at CPAC in 2015 and returned in 2017 to tell American conservatives that Brexit and Trump represented the triumph of the nation state over globalism.

Cottrell’s significance is that he shows this relationship operating below the level of speeches.

• He paid for Farage to attend NatCon in Brussels.

• He paid for Farage to travel to Palm Beach and meet Musk at Mar-a-Lago.

• An account in his name received millions in unidentified cryptocurrency and wagered it upon Trump’s return.

• He paid a lawyer who had served as Arizona’s Republican attorney-general and was subsequently nominated for office by Trump.

• And he was seeking clemency from Trump for an American criminal conviction.

Each individual fact has limits.

Taken together, they show that the transatlantic relationship surrounding Farage is not merely a shared set of slogans about sovereignty, borders and the destruction of globalism.

Rather, Farage and Cottrell inhabit a political world in which British populism, American Republican politics, cryptocurrency wealth and private access repeatedly overlap: CPAC gives the relationship a stage; NatCon gives it a political philosophy; The Heritage Foundation supplies policy, personnel and a model for converting ideology into government.

The Balkans were not proven to be the movement’s central hub, but they had become an oddly persistent part of its map.

This is the informal connective tissue beneath the formal transatlantic institutions explored earlier in the article. It is the original contradiction.

Farage, Trump and the wider nationalist right present themselves as opponents of rootless global elites operating beyond democratic control. Yet the movement surrounding them is becoming increasingly international, mobile and financially opaque.

The cryptocurrency, private flights, presidential pardons, political betting and Republican intermediaries may all appear enormously consequential from within the ecosystem.

Outside it, however, they risk confirming something rather different.

The political world forming around Reform risks looking less like an insurgency against a distant global elite than the construction of a rival transnational elite of its own.

Does any of this matter in Clacton?

Electorally, perhaps not.

Democratically, it should.

There is certainly visible unease in the constituency. Some residents have criticised Farage’s explanation for triggering the by-election, describing his letter to voters as a “self-pitying diatribe” and questioning his attempt to turn scrutiny of his finances into a grand conspiracy involving the government, the media and the establishment.

Farage remains widely expected to win—particularly because Labour, the Conservatives and the other principal parties have declined to participate in a contest they regard as a stunt. The question is therefore not necessarily whether he will return to Parliament, but what he will claim that return proves.

The national picture is rather less flattering.

When Ipsos asked British adults whether they would prefer Farage or Count Binface to win, 33% chose Binface and 21% chose Farage. Another 32% preferred neither—which may be the most coherent political position currently available.

More importantly, 73% said the parliamentary investigation into Farage should continue even if he wins the by-election.

That distinction matters.

Farage will almost certainly attempt to present victory as exoneration: proof that ordinary people do not care about the origins of his wealth, the gifts he received or the financial relationships surrounding Reform.

The victory speech is so predictable that most of it could probably be written now.

There will be shouty fragments designed to be separated into social-media clips. The words “fear” and “establishment” will appear close together. There may be references to persecution, witch-hunts and stitch-ups. Farage will remind viewers that the principal parties refused to stand against him and then present his victory over a ballot paper largely composed of novelty candidates and political eccentrics as the moment the entire British establishment was defeated by the people of Clacton.

He may even use the result to portray Reform as indestructible at precisely the moment its appearance of national inevitability is beginning to weaken. YouGov’s latest MRP put Reform and Labour level on 22%, after showing Reform ahead consistently for over a year.

That is not a collapse, but it is no longer the unstoppable advance Farage has spent months describing.

Whatever Farage says, however, a by-election is not an audit.

It cannot establish where George Cottrell’s money originated.

It cannot decide whether benefits should have been declared.

It cannot determine whether Britain Means Business was the genuine source of the donations made in its name.

It cannot conclude a police investigation or retrospectively transform unanswered questions into answered ones.

It can determine only who represents Clacton.

The more important question for the constituency is what Farage’s extraordinary network of wealthy international friends, donors and associates has actually delivered for the people living there.

The official 2025 Index of Multiple Deprivation again ranked the neighbourhood east of Jaywick and St Osyth as the most deprived in England. It had occupied the same position in previous editions of the index.

This is the constituency containing a politician with access to private aircraft, cryptocurrency fortunes, billionaire donors, American presidents, international financiers and the political families surrounding them.

It is reasonable to ask how any of that access will be used to improve employment, housing, health, education and infrastructure in the place he is asking to represent again.

There is not yet much evidence that it has.

Farage’s own financial circumstances have certainly changed, of course. An analysis of the parliamentary register found that he had received more than £2 million in additional income since first being elected in July 2024, excluding his parliamentary salary.

He may therefore return to Parliament wealthier, louder and convinced that Clacton has acquitted him of everything.

Jaywick in his constituency will still be England’s most deprived neighbourhood.

That is the result his victory speech will not explain.

There had been no long and bloody leadership contest. No summer of televised debates. No prolonged discussion about the future philosophical direction of the Labour Party.

The party had reached the entirely understandable conclusion that it was already drowning and that holding an extended seminar on the precise ideological properties of the lifebuoy might be counterproductive.

Burnham was therefore proclaimed leader with something approaching medieval unanimity.

He gave his first speech on Monday.

His speech focused on many dangerous subjects.

Burnham spoke of renewal. He spoke of ‘circuit breakers’ on Britain’s political instability. He spoke of ‘new economic models’ and ‘new political models’.

And he did so, most shockingly of all, without a lectern.

The Downing Street lectern had become one of the busiest objects in British politics. It had spent much of the previous decade being carried into the street whenever another prime minister needed to announce that the country required stability and that, to achieve it, first, they needed to leave immediately.

Burnham began by acknowledging this grotesque turnover of recent British leaders. He was almost apologetic. He was, he noted, the sixth person in ten years to make that journey into Downing Street and the seventh prime minister since the Brexit referendum in 2016.

“We have not been good enough,” he said.

But who, precisely, was ‘we’?

The political class? The Labour Party? Westminster? The government Burnham had spent the previous decade periodically criticising while remaining just far enough outside it to avoid getting any on his shoes?

Burnham did not elaborate. “We” allowed everyone to accept collective responsibility while ensuring nobody had to resign.

His speech did something important, however, because it attempted something Starmer’s government had almost completely failed to do: it sought to explain the British condition.

Burnham argued that the country had taken “wrong turns” during the 1980s: political power had become more centralised, economic power had been privatised and large parts of Britain had been left to manage their own decline.

It comes with caveats.

Read more

It is cynical. It is grotesque.

It is also extremely weird.

To be clear, Reform had decided what the murder meant before the police had established what the evidence meant. Its representatives selected the presumed motive, identified the political beneficiaries and began distributing blame while detectives were still attempting to establish the basic facts.

This was not an appeal for answers.

It was a campaign to ensure that, whatever answers eventually emerged, the public had already been taught how to interpret them; it was Reform’s attempt to fill the seemingly intolerable empty space in modern politics.

On Friday, Devon and Cornwall Police asked the public not to speculate about Widdecombe’s death. Such speculation, Assistant Chief Constable Matt Longman warned, was potentially harmful to the investigation and deeply distressing to her family and friends. On Saturday, Nigel Farage travelled to the area around Widdecombe’s home and began reconstructing the crime for journalists.

He took a camera crew, naturally. He nodded his head to see if they were ready to roll.

One theory, he explained, was that it had been a burglary gone wrong. Farage did not believe it. From what he could see, with all of his forensic knowledge, and from what he could “make out”, this had been “premeditated murder”.

Whether the killing had been politically motivated, whether somebody held a personal grudge or whether there was another explanation, Farage could not say.

“I don’t think it pays at this moment in time to speculate,” he added.

That is to say, people should not speculate until after Farage himself had speculated about the actions of the killer, dismissed one possible explanation, declared the crime premeditated and introduced the possibility of a political motive.

Farage was not conducting the investigation, obviously.

He had not examined the scene. He did not know what detectives had recovered, what witnesses had said or what evidence police had found elsewhere. Yet he was confident enough to begin eliminating possibilities in public before urging people not to speculate.

Harvey Proctor, a close friend of Widdecombe’s, understood the problem with this immediately.

“Ann Widdecombe was far too dear to her family, friends and former colleagues for her murder to be exploited as political propaganda,” he said. It was a charge laid firmly at the door of the Reform leader.

There was something particularly striking about Proctor making that argument. Proctor’s own parliamentary career had ended after his 1987 convictions for gross indecency, but decades later he was also subjected to the fabricated allegations at the centre of Operation Midland. Widdecombe had supported him when he became a central figure during the investigation—a Metropolitan Police investigation that closed without charges after Carl Beech claimed that senior figures in politics, the military and the security services had belonged to a child-abuse ring responsible for several murders.

Widdecombe, he said, had understood that accusations did not become true because they were dramatic, politically useful or endlessly repeated. Now Proctor was asking the leader of her own party to apply the same principle to Widdecombe’s death.

On Sunday morning, police said there was, at that stage, nothing to suggest that Widdecombe’s killing had been politically motivated or constituted a terrorist incident. Detectives remained open-minded, but explicitly urged people not to circulate theories about the motive.

“It’s unhelpful,” the officers said.

“It doesn’t aid our investigation, and particularly, it’s distressing to the family and friends of Ms Widdecombe.”

The warning was not an obscure passage hidden in the twenty-third paragraph of a police statement. It was delivered publicly, during a press conference, in direct response to the speculation already spreading around the case.

It made little difference.

Zia Yusuf made the underlying argument explicit when he wrote: “‘Don’t speculate!’ means ‘shut up and accept the establishment narrative!’”

This was revealing.

A police request for evidential restraint had been translated by Reform into a typically conspiratorial instruction to submit to an establishment story being imposed upon the public. Uncertainty was no longer a necessary condition of an active murder investigation according to Reform.

Richard Tice escalated the argument further.

Responding to criticism of Farage’s intervention, he accused The Times Group of hatred, lies and libel before asking: “How many more Reform politicians do you want dead?”

It was an extraordinary response to a newspaper reporting criticism of political speculation during an active murder investigation.

When counter-terrorism officers assumed control of the investigation on Monday, Tice immediately declared the party vindicated, even though authorities said they were still pursuing multiple lines of inquiry in order to establish a motive.

Authorities had not fully established that Widdecombe was targeted specifically because she represented Reform. They had not concluded that Reform politicians collectively were being hunted. They had not found that the government, Parliament or police had deliberately withheld protection from the party.

None of this prevented Reform from behaving as though every part of its story had been confirmed, however. It was just part of the grand illusion.

Subscribe now

For Reform, it was key to speculate in advance of the evidence.

Then, when later evidence appeared to support one part of the speculation (ie. counter terrorism police took over the investigation), it became important to treat the entire construction as fact.

The question for Reform was not whether it had sufficient evidence for its claims when it made them. The point was that Widdecombe’s murder became a system for organising political guilt, and in which every possible development supported Reform.

This is the basis of how modern conspiracy politics works.

If terrorism was established, the party had been right. If another motive emerged, the authorities had hidden the truth. If the investigation remained inconclusive, the lack of certainty itself demonstrated a cover-up.

There was no evidence capable of disproving the theory because contradictory evidence could simply be absorbed as further evidence of institutional dishonesty.

Modern conspiracy politics works this way because it does not reject facts. Instead, it waits for facts to arrive and assigns each one a prearranged role.

In this case, Reform’s response was to pretend that changing evidence had confirmed claims made before that evidence existed. There is, however, a difference between following the evidence and waiting for the evidence to catch up with you.

Into this stepped Home Office secretary Shabana Mahmood.

Among many things spoken about, Mahmood told MPs that police had cautioned against speculation and must be given, “the space they need to carry out their work”.

At the same time, she acknowledged the particular fear felt within Reform and offered Farage a meeting with the chair of RAVEC, the independent body responsible for assessing protection for people in public life. Mahmood also said the government would consider what security guidance should be offered to former MPs and political figures outside Westminster.

The distinction was crucial.

It meant that the government could review protection without endorsing the claim that the existing system had been politically manipulated against one particular party generating the loudest atmosphere of impending martyrdom.

The government’s offer demonstrated something Reform’s version of events could not accommodate: the state could take Reform’s security seriously without accepting Reform’s entire political interpretation of the murder.

It could not prevent Reform’s established worldview, however. According to Reform, the party was under attack and had been abandoned by an establishment that could not be trusted, that hated Reform and had created the conditions in which its politicians might be killed.

And Ann Widdecombe, who could no longer speak for herself, had become the proof upon which the whole worldview rested. This is fundamentally why Reform’s language surrounding the issue has been so troubling—and cynical.

More troubling is that Zia Yusuf had claimed previously that “the state is providing no protection whatsoever” and that neither the government, the Speaker nor the police cared about the security of Reform MPs.

But Farage had, in fact, previously been offered a taxpayer-funded security package reportedly including a bodyguard, a secure car and a trained driver. The protection was said to be broadly comparable to that received by the Conservative leader and some senior ministers.

Farage turned it down because he considered it inadequate.

That, in itself, may be a legitimate dispute.

Indeed, Robert Jenrick did not dispute that an offer had been made or that Farage had rejected it. His argument was that the package represented a substantial downgrade from the protection Farage had previously received and therefore did not correspond to the risk.

But for Farage, this raises all manner of other questions.

• What does sufficient protection look like?

• What protection had he previously received?

• Who provided it?

• Who paid for it?

• And was it declared?

The last question in particular returns us to the wider reason for the suspicion surrounding Farage’s intervention after Widdecombe’s death.

Subscribe now

Last week, this page went into excruciating detail over what had happened that led to Farage’s stunt of resigning as MP for Clacton.

In the previous chapter we spoke about Robert Jenrick, but it was Jenrick who was asked by the BBC whether it “suited” Farage and Reform to change the national subject away from the £5 million gift and towards his security arrangements.

Jenrick rejected the premise, but the fact that the question was asked so explicitly establishes the media context in which Reform’s response to Widdecombe’s death was being examined.

It concerned the financial assistance Farage had received from wealthy associates, whether that assistance should have appeared in the parliamentary register and the extraordinary sequence of events through which he resigned his seat rather than remain in Parliament while those questions were being investigated.

After Widdecombe’s death, the political conversation surrounding Farage had moved from what he had received, who had provided it and whether he had declared it, to whether the British state cared if he remained alive.

That is not a subtle change of subject. It is an almost total transformation of the terms upon which Farage is scrutinised.

Before her death, security was the explanation that required examination. Afterwards, it became the emergency that made examination look obscene.

Regardless—

The questions do not disappear. In fact, the questions surrounding Farage’s security arrangements were already difficult enough, because the chronology did not produce a particularly coherent explanation.

According to Christopher Harborne’s lawyers, he gave Farage £5 million on 5 April 2024. Farage initially said the money “was given to me so that I would be safe and secure for the rest of my life”. The following month, he announced that he would not stand in the general election. Eleven days later, he reversed that decision, assumed control of Reform’s campaign and stood in Clacton.

Then came another complication.

George Cottrell subsequently paid for Farage’s travel, accommodation and “security provision” during a trip on 16 and 17 April 2024—after the date on which Harborne’s lawyers say the lifelong-security gift had been made.

After Farage entered Parliament, Robert Jenrick says he was given a “comprehensive” state-security plan that was later substantially downgraded. Farage was then reportedly offered a replacement package involving a bodyguard, secure vehicle and trained driver, but rejected it because he considered it inadequate. Jenrick has confirmed that an offer was made and refused, while defending Farage’s assessment that it did not correspond to the level of risk.

Perhaps each stage has a perfectly reasonable explanation.

Perhaps.

The problem for Farage is that the explanations do not yet form a single intelligible account.

The security explanation has never been properly explained. Indeed, the more information that emerges, the more explanations that Farage himself provides, the less it resembles a straightforward arrangement in which one benefactor paid one clearly defined sum for one clearly defined purpose.

Farage’s point—and the point made by many MPs—is that the danger itself is real. Few could seriously dispute that after the murders of Jo Cox and David Amess, followed now by Ann Widdecombe’s death. Public political life can be dangerous.

But saying so does not make the accounting any less bewildering.

If anything, it just gets murkier.

There was the BBC’s investigation into Christopher Harborne’s financial interest in Tether, the company behind the world’s largest stablecoin.

Harborne had donated £15 million to Reform over the previous year, in addition to the £5 million personal gift he had made to Farage. At the same time, Farage had raised the regulation of stablecoins directly with Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England and chairman of the international Financial Stability Board.

Farage did not apparently raise Tether by name. Reform denied that its policies had been influenced by Harborne or any other donor. The Bank said Farage’s intervention did not change its position.

The BBC had identified something without precedent in modern British politics: a party preparing itself for government had become overwhelmingly dependent upon one donor whose fortune was closely connected to a narrow financial sector—and whose commercial prospects were extremely sensitive to decisions being made by the institutions the party hoped to control.

There was also Farage’s private company agreeing to pay him £50,000 over five years to rent studio space situated at one of his own properties.

The rent was set at £10,000 a year: reportedly below the point at which the arrangement would have to be entered in the parliamentary register. The arrangement may be entirely lawful. Farage had not, however, explained how the figure was calculated or whether the rent had been independently valued.

Then there was George Cottrell again.

The Sunday Times reported that Cottrell had become the owner of an £8.5 million Chelsea property previously connected to Reform treasurer Nick Candy. The transfer documents reportedly recorded that the property had changed hands “not for value”, with the price listed as zero.

Candy insisted that the house had not been gifted to Cottrell. He said Cottrell had instead purchased shares in the Guernsey-registered company that owned it and settled a loan the company owed to the Candy Group.

Neither man disclosed how much Cottrell had paid.

The public record showed a Chelsea house worth £8.5 million being transferred for nothing. The explanation was that the real transaction had occurred somewhere behind it, through the purchase of an offshore company and the settlement of an undisclosed debt.

Nothing was necessarily unlawful. But nothing was especially visible either.

And then there was the Montenegro connection. The small Adriatic state had attracted a curious concentration of people from Farage’s political and financial circle.

Cottrell had used Montenegro as a base for several years. Harborne had registered a biotechnology company in the coastal town of Tivat. Reform board member Gawain Towler and former party treasurer Mehrtash A’zami had also established businesses there.

Some figures from Farage’s circle had developed relationships with the governing Europe Now! Movement, whose leader wanted to transform Montenegro into an international cryptocurrency centre. Towler acknowledged providing strategic media advice during the party’s election campaign. Allegations that Cottrell had secretly financed it were firmly denied by his lawyers.

Again, none of this proves criminal wrongdoing by Nigel Farage.

That is not the point.

The point is that the financial world surrounding Farage is becoming more complicated by the day.

Then Ann Widdecombe was murdered.

Her death did not mean the financial reporting became less relevant. It just became less visible. At least for a bit.

Subscribe now

By Wednesday, Reform’s argument had moved beyond the security of politicians.

It had become an argument about culpability.

At a press conference on 15 July, Zia Yusuf accused politicians and the media of creating the climate in which Ann Widdecombe had been killed.

“I can tell you about the climate in which she was killed,” he said.

It was one of “a relentless narrative from politicians and the media that Reform UK is a threat”.

It was, according to Yusuf, “a threat to be urgently stopped…A narrative so relentless it constitutes incitement.”

The word was important: incitement.

Incitement is not merely criticism. It is language that encourages somebody else to act. It’s a bit like when Nigel Farage had responded to the release of body-camera footage showing the appalling treatment of 18-year-old Henry Nowak by urging the public to feel “pure, cold rage”.

Despite the restraint implicit in an appeal made by Nowak’s family, Farage presented the case as evidence of a “two-tier culture” in which the rights of white people mattered less than those of ethnic minorities, and concluded that the correct public response was rage.

Later that day, a protest outside Southampton police station descended into violence. Officers were attacked with rocks, chairs, cans and flares. Eleven police officers and a police dog were injured. Far-right activists and political agitators were among those who had promoted or attended the demonstration.

This too could be considered incitement.

For Reform, Yusuf appeared to be arguing that politicians and journalists had not simply described Reform unfairly. They had helped create the conditions in which violence against Reform politicians became conceivable.

He was asked whether he was accusing other politicians of incitement in the criminal sense, Yusuf said that he was not. The accusation was therefore serious enough to associate his opponents’ language with lethal violence, but not specific enough to require evidence of a criminal offence.

During the same press conference, Yusuf complained that Reform had been described as racist, fascist, dangerous and a threat to democracy. When asked about his own language—including his description of Conservatives as “traitors”—he defended it.

There are naturally more double standards from Yusuf.

In the press conference, Yusuf said that he was upset that political parties suggested Reform is fascist even though he has himself the government “authoritarian” and “dystopian” on different occasions. Yusuf also complained that political parties had branded Reform “dangerous”, but then in a similar breath has himself described Starmer policies as “dangerous” and asked “how much blood must be spilt” due to “political decisions.” He complained about others suggesting that Reform posed a threat to democracy, yet has himself branded Labour a “threat to democracy.”

Reform can say all of this, of course, because it is Reform saying this, and Reform appears to believe that it operates at a different level of entitlement and superiority, often under the guise of free speech that can not be possibility awarded to others.

When Reform described its opponents as traitors, authoritarian or dangerous, it was describing political reality, according to Reform. When its opponents described Reform as dangerous, they were creating a climate of incitement.

Reform’s language was an analysis. Everybody else’s was potentially a cause of death. Apparently.

This clear double standard aside, there is no serious argument that the threats facing Farage and other politicians are imaginary.

On the same day as Yusuf’s press conference, a man was arrested over an alleged threat to shoot Farage. Yusuf said Farage had received almost 600 death threats since February. The murders of Jo Cox, David Amess and now Ann Widdecombe demonstrate that political violence in Britain is not theoretical.

That is precisely why the language surrounding it requires care — including from Reform itself.

But acknowledging that Farage faces genuine danger does not settle every question surrounding the party, or even how its security has been managed. It also doesn’t transform every financial question into an attempt to deprive him of protection.

Farage was due to meet the Royal and VIP Executive Committee on Thursday after accepting Shabana Mahmood’s offer to discuss his protection. Ahead of that meeting, he gave a more detailed account of the state security he had previously received.

According to Farage, his original protection had been considerably greater than that provided to Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. This was necessary, he said, because his political style involved walking down high streets, attending public events and interacting directly with large crowds.

It was on this basis that Farage argued that he could not continue operating with only a driver and one protection officer. Then he connected this directly to Christopher Harborne’s money.

“That really is part of the thinking behind the big gift that I got from Christopher Harborne,” he said.

That is an important statement; not because Farage had once again connected Harborne’s £5 million to the cost of his security. It adds another dimension to an explanation that had already changed repeatedly.

When the gift was first disclosed, Farage said it had been given to him “for one purpose”: to ensure that he could protect himself for the rest of his life. Days later, he described it as an unconditional “reward” for campaigning for Brexit for 27 years. When journalists continued asking what had happened to the money, Farage said it was none of their business. An unconditional personal gift, he argued, could be spent on Ferraris, placed on horses or used however he wished.

He later attempted to combine the explanations. Now the account had expanded again.

The gift had apparently also been conceived in response to the scale of protection required for Farage to continue travelling around Britain, attending public events and interacting with large crowds.

But it expanded again when it arrived alongside reports that, shortly before the gift was made, Farage had told senior Reform figures that he would need approximately £1 million a year to compensate for the earnings he would lose by returning to frontline politics.

According to three sources, Farage estimated the total cost of that return at £5 million—no mention of security was reportedly made during those conversations.

Scrutinising this, as Zia Yusuf says, is not incitement. It is just inconvenient, for Reform, should anybody dare scrutinise it in the first place, or that there are now several overlapping explanations for the sum of money Farage received from Harborne.

It is exactly why the question of disclosure remains important, and yet Yusuf attempted to close this distinction entirely. “Those who question Nigel Farage’s need for security should stop,” he said at Wednesday’s press conference. It was explicit. It wasn’t that there was nothing to see here; it’s that there might be, but you’re just not supposed to look.

Yusuf does not get to make that decision, however, and it is in the public interest that those questions be asked and answered.

What is clear is that Widdecombe’s murder cannot answer those questions as much as Reform cynically tries to make it.

It cannot retrospectively determine what Harborne intended in April 2024. It cannot establish what Farage intended when he discussed needing £1 million a year. It cannot decide whether the gift should have appeared in the register. It cannot explain the involvement of George Cottrell, the private security provision, the additional financial support or the wider network of properties and companies already examined in this article.

What it can do is make asking about them feel indecent.

That is where the accusation of incitement becomes politically useful, and goes back to the main spine of this article in why Reform’s attempts to deflect (under the guise of personal security) are so cynical.

Incidentally, polling suggests that the public has not necessarily accepted Reform’s transformation of the controversy.

A YouGov poll for The Times found that six in ten voters believed Farage had acted incorrectly over the gifts. Only 22% of his decision to resign and contest the Clacton by-election, while 40% disapproved. Even among Reform supporters, only half said he had acted correctly over the financial arrangements.

This does not mean Reform has collapsed, mind you. It does suggest that the “people versus the establishment” framing has not automatically erased the original concern.

Indeed, several things can exist at the same time.

Ann Widdecombe has been murdered. Farage, other Reform figures (and other politicians more broadly) face genuine and serious threats on a daily basis. Security detail offered to Reform figures was deemed lax and insufficient, and refused.

All of this can be true.

Stories, credited to Anna Isaacs in The Guardian, can also still exist that make the point that shortly before receiving £5 million, Farage told Reform figures that returning to politics would require £1 million a year to compensate for his lost earnings, and he estimated those costs would amount to £5 million.

That is, the same £5 million that has been variously described as a private gift, a non-political gift, an unconditional gift, lifelong security funding, a reward for Brexit and, now, part of the financial machinery necessary for him to continue operating as a highly visible political leader.

The people of Clacton being given an insight into those financial affairs of its MP is not incitement.

It is accountability.

I remember writing about “Posh George” Cottrell last year.

It was in relation to how Cottrell was said to be subject to a HMRC probe and was facing questions over tax residency. To be clear, at the time it was not understood to be a formal investigation. Cottrell’s lawyers said he was “not aware” of any “probe or inquiry”, and that the article originally published in The Guardian was subject to a legal complaint from Cottrell.

But it was one of numerous stories involving Cottrell that have popped up since July 2024 after Farage became elected as MP for Clacton.

Another story I remember looking at concerned legal proceedings involving Tony Bloom, the billionaire owner of Brighton & Hove Albion and the betting consultancy Starlizard. This involved Cottrell too.

In December 2025, a High Court claim brought by Ryan Dudfield, a former associate of Bloom, which alleged that Cottrell had acted as a “stalking horse” for Bloom’s betting syndicate. In plain English, the allegation was that online betting accounts held in Cottrell’s name were used by Bloom’s syndicate to place bets, predominantly on football, with Cottrell allegedly receiving 33% of any winnings while Bloom or the syndicate covered the losses.

That is serious for two reasons:

• The claim was not about a few casual bets. It concerned an alleged professional betting operation said in court documents to generate very large sums, with Dudfield claiming he was owed a share of gambling profits estimated at around $250 million.

• It raised questions about the use of “frontmen” or third-party accounts in high-stakes betting — a practice that can matter enormously in a regulated industry where the identity of the person placing or benefiting from bets is not some minor administrative detail.

There are important caveats.

These were allegations in court documents, not findings by a court.

Bloom later denied owing Dudfield the sums claimed, disputed parts of the claim, and denied that the syndicate was “secretive”, while his legal response nevertheless confirmed that there had been an agreement under which Cottrell allowed Bloom to place bets through at least one gambling account in Cottrell’s name.

So the relevance to Reform was not that this was a Reform scandal in itself.

It was that Cottrell — already close to Farage, already appearing around the party’s inner circle, and already linked to questions about money, access and influence — had also appeared in a separate High Court dispute involving high-value betting, third-party accounts, offshore gambling platforms and disputed profit-sharing arrangements.

Other stories have appeared too.

The pattern continued with Farage’s December 2024 trip to the United States, where he travelled to meet Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago.

In February 2025, it was found that the trip had been part-funded by Cottrell, who paid for Farage’s flight from Teterboro, New Jersey, to Palm Beach, Florida. Farage’s own register of interests records the donor as George Cottrell, gives the value as £15,276.72, lists the purpose as a “personal meeting”, and notes that the entry was registered late, with the rectification procedure applied.

It should be noted that while the register records it as a “personal meeting”, the fact that Farage met with senior Trump figures to “learn about the Trump ground game” makes the political context obvious.

There was also the creation of Geostrategy International Unlimited.

Companies House records show that Cottrell was appointed as director of Geostrategy International Unlimited, a political strategy and polling firm, that under section 448 of the Companies Act 2006, means that directors of an unlimited company are generally exempt from the requirement to file accounts and reports with the registrar, subject to exceptions.

For a political consultancy linked to a figure already close to Farage, that is not irrelevant. It means less public visibility over the company’s finances than would usually be expected from an ordinary limited company.

In most circumstances, that might be a dry point of boring, procedural company law. In this case, it is more significant.

Cottrell is not just any political consultant. He is a man who previously served time in the United States after pleading guilty to one count of wire fraud, who has since appeared in a series of stories involving money, political access, gambling accounts, tax residency questions and undeclared or disputed support for Nigel Farage.

Against that background, reduced financial transparency is not a footnote. It is the point.

All of these stories together are fascinating because they reveal a close proximity Cottrell has to the Reform network of power — including Nigel Farage himself, who described Cottrell as, “like a son” to him. Contemporary reports from former Reform insiders literally say that Cottrell refers to Farage as “daddy.”

But the problem often has been — up until now at least — how, as I noted previously, “few outside the Westminster bubble know who George Cottrell is.”

None of these stories that relate to Cottrell, a man who is so invested in the Reform project, have really cut through in any meaningful way. That is to say, the public have not developed a fixation on the subject enough to make any real difference so far as voting intention is concerned.

Have the latest revelations in The Sunday Times cut through? That is the question. The answer: for voters, perhaps, but for Farage, something has rattled his cage.

Subscribe now

It is worth being precise about what was alleged, because this was not just another story about George Cottrell standing somewhere near Nigel Farage in a nice suit.

The allegation was more direct than that: that Cottrell provided extensive financial and operational support to Farage in the period before he was elected MP for Clacton in July 2024, including staff, security, transport, accommodation and social media support.

The Guardian’s summary of the allegations described it as funding for Farage’s “operation”, including staffing, security and housing, while the Financial Times reported that the parliamentary standards watchdog was being urged to investigate undeclared “in kind” benefits from Cottrell in the year before Farage’s election.

The staffing element is particularly important.

The Sunday Times reported that Cottrell recruited and paid people to work around Farage’s private office and social media operation before the general election.

According to the paper, this included Jack Anderton, who was paid the equivalent of about £55,000 a year to work on Farage’s social media output; Tom Dupre, who created a website, and assisted with recruitment and back-office work; and Leah Thornton, who became Farage’s assistant.

Cottrell’s lawyers reportedly said Anderton and Thornton were paid by bank transfer from accounts in Cottrell’s name.

That matters because this is where the “personal friend” defence starts to creak under the weight of what looks like the foundations for political infrastructure.

There was also the question of security.

The Sunday Times reported that Cottrell paid for Farage’s private security, and Al Jazeera’s Reuters/PA report said Cottrell’s lawyers confirmed the last payment for private security came in the first quarter of 2024.

That timing matters because Farage was elected on 4 July 2024, and the House of Commons Code of Conduct requires new MPs to register current financial interests and any registrable benefits received in the 12 months before their election.

There was also accommodation.

The Sunday Times reported that Cottrell allowed Farage to use a five-storey Georgian townhouse near Buckingham Palace.

The Guardian reported that Reform’s Robert Jenrick* accepted Farage had received staff, security and accommodation from Cottrell before becoming an MP, but argued these were personal gifts and did not need to be declared. Jenrick also accepted that Farage had stayed in Cottrell’s house “a couple of times” and had private security paid for by him.

[*Jenrick, by the way, is also subject to a criminal investigation into a £37,500 donation linked to his 2024 campaign to become leader of the Conservative Party after it was found that funds illegally originated from a foreign source]

The issue is whether a party leader preparing to return to Parliament can receive accommodation near the centre of British political power, alongside staffing, security and social media support, and have all of it treated as politically irrelevant because the person providing it is described as a friend.

Incidentally, what Farage did declare is just as important as what he allegedly did not.

In his first Register of Members’ Financial Interests after the election, Farage declared a Cottrell-funded trip to Belgium between 16 and 17 April 2024, valued at £9,253.60, covering return travel, accommodation for Farage and one staffer, and security provision, for the purpose of speaking at a conference.

He later registered a Cottrell-funded flight from Teterboro to Palm Beach, valued at £15,276.72, with the purpose listed as a “personal meeting”. That later entry was marked as a late entry to which the rectification procedure was applied.

The register does show Cottrell-linked support. This is precisely what makes the Sunday Times allegations more awkward, not less.

Farage declared some Cottrell-funded benefits: Belgium, travel, accommodation, security, and later the US flight. According to the Sunday Times, however, he did not declare the wider alleged support: staff, private office assistance, social media help, transport, security and use of the London property.

The dispute is therefore not whether Cottrell was ever financially connected to Farage. The register already shows that he was. The dispute is whether the public was shown the full scale and nature of that support.

The rules are not especially mysterious.

The Commons rules on registration say MPs must register gifts, benefits or hospitality over £300 if they relate in any way to their membership of the House or political activities.

The current Guide to the Rules also says that benefits do not need to be registered if they could not reasonably be thought to relate to parliamentary or political activity — for example, purely personal gifts from partners or family members — but adds that both the possible motive of the giver and the use of the gift should be considered, and that if there is any doubt, the benefit should be registered.

That is the real pressure point.

Reform’s argument is that Cottrell’s support was personal, provided before Farage became an MP, and therefore not declarable.

Farage has naturally denied wrongdoing, said he followed the rules, and described the reporting as an “establishment hit job”. Reform has also called the Sunday Times story “baseless and contrived”.

The counter-argument is obvious: the rules do not only apply to benefits received after election, and the test is not whether the donor is formally employed by the party. The test is whether the benefit could reasonably be thought to relate to parliamentary or political activity.

That becomes harder to dismiss when the alleged benefits include staff working on political social media output, security for a public political figure, accommodation near Westminster and support around Farage’s office operation.

None of that proves a breach. That is for the standards process to determine.

But—

It explains why opposition MPs asked the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards to look at the matter, and why the Financial Times reported that the watchdog was being urged to open a new investigation into the Cottrell benefits.

There is also the wider problem of role and proximity. Reform and Cottrell’s lawyers have said he is an unpaid volunteer with no formal role in the party.

Yet reports suggest that Cottrell has been seen at numerous Reform events, press conferences, fundraisers, backstage at rallies, media appearances and overseas trips.

The Times also reported that Cottrell used a business card bearing the Reform UK logo and Farage’s official email address, with Reform and Cottrell’s lawyers saying the card was designed only to help people contact Farage’s office and was not intended to imply formal authority.

That is why this story is not just about one declaration. It is about the gap between formal status and practical influence.

Cottrell is presented as having no official role, yet the reporting places him close to Farage’s operation, close to Reform events, close to the party’s donors, and allegedly close to the machinery that helped Farage return to Parliament.

He is simultaneously described as politically incidental and repeatedly appears in places where politically incidental people do not usually appear.

There is one more layer.

The Sunday Times also reported that Cottrell is involved in an offshore crypto-gambling operation, Tether.bet, and raised questions about his possible interests in relation to Farage’s and Reform’s pro-crypto positioning.

That should be handled carefully: it is not proof that Farage has acted to benefit Cottrell, and Cottrell denies expecting any benefit from his relationship with Farage. It does, however, add to the transparency problem.

When a party leader receives extensive private support from someone whose own business interests may overlap with areas of political advocacy, voters are entitled to know what was provided, when, why, and on what terms.

The question at this point is not about whether Nigel Farage technically broke the rules. That matters, of course, and may yet be tested through the standards process. At some point. Whenever. (NB: We’ll speak about this in a bit)

The political questions are broader and more damaging: how much of Farage’s pre-election operation was privately sustained by George Cottrell, how much of that was known to voters, and why did the public register show only some Cottrell-linked benefits if the Sunday Times account of wider support is correct?

This is where the story changes from another Cottrell curiosity into something more serious.

Subscribe now

By this point, the issue is no longer only whether George Cottrell had provided undeclared or disputed support to Nigel Farage personally.

It is whether the wider financial ecosystem around Reform was beginning to attract scrutiny that could not simply be dismissed as gossip about one rich friend.

On 8 July, the Guardian reported that bankers had raised potential money-laundering concerns with the National Crime Agency over several transactions involving senior Reform figures and party-linked funding.

The reported Suspicious Activity Reports included concerns about a £1m donation to Britain Means Business, a fundraising vehicle used to support Reform, which the Guardian said appeared to have come from Fiona Cottrell, George Cottrell’s mother and a major Reform donor.

Half of that £1 million was then transferred by Richard Tice, as director of the company, to Reform UK. According to the Guardian, bank staff were not satisfied that the funds had ultimately come from Fiona Cottrell, and the NCA sought assistance from a foreign partner agency to trace the original source.

The same report also said that two further SARs related to a loan from George Cottrell to Tice, made shortly before Tice finalised a property purchase and made a party donation, and repaid after those transactions were completed.

A fourth SAR related to the £5 million gift from Christopher Harborne to Farage, which the Guardian had previously reported was also flagged to the NCA over money-laundering concerns.

All of this has to be handled carefully; A Suspicious Activity Report is not a finding of criminality.

The NCA says SARs alert law enforcement to potential money laundering or terrorist financing, and the Guardian itself notes that they are not crime reports or proof of wrongdoing. They are, essentially, red flags sent by regulated professionals when concerns are serious enough to require examination.

Politically, that caveat only gets Reform so far.

The significance is not that an SAR proves wrongdoing. It does not.

The significance is that Reform’s money trail has now produced multiple reported red flags across different transactions involving Farage, Tice, George Cottrell, Fiona Cottrell, Britain Means Business and Christopher Harborne.

That changes the nature of the story.

It is no longer only about whether one benefit should have appeared on one MP’s register. It is about whether the party that says it wants to clean up British politics has built its rise around financial arrangements that require this much explanation.

With Cottrell in particular, it suggests not just proximity, but possible dependence. Not just friendship, but infrastructure. Not just a wealthy ally occasionally helping out, but a private support network around the leader of a party that presents itself as the voice of ordinary people against hidden power.

Again, however, the question remains: did any of this actually cut through with voters?

It remains unanswered.

What matters though, is that it clearly cut through at Reform HQ—and rattled Farage enough to do something incredibly stupid. Probably more so than any question or allegation that has ever been put towards Farage in his political career.

Rather than allow that question to sit inside the slow machinery of parliamentary standards as he perhaps should have done, the thin-skinned Farage did what Farage always does. He turned it into theatre and a press conference—that characteristically happened without any press present.

Subscribe now

On Tuesday July 7, Farage announced that he would ‘resign’ as MP for Clacton in order to trigger a by-election, while also making clear that he intended to stand again.

Before we proceed, there is, inevitably, one extremely British procedural detail here.

No MP can simply resign from the House of Commons. Under a rule dating back to the seventeenth century, MPs vacate their seats through death, disqualification, expulsion, dissolution, or by being elevated to the Lords. The modern workaround is that an MP who wishes to leave asks the Chancellor to be appointed to one of two absurdly antique offices of profit under the Crown: the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds, or the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead.

It did eventually happen, or at least sort of, but for Farage, he was staging a resignation that was not really a resignation, in order to fight a by-election that is not really designed to answer the question being asked of him.

If you want it drier still, even once the seat is vacant, a by-election does not appear because Farage has announced one. The House must order the Speaker to issue a warrant for a new writ, usually on a motion moved by the whip of the party that last held the seat — normally, but not necessarily, that party’s Chief Whip (Lee Anderson, in this case).

There is no fixed legal deadline requiring the Commons to do this immediately, and Erskine May says motions for new writs can be objected to, debated, set aside or even amended. Ironically, Farage’s people-versus-establishment referendum still depends, rather beautifully, on the establishment issuing the paperwork.

In any case—

After page after page of scrutiny over his finances and allegations about gifts from personal supporters, Farage said the by-election would be “people versus the establishment”, and that he wanted his constituents to decide whether they still wanted him as their MP.

Constitutional details notwithstanding, this was not a resignation in the normal political sense. It was a tactical resignation designed to create a new political arena: a by-election in which Farage could invite voters to judge not the detail of the allegations, but the broader story he wants to tell about himself.

That distinction matters.

Another distinction that matters is the emotional terrain on which Farage wants to fight the by-election.

For Farage and his defenders, like former Conservative MP for Devizes Danny Kruger, the emphasis is elsewhere: away from the register and towards intrusion, harassment, family and victimisation.

Farage described the media scrutiny as a “pile on”, accused the mainstream media and other parties of going after him over gifts from personal supporters, and said the final straw was what he called media intrusion into his family’s privacy.

“I will not tolerate any of my family being endangered because of what I choose to do in public life,” he said. For the avoidance of any psychological doubt, this is Barnard Castle stuff. ‘What any man would do’ stuff. It changes the moral subject of the story from George Cottrell to Farage’s family.

It is no longer: what was provided, when, by whom, at what value, and why was it not declared?

It becomes: why are journalists hounding a man’s loved ones?

That move is not accidental.

It turns a standards question into a manipulative victimisation story. It invites supporters to see every question about Cottrell, Harborne, donations, private support or the register as part of a wider campaign by a demonised media establishment to destroy Farage personally.

Once that frame is accepted, scrutiny becomes cruelty, journalism becomes harassment, and the family becomes a human shield against questions that are not, in themselves, about the family at all. It provides a counter-narrative for his supporters to repeat.

Indeed, it is no longer a question about what Farage is alleged to have done. It is a question of what the media have done to Farage by reporting the allegations.

And there is something deeply recognisable about that move.

Anyone who has dealt with coercive, bullying or narcissistic behaviour will know the pattern of DARVO—deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. The moment reality arrives, the accused does not answer it. They attack the act of confrontation itself. They turn the question into the offence. They make scrutiny feel like cruelty and accountability feel like persecution.

That is the emotional architecture of Farage’s defence. It is not about providing answers to the questions. Instead: how dare you ask them in the first place?

For all of Farage’s noise, however, it changes nothing about the serious questions being asked.

Those questions and scrutiny of Farage’s finances (and all of what is written above) do not magically disappear if Farage gets another mandate. A constituency result can show that voters support him. It cannot, by itself, determine whether he complied with the Code of Conduct. It just means Farage may eventually have to stand in two by-elections.

The reason for that is wonderfully absurd.

The Commons standards process does not vanish because Farage briefly exits Parliament. The procedural protocol says that if a member ceases to be an MP while an investigation is in progress, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards suspends the investigation until the member is re-elected. If the member is not returned, the Commissioner decides whether it is appropriate and proportionate to resume.

So Farage may be able to interrupt the process, but not necessarily erase it. The paperwork waits.

Such is the absurdity of this possibility that other parties have rightly refused to stand any candidates until the recommendations of any Standards investigation have been made.

Within hours of Farage announcing the Clacton by-election, the Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and Restore Britain all indicated that they would not stand candidates, calling the act of resignation a “desperate stunt,” a “media circus” and a “vanity project” respectively.

On one hand, this act of defiance from the other parties does give Farage a narrative—the one he has spent years building.

Farage says the system is stitched up. Then Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and Restore Britain all decide not to stand. Supporters of Farage do not see the boycott as the opposition refusing to legitimise a stunt. Rather, they see it as evidence the cartel has revealed itself by declining to participate.

For Farage, the message is simple: the establishment is scared.

On the other hand, into this steps Count Binface to expose how flawed this particular narrative is.

Farage’s gamble could leave him facing the satirical candidate as one of his few challengers. Which is funny, obviously, but it is also politically dangerous because it effectively takes what was once a serious threat to Westminster, and reduces it to a laughing stock.

Farage wanted a national uprising. With parties refusing to stand, he ends up with a summer by-election arguing against a bin.

It creates the imaginary farce of Farage trying to conduct a serious debate with Count Binface in a constituency containing some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in England: “The people of Clacton do not agree that vital capital expenditure should be siphoned from the Treasury to fund the return of Ceefax.”

And this is precisely the absurdity the opposition parties are right to identify.

Farage has tried to summon the country to a democratic reckoning on a question the by-election cannot answer over his personal finances.

Clacton can decide whether it wants Nigel Farage as its MP, true.

It cannot decide whether alleged benefits from George Cottrell were personal gifts or political infrastructure; it cannot audit the Harborne money; it cannot rule on parliamentary standards.

Farage wants the result to stand in for all of that: one constituency, one summer campaign, one cheering crowd, and somehow the paperwork is supposed to vanish. That’s not how it works, and it could all backfire tremendously for Farage.

Subscribe now

My previous article examined whether or not Farage could quit.

Aside from the deeper suspicion among voters who are now asking what Farage is up to, we should turn attention to Reform itself, who are starting to seriously question whether Farage has become a liability.

Interestingly, Reform appear to have been taken aback when the major parties declined to field candidates, and that Team Farage did not seem to have expected it. The surprise left Reform insiders with little in the way of a response beyond starting interviews by making chicken noises.

In public, Reform can call the other parties cowards—or chickens.

In private, the manoeuvre has clearly created a stranger campaign than Farage wanted: not Farage versus the establishment, but Farage versus abstention, Count Binface, and the possibility that his grand democratic reckoning becomes a barely contested procedural pantomime.

Even this, however, cannot mask the problems the party has internally.

Reports even prior to Farage’s announcement noted how Reform’s Millbank HQ was “more riven with infighting and jostling for position than usual”, with anxiety about by-election losses, Restore Britain, and Farage’s future. It also reported distrust between old Reform/Ukip types and former Tories around Robert Jenrick, Zia Yusuf’s clash with Jenrick, and the core question of succession should Farage leave. Others, fighting like “rats in a sack,” are making the point quite bluntly:

“Everyone knows that the party without Farage is finished.”

Again, it may be perhaps too lazy to make the comparison, but this is like Boris Johnson in and around January 2022 all over again. Like the Conservatives, the party itself is finding that it can neither live with or without Nigel Farage.

Indeed, the party looks organisationally thin beneath the Farage brand.

There is a lot of churn in Reform’s organisation: David Bull leaving as chair, as I wrote about before, Charlton Edwards exiting as company director and no longer treasurer, some Conservative defectors returning, criticism of Millbank as young/inexperienced, donor unhappiness about strategy, and concern about a lack of policy depth. One unnamed donor said that populists can win “up to a point” but then need a broader set of policies and ideas.

It just goes on like this.

Into this steps former Farage acolyte Ben Habib.

Habib has asked the Electoral Commission to examine alleged undeclared donations from George Cottrell over the 2019–2024 period.

That matters because one of the defences around Farage is that some support arrived before he became an MP, and was personal rather than political. Companies House records show that Farage was a person with significant control at Reform 2025 Ltd from May 2019 until February 2025, holding more than 50% but less than 75% of shares.

Habib’s point was essentially that you cannot be the controlling figure in a political party and also ask everyone to believe your political life was in some kind of cryogenic suspension.

That does not make Habib noble. It makes him more of a useful idiot, able to smell the smoke, but also being able to provide some more fuel.

Most worrying for Farage is that even the donor class can smell it. The Telegraph reported that Mohamed Amersi, former Conservative party mega-donor who previously gave £25,000 to Reform, said he would not donate again “until the cloud hanging over this issue is resolved.”

The problem for donors like Amersi is that the story keeps evolving week after week over the matter of Farage’s finances, which are a world away—usually several thousands, often in America—from the people of Clacton that Farage is supposed to represent.

There, in Clacton, the media discovers weariness.

A constituency full of voters tired of Westminster politics, tired of being used, tired of the circus. One voter said he had always been Labour but would no longer vote for anyone because “everyone’s just out for their own”; another said people in her family had written to Farage for help and “he doesn’t even reply”.

That’s the real insult. The insult is that a constituency with serious poverty, poor services, health pressures, housing issues and long-term neglect is being asked to function as a character witness for one man’s donor problem.

By the way, the by-election itself will not be cheap.

Farage offered for Reform to pay the cost of the by-election, but reports confirm that the government said this would be illegal because election costs must be met from public funds, not by candidates or parties. Estimates say it could cost more than £200,000. Twice if another occurs.

Clacton may be asked to host one publicly funded by-election so Farage can claim a mandate over questions the by-election cannot answer — and then, if he wins, and if the standards process later produces a suspension long enough to trigger recall, he could potentially face another one.

One by-election for the performance.

Another for the paperwork.

The second would be an even greater insult than the first. It would mean Farage using a deprived constituency in Essex as a human shield for a register of interests, with voters treated not as constituents with problems of their own, but as a laundrette for his dirty paperwork.

But there is an alternate ending.

A quietly devastating critique of Farage might suggest the remote possibility that Count Binface wins.

Even Reform, whose obscenely well-funded, Mayfair-establishment based operation required them to shift resources from the Greater Manchester mayoral contest to Clacton, recognise the threat—however bizarre and surreal it may seem.

In some ways we have reached (that overused phrase of) Peak Reform with this by-election. This page thought Reform had reached its peak during the 2024 UK General Election, when candidate Peter Gold, who bears a somewhat (ie. not really) passing resemblance to Sir Patrick Stewart, launched his campaign for the Plymouth Sutton and Devonport constituency dressed as Star Trek's Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Evidently not.

It took a man dressed as a bin to bring it out. It has left the Telegraph writing angry columns about why Count Binface is not funny. Supporters have begun to ask genuine questions about who funds a man dressed as a bin in an attempt to discredit him. Former Conservative chancellor, not far from financial discrepancies of his own, Nadhim Zahawi went so far as to say that “the deep state is after Farage.”

There is a genuine fear in Reform about a man dressed as a bin.

Read that back several times to appreciate it: “a genuine fear… about a man dressed as a bin.”

If ever there was a time for Reform supporters, and especially paid-up members, to have a moment of self-reflection, it is now.

Because Farage losing to a man dressed as a bin would be damaging enough on its own—electorally, but also psychologically. But the most damaging part would not be the defeat itself. It would be what happened afterwards.

For all of those who have expended vast amounts of energy supporting Farage over the years, usually screaming at “the Lefties” on social media, the reality is that if he went on to lose to a man dressed as a bin, nothing would actually happen. Voices may ring out across social media. GB News’ output might be sustained a bit longer when it isn’t cutting staff numbers. The right-wing media might devote several articles filled with hyperbole and clickbait to express how much of a travesty of democracy the result is.

But there would be no January 6 uprising.

There would be no revolution in Farage’s name. No great democratic rupture. No movement. No riots. No buildings in flames. No crowds marching on Westminster because according to the internet a dark, secretive establishment had somehow conspired to anoint a man in a silver dustbin as the saviour of Clacton-on-Sea.

There would just be the result.

And life would move on.

Politics would move on too — arguably in the most absurd way possible, true, but Farage would most likely retreat back into the algorithm, shouting into the echo chamber for those who believe their Messiah was persecuted. The grim reality for those who fail to take that moment for self-reflection is that he was just a very naughty boy who ‘bravely ran away’ after he refused to come clean about his personal finances.

Saying that isn’t me being mischievous. It’s just that anybody who has been paying attention to developments in Reform has seen that the wheels have been coming off for a while now — if they were ever truly secure in the first place.

To be clear from the outset, the problem for Farage is not that Reform lost Makerfield. It did lose by quite some considerable margin, as I wrote previously.

But there’s more to it than that.

A victory in Makerfield would have said, ‘things are happening; this is real.’ Instead, it was left visibly showing that support for Reform has hit a ceiling.

Makerfield was supposed to be the next great proof of concept for a party looking to create a ‘political earthquake’ before the next general election. It was also supposed to be an opportunity for Reform to exemplify how — since 2024 — they have mobilised, but more importantly, professionalised.

Out were the conspiracists, racists, oddballs and fringe elements of old. In were the new breed of hopefuls. Or so voters are constantly told.

The problem is that this isn’t even remotely true. In the case of Makerfield, the Reform candidate there, Robert Kenyon, faced accusations of misogyny and sexism, homophobia and transphobic slurs, extremist rhetoric and COVID-19 conspiratorial bilge, and sharing questionable views on geopolitics relating to Crimean occupation.

A bigger conundrum facing Reform, as noted so often on this page in any analysis of current events within the party, is that despite the message that Farage is trying to professionalise it, the vetting process seems to fail continually—and on an industrial scale. The historical views of people like Robert Kenyon are all par for the course in Reform irrespective of Farage’s assertion that it is changing.

Farage’s attempts to ‘professionalise’ Reform have completely failed. It is one of the many features of this supposed ‘government in waiting’ that has started to catch up with Farage and Co.

Losses in areas such as Gorton and Denton, or in areas of Wales and Scotland, have started to catch up with Farage as well, although it isn’t down to these results that people should be seriously considering whether or not Nigel Farage should resign. It goes beyond that.

It is more about why these kind of ‘underperformances’ are completely expected.

For context, there have been five by-elections since the 2024 general election. Reform has won one (in Runcorn & Helsby) — and only did so by the tightest of margins (6 votes). This kind of record is not indicative of any kind of real momentum, and certainly not at a parliamentary level.

Reform themselves might reflect on council and mayoralty victories to highlight their success. Indeed, By the 2025 local elections, Reform had almost 700 seats — 41% of all seats being contested at the time — and took control of multiple councils. Open Council Data currently lists Reform as holding well over 2,000 council seats.

And yet—

Despite the numbers, the real metric of success comes from the achievements in those areas. Previously, I highlighted the failure of Kent County Council. Later, I highlighted Reform’s “basket case” [c. Nigel Farage himself] in Worcestershire.

Several articles ago, I spoke about the Ukraine flag controversy in Essex. It was one of Reform’s first acts in local government after gaining control in May. They did not present a housing plan, a social care rescue package, a roads programme or a forensic audit of waste.

It was a flag.

The Ukrainian flag that had flown since 2022 was replaced with a second Union flag, in what the incoming Reform leadership called a proud moment. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, currently running a country fighting an actual war—rather than a symbolic one against bunting—then had to gently explain that: “small mistakes can break big friendship.”

This is what Reform governance looks like in miniature: enormous drama over tiny symbols, followed by international embarrassment, followed by Farage pretending that everyone else is hysterical.

All of it together — Makerfield loss, failure to mobilise and professionalise, candidate vetting errors, council problems — makes the issues cumulative for Farage. Voters see a pattern that cannot merely be attributed to a ‘deep state’ media blitz on Reform.

This is where Dr David Bull enters the frame.

Subscribe now

To be clear, Dr David Bull is not some random ex-Reform councillor with a Facebook profile showing him holding an enormous carp, or some peripheral crank existing on the borderlands of Twitter/X.

Bull is one of those figures who has moved through several of modern Britain’s stranger institutional pipelines: medicine, television, Conservative politics, Brexit politics, and Reform politics.

Before Reform, Bull was a recognisable media doctor and presenter. His career included health broadcasting, children’s television on Newsround, lifestyle television and, interestingly, Most Haunted Live — which, in the context of Reform UK, now reads less like a broadcasting credit and more like professional preparation.

Politically, he did not arrive yesterday.

He had previously been selected as a Conservative parliamentary candidate for Brighton Pavilion before later withdrawing. He then joined the Brexit Party project, was elected as a Brexit Party MEP for North West England in 2019, and remained in the European Parliament until Britain’s exit from the EU brought the UK’s MEP experiment to its abrupt constitutional end.

From there, Bull became part of the Reform machine.

In March 2021, he was made Reform UK’s deputy leader. In July 2024, Farage removed him from that post as part of a reshuffle that also saw Ben Habib ousted and Richard Tice moved into the deputy leadership role.

Then, in June 2025, Bull was brought back to the front of the operation as Reform’s chairman, replacing Zia Yusuf after one of those internal (and highly typical) Reform episodes where a senior figure resigns, returns, is reconfigured, and everyone pretends this is evidence of stability.

In May 2026, Bull stood down as party chair and was replaced by Lee Anderson — he of ‘South Normanton Holiday Inn Express’ fame who previously said Reform bribed him with a lot of money to defect from the Conservatives to Reform. Not that anybody talks about that any more.

(NB: All of the above paragraphs alone could easily point towards the wider thesis of ‘things people are noticing about Reform’ as noted in chapter one)

Since leaving the role of party chair, Bull suggested that Farage should take “a break” from politics, saying he was giving the advice as “a friend and a colleague,” and remarked that “the party is way bigger than Nigel.”

In normal politics, that might sound harmless enough.

But this is Reform, and in Reform, saying “the party is way bigger than Nigel” is not a wellness observation and more a theological event.

We remember Rupert Lowe’s acrimonious departure from Reform last year:

Rupert Lowe, then one of Reform’s MPs, questioned whether Farage’s “messianic” qualities could translate into the “sage leadership” needed to run a serious political party.

This was not, in itself, an especially deranged thing to ask. It is the sort of question any party claiming to be a government-in-waiting should be able to survive without immediately reaching for a bucket of holy water and the disciplinary process.

This is Reform, however, where internal criticism of Farage does not operate like normal disagreement.

This is a party whose attempts at professionalisation have reportedly included asking local branch officials — chairmen, secretaries and treasurers — to sign non-disclosure agreements before taking up their roles. Reports suggest that Reform later tightened branch rules so that they required branch officers to sign NDAs, while restricting local branch activity on platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook.

It seems less like professionalisation and more like paranoia over what is said about the party’s internal structure by those operating within.

What was stark about Lowe’s intervention at the time was that it went directly to the central contradiction of the party. Reform wants to be treated as a serious national force, but also wants to retain the emotional simplicity of a personal vehicle fueled by single-minded ambition.

It wants to be a movement, a party, a government-in-waiting, a protest machine, a grievance refinery and a constitutional support act for Nigel Farage, all at the same time. Reform appears to have underestimated how, at some point, somebody was always going to ask whether the Messiah was becoming a management problem.

For Lowe, what followed was not exactly a demonstration of relaxed institutional confidence.

Reform suspended him amid allegations of bullying and verbal threats, which Lowe denied. The Crown Prosecution Service later said he would not be charged over the alleged threats, concluding there was insufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction. Lowe, by then fully outside the tent and enthusiastically urinating inwards, described Farage as a “coward and a viper” who “must never be prime minister”

From there, Lowe became something more dangerous to Farage than a disgruntled former colleague. He became an alternative story of “what people wanted Reform to be”

To be clear, Restore Britain is still small.

It is not sweeping the country and is not yet a serious electoral machine. It has not produced anything like Reform’s local government footprint. But its significance is not simply numerical.

Its significance is psychological. Restore exists as an accusation.

It says to the angriest end of Farage’s potential electorate: Reform has gone soft. Reform has been captured. Reform has become respectable. Reform has let in defecting Conservatives, professional politicians, media managers, donor politics and all the other things Farage once trained his supporters to despise.

Restore did not cost Reform the seat. As noted, Rebecca Shepherd finished third, with just under 7% of the vote, and even if every one of those voters had gone to Reform, Andy Burnham would still have won.

And so dangerously for Reform, this is not a simplistic “split the right” story. It is worse for Farage than that. It is a contamination story.

During the campaign, Reform and Restore spent days attacking each other with the kind of dignity normally associated with two bald men arguing over a comb. Underneath the farce was something important, however. Restore showed that Farage can now be attacked from a different side — the purist extreme hard right.

Though they appear to be criticising Farage from different directions, what unites both Rupert Lowe and Dr David Bull is the argument that Reform’s strength is also its fundamental structural weakness: the entire emotional and electoral logic of Reform has always been Nigel Farage.

The party has officers, candidates, councillors, MPs, donors, chairmen, deputy chairmen and a seemingly endless supply of men (and it is mainly men). But the centre of gravity remains Farage. He is the brand. He is the narrator. He is the grievance made flesh.

When David Bull — not an enemy, not a random, not a jealous outsider filled with any particular grievance or malice — says Farage may need time out, the statement lands differently from Rupert Lowe.

It suggests a deeper fatigue inside the machine. Something is wrong.

Subscribe now

Nowhere has that sense that something is going wrong been more visible than in Farage’s handling of the £5 million question.

For what it’s worth, questions over Farage’s own personal finances have been a vulnerability since he was elected and opened up his interests to public scrutiny. The media has fallen short on this, and has been too slow for months. Years even. As I noted way back in July 2024:

Indeed, the early register entries after the 2024 general election listed a number of questionable payments and benefits Farage had received: overseas trips to the US linked to Donald Trump, thousands made as a presenter on GB News, and money received from Christopher Harborne.

All the new scrutiny over his personal finances should have been visible from the start.

Farage’s register showed the sort of financial ecosystem that would have caused an electrical fire had it belonged to anyone else: media money, platform money, donor-funded travel, American political access, GB News earnings and, already, the recurring presence of Christopher Harborne.

Yet for months, much of Westminster treated it as background colour rather than the obvious question it was becoming.

The £5 million story did not come from nowhere.

It came from a pattern.

Remember, this is the same Nigel Farage who breached the MPs’ code of conduct 17 times by failing to register £384,000 in outside earnings within the required 28-day deadline.

This is the same Nigel Farage who, after being criticised over how much time he actually spent in Clacton, announced that he had exchanged contracts to buy a house in the constituency — only for the Guardian to later report that the property was actually bought by his partner, Laure Ferrari.

This is the same Nigel Farage who admitted breaching parliamentary rules after failing to register a trip to Florida to speak at a Republican Party dinner, where hospitality packages reportedly cost up to $25,000. It’s worth noting that since becoming an MP, Farage has registered at least eight separate externally funded overseas trips (including a trip to Davos), totalling more than £230,000 in travel, hospitality, accommodation, accreditation and associated support.

This is the same Nigel Farage who, having already promoted gold bullion (including at Reform’s own conference), has recently declared a £270,000 payment from Direct Bullion for promoting gold — his largest single payment yet for work outside Parliament — at a rate calculated to be more than £22,000 an hour. The total Farage has earned from Direct Bullion promotion is £685,500.

This is the same Nigel Farage whose property arrangements have now become part of the same transparency problem. Questions are rightly being asked about how Farage and Laure Ferrari have built a mortgage-free property portfolio worth more than £4 million, with at least five properties across Surrey, Essex and Kent, while only two were disclosed in his parliamentary register of interests. Farage’s representatives say his declarations comply with the rules, naturally, but this is pattern.

It’s just unfortunate for Farage that the £5 million question that he keeps being asked is the biggest version of that pattern.

The explanations have not exactly helped.

At various points, Farage has said the money was for personal security, that it was a reward for Brexit, that it was private, that it was non-political, that it was unconditional, that it was nobody’s business, and — when the story became especially inconvenient — that the information may have emerged through a hostile hack. The Guardian’s helpful timeline of Farage’s shifting explanations over the £5m gift reads less like a clarification and more like a man trying to assemble a wardrobe while falling down the stairs.

What made the recent media round so damaging was not only the substance of the questions, but Farage’s visible irritation at the existence of questioning.

On LBC, Nick Ferrari pressed him on what the money had been spent on. Farage replied: “With all due respect, what’s it got to do with you?” He added that it was an unconditional gift, that he could spend it on Ferraris if he wanted, and that he could put it on the horses.

Farage repeated this evasiveness across other interviews, including on TalkTV, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, and on Sky News. “Waste of time,” Farage said. “Ridiculous questions.”

The wider point is the hypocrisy of Farage.

Put simply, Farage’s political career is built around the language of suspicion.

For over thirty years, Farage has told people to follow the money, question the elites, ask who benefits, interrogate the cosy arrangements, expose the hidden interests. Farage has railed against globalism, opaque power networks, unaccountable international influence, the EU, the WEF, the conspiratorial ‘secret rulers of the world.’

And yet—

Whenever the questions travel in his direction, the curtains come down, the drawbridge rises, and suddenly the great tribune of transparency becomes extremely passionate about the sanctity of private financial affairs, which now seem to require a guidebook, a Land Registry search, a Companies House tab, a parliamentary register, a standards inquiry (…maybe two), and we’re still none the wiser as to how deep his pockets go, or whose grubby hands are actually in them.

It is not simply a question about whether Farage has technically breached a rule either. That matters, of course, and the parliamentary standards process will take whatever course it takes. But politically, the damage is broader than procedure. The issue is not only whether the money should have been registered, or when, or under which category, or whether it arrived before or after a particular formal threshold of parliamentary candidacy.

The issue is that the story reverses the moral posture on which Farage has built his entire career.

Farage has spent decades presenting himself as the man outside the room, banging on the glass, demanding to know what is being hidden by the people inside. He has been the outsider, the dissenter, the pub-table prosecutor, the man who asks why nobody else is asking the obvious question.

Now he is inside the room.

And the question is being asked of him.

Subscribe now

The danger is cumulative.

Makerfield showed that Reform can be beaten. Bull showed that there is fatigue inside the machine. Lowe and Restore showed that Farage can be attacked from the right as compromised. The councils showed that the protest machine struggles when handed administrative reality. The candidate scandals showed that professionalisation remains more slogan than fact.

And the £5 million story shows that Farage himself is no longer safely outside the system he condemns.

The idea that Nigel Farage might resign before the next election is not a prediction. It is an underpriced possibility because the conditions that make it thinkable are already visible.

Start with the internal panic.

After Makerfield, Reform insiders were urging Farage to sack Zia Yusuf, with figures inside the party reportedly “spooked” by Restore and concerned about whether Reform was being pushed too far right. One source said Yusuf was “a big problem”. Another warned that there were:

“some serious splits within the party that are going to break out at any point”.

That is, suffice to say, not the sound of a party calmly preparing for government. Frit, actually, as Farage’s idol Thatcher used to say.

Further evidence comes from Farage asking the plaintive question, “what do you want?” to Restore-switching voters.

And it’s a hell of a question carrying a lot of weight because it exposes Farage’s loss of control. This is the man who believed with absolute confidence that he could command the sea, now seemingly on the verge of being sucked beneath the waves because he failed to understand the way the tide was shifting.

Incidentally, tactical voting is one of Reform’s greater concerns.

The same pattern that was visible in Makerfield had already appeared in Caerphilly, where Plaid Cymru assembled the anti-Reform vote, and in Gorton and Denton, where the Greens did the same.

It is not that everybody has suddenly discovered they love Labour because of Andy Burnham’s return. It isn’t that the Conservatives are likely to see a major resurgence, the Liberal Democrats are about to sweep the Home Counties and West Country on a wave of orange clipboards and community newsletters, or that the Greens, Plaid and other parties necessarily provide the solutions.

Incidentally, the Senedd is becoming somewhat of a laughing stock.

On paper, Reform’s Senedd result should be one of the party’s great proofs of seriousness. In May, Reform surged into the Welsh Parliament as the official opposition, taking 34 of the 96 seats. That is not nothing.

And yet, almost immediately, it started to fall into chaos.

Reform’s early weeks in the Senedd involved tears, walkouts, “own-goal votes” and some of its MSs voting against their own party. One Labour MS described the Senedd as “a circus”, accusing Reform of chasing “clickbait moments”, while Cardiff academic Laura McAllister made the more important strategic point:

“Chaos or bad behaviour in the Senedd doesn’t sell well, even to the Reform base, because whilst people are prepared to consider Reform as a populist insurgent party, having the keys to No 10 is completely different.”

Other reports exist that suggest Dan Thomas, Reform’s leader in Wales, is already said to be so despondent with the scene in Wales that he has begun to eye up a Westminster seat only weeks after being elected to the Senedd, with Reform’s 34 MSs reportedly already falling out with each other.

The same report points to tension between longer-term Reform/Brexit Party types and more recent Tory defectors who were handed top positions under Wales’s new super-constituency system.

As we saw in Caerphilly, however, the concept of tactical voting is something that could seriously damage Reform’s ambitions in Wales.

The nightmare is that enough voters dislike Reform to become practical — at least if current polling* is anything to go by (*usual NATB-caveats this far from a general election apply).

Everything about the current state of Reform, then, suggests that the party is entering a new phase of its development. It hit the ceiling months ago, and is now looking at a backwards trend, with the £5 million question hanging in the air serving as the sword of damocles over everything else, including the party’s ‘Farage dependency.’

The question for Farage himself is whether he wants to remain trapped inside Reform long enough for all of this to become his daily life. Because it will. Because scrutiny should.

Farage may decide that the best way to preserve the myth is to leave before the machine demands too much of the man. In this case, that means the management of a party that has become too real, too exposed, and too far outside the closed ecosystem on the fringes of social media.

The question of whether Farage might resign matters at this point should be asked more openly.

It isn’t because it’s certain. It may not happen. But it would make sense if he did, or was at least considering it seriously — and this is before he has even had the chance to do it as Prime Minister.

Remember the precedent of Boris Johnson who hated being Prime Minister because he discovered that power is less profitable than proximity to power.

The difference is that Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. Farage has not.

The comparison is useful, however, because Johnson sought the role and enjoyed the cosplay and theatre, but what he appeared to enjoy rather less was the actual job. He loathed the grind, the papers, the discipline, the committees, the limits, the scrutiny, the fact that being prime minister meant he could no longer simply wander around the world being paid enormous sums to say Boris Johnson things in rooms full of people who had paid to hear Boris Johnson things. That would come after he left.

Should Farage enter Downing Street, he would face the same conundrum. Being prime minister is, by Farage standards, not especially well paid.

True, the role sits somewhere around the high-six-figure edge of respectability (around £180,000 per annum) only if you compare it with normal public life, but compared with Farage’s recent financial universe, it starts to look like a huge pay cut.

And like Johnson, prime ministerial power would give Farage what he has always claimed to want, but it would also take away what he actually seems to enjoy. Boris Johnson discovered that the prime ministership was not the apex of freedom. It was a badly paid cage with designer wallpaper.

Farage may look at the same cage and conclude that he thinks he is worth more outside it. Perhaps that is the final irony.

For years, Farage has asked voters to believe that he is the only man willing to take back control, but it seems the closer he gets to the control room, the more it looks as though he wants to run away from it.

Maybe Nigel Farage does not want to be prime minister.

Maybe it would be simply too cheap for him.

It was The Lectern.

And alongside The Lectern, to the side, were the civil servants, the few remaining cabinet loyalists, the family, and for us, the sight we have seen so many times in the last 10 years: the departure of another Prime Minister, the fifth since 2016 to resign rather than simply be evicted by the electorate.

A few articles ago, I focused on something that is probably as fitting a pre-emptive tribute (or autopsy) as any to Starmer and talk of his imminent departure.

It was mostly about the 2026 King’s Speech, and the strange emptiness of a government that intended to get extremely busy between 2026 and 2027.

That article, written weeks ago, matters now perhaps more than any autopsy I could write of Starmer’s premiership because it explains, in a roundabout way, something that hangs over British politics like a ghostly black and ominous cloud sent from Mordor: the insatiable hunger for a political narrative.

For context, the King’s Speech contained 37 proposed bills and draft bills that it hoped it would enact in this session of Parliament. It was ambitious. It was not nothing.

In defence of Labour, nobody can seriously look at the government’s legislative programme from the last two years and conclude that the government simply sat in Whitehall playing Minecraft. The first session, which ran from the July 2024 King’s Speech through to the May 2026 King’s Speech, included 63 government bills, 54 of which received Royal Assent.

Again, this is not nothing, but for many people in society it somehow manages to feel like nothing. Any obituary of the Starmer administration (which this article is not) should consider why this was the case.

The conundrum, of course, is that for many observers of current events since 2016, post-referendum churn left observers expecting crisis as proof of importance. One of the problems with Starmer’s procedural government is that it could not compete with that.

Without making this an article on the 10th anniversary of Britain’s referendum to leave the EU, one of the lasting legacies is that British politics has not merely been reported. It has been serialised. Every week required a cliffhanger.

Every vote must be a showdown. Every bill must be a battle for the soul of the nation. Every procedural device and constitutional oddity must arrive on television with the faint smell of gunpowder.

There was a period, not very long ago, when British politics became so deranged that perfectly normal people were expected to develop urgent opinions on complex, constitutional definitions given by experts, wheeled out from the crypts of places like the Institute for Government, to explain what prorogation, “confidence and supply”, or any other buzzword that nobody ever used before Brexit, meant.

Most people have more immediate concerns, however. They do not sit at home in the evening thinking: ‘I wonder whether the government will rely on negative or affirmative resolution procedure for this secondary legislation.’

That, really, is the lasting legacy of Brexit insofar as technocratic governments cannot exist under the new doctrine of ‘narrative first, process after’. No government can both generate that level of drama and carry on doing the quiet, boring, necessary things governments are supposed to do. Politics now cannot exist without noise or impatience.

Read more

He got two.

And they were big ones.

First was John Healey, who resigned as Defence Secretary over military spending. Al Carns, the Armed Forces minister, followed him out shortly afterwards.

For Healey, the issue was money.

Specifically, the money Britain says it needs to defend itself, the money the Ministry of Defence says it needs to pay for the plan, and the money the Treasury says exists only in the same metaphysical category as affordable childcare, adult social care reform, or an NHS strategy not entirely dependent on the miraculous healing properties of the bold, spatial innovation of a plastic waiting chair in A&E.

Carns’s complaint was sharper.

It was not just that the Defence Investment Plan was underfunded. It was that it was insufficiently transformed; too slow, too old, too attached to the expensive ceremonial furniture of a previous military age.

In Healey’s version, the state was refusing to buy enough defence. In Carns’s version, the state was also buying the wrong defence, at the wrong speed, through a machine that still behaves as though modern warfare is something that happens after a consultation period.

Labour’s problem on defence was that the argument had been built into its mythology from the beginning. Talk of the department being “hollowed out”, of procurement waste, of black holes and neglected morale, was not some panicked invention after taking office.

It had been part of the party’s attack line for years, when Labour could inspect the ruins from the relatively comfortable vantage point of opposition. Impatient as the public may be by the continued use of this attack line, it remains accurate.

The Conservatives really had left a huge mess, with more than a decade’s worth of cuts and waste in the sector. And not just ‘some’ waste, either. Lots and lots of waste.

It was waste primarily accrued from overspend on procurement, write-offs, contract cancellations and/or unplanned extensions, delays, admin errors, damage to and/or broken equipment, or cases where taxpayers’ money is simply wasted but where an accurate estimate of the costs cannot be officially confirmed—though it was found in 2021 to be “into the billions.”

None of this remains untrue. This was not Labour melodrama.

The National Audit Office really had warned that the MoD’s 2023–2033 Equipment Plan was unaffordable, with forecast costs exceeding the available budget by £16.9bn.

The Public Accounts Committee really did describe it as the largest funding deficit in any of the twelve equipment plans published since 2012.

The problem was that the argument ceased to be effective after two years of saying it. Just as the Conservatives learned that blaming Liam Byrne’s ‘letter in the drawer’ for every problem that needed a solution may have been funny for a bit, but made people cringe by 2024, Labour is now reconciling itself to the possibility that when you lobby for more cash, the chances are you aren’t going to get any.

Or alternatively—

That it becomes ‘subject to fiscal conditions’ — the Treasury’s little trapdoor under every moral promise that prevents it from committing too much to anything — as defence expenditure now seems to. Hence Healey’s departure.

Subscribe now

What made Healey’s resignation more than a standard departmental budget tantrum was the timing and specificity of the complaint, however.

He was not saying, in the usual ministerial way, that his department would quite like more money, please, because everyone in Whitehall would quite like more money.

Healey’s argument was that defence had already done the work. The threat had already been assessed. The Strategic Defence Review had already been published. The government had already accepted the language of a more dangerous world. Ministers had already spoken of readiness, deterrence, NATO, Ukraine, Russia, the Middle East, the High North, the Strait of Hormuz, and the unpleasant possibility that “as soon as 2030” might not be a hypothetical so much as an appointment.

Then, according to Healey, the financial settlement arrived and behaved as though none of that had happened in a letter that was polite in the manner of a man putting a bayonet through a tablecloth. Though he praised Starmer, the government’s record, Ukraine policy, and a number of other things including, crucially, the Strategic Defence Review, he slid the knife in exactly where it mattered: the Prime Minister had been unable, and the Treasury unwilling, to commit the resources required.

Healey’s objection was that the support was backloaded, that the pressure was immediate, and that a rise to 2.68% of GDP by 2030 was functionally absurd when spending was already due to hit 2.6% next year.

Carns then made the argument more dangerous because he shifted it from affordability to competence.

His resignation was not just a complaint that the plan was underfunded. It was a complaint that the plan belonged spiritually to another era. The Defence Investment Plan, in his view, was neither sufficiently funded nor sufficiently transformative.

‘Transformative’ is the word doing most of the damage here, because Carns’ argument was simple: the British state is still trying to buy defence like it is ordering mahogany furniture for a gentlemen’s club: slowly, reverently, expensively, and with no obvious understanding that the building is about to be blown to smithereens by hundreds of cheap mini-drones buzzing outside.

The scandal is not that the MoD literally spent the modernisation budget on, say, the restoration of an antique cigar case found in the Defence office that once belonged to Churchill. Although the tragedy isn’t too far away from that. The closest literal version is the MoD Art Collection: more than 2,000 items of fine art, chronometers, antique furniture, clocks and assorted historical objects (unvalued in the accounts because they were treated as publicly owned non-operational heritage assets) that were still costing the department almost £60,000 in maintenance tasks a year, 20 years ago.

(NB: As far as publicly available answers go, that appears to be the last useful annual figure anyone extracted from the machine, which means that nearly twenty years later the current cost may be lower, higher, buried in a broader budget line, or being guarded in a mahogany filing cabinet by the ghost of Lord Kitchener)

It is that the real examples are bigger and stupider. Ajax is the modern classic: a £5.5 billion armoured-vehicle programme that, for years, appeared to injure more British soldiers inside the thing than the lucky baddies fortunate enough to be outside of it it, thanks to unresolved noise and vibration problems.

Nimrod MRA4 is the grand tragicomic ancestor: £3.6 billion written off after the maritime patrol aircraft was cancelled, despite the NAO warning that it had contributed to eight of the 15 security priority risks in the National Security Strategy, and that cancellation would have consequences for some military tasks that were “severe.”

Carns’ resignation letter was different to Healey’s in that sense.

It is the part Starmer cannot easily dismiss as ministerial special pleading.

Carns was not simply saying “give the MoD more money.” He was saying the MoD wastes money, moves slowly, clings to legacy programmes, and allows bureaucracy to become a weapon of mass delay.

Weirdly, In one sense, that ought to help the Treasury’s argument. Why pour more money into a machine that appears to turn urgency into paperwork and paperwork into a commemorative procurement failure?

But in another sense, it makes the government’s position worse.

• if Healey is right, Labour is underfunding defence.

• If Carns is right, Labour is underfunding defence through a machine that also does not know how to buy the right things quickly enough.

This is the double bind.

Defence does need more money, but Defence also needs to stop eating money like a goat devouring banknotes.

Starmer’s response was, in its own way, and weirdly, perfectly rational.

He accepted the danger. He accepted that Britain had inherited years of underfunding and neglect (This is defensible). He argued that his government would deliver the highest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War (This comes with the ‘subject to conditions’ attached). He said the Defence Investment Plan would provide the resources the military needs, transform and modernise the armed forces, back British industry, and ensure money was spent wisely (This remains aspirational).

Then came the sentence that told us where the whole government lives now: the increases would be “sustainable and fair” and would require:

“significant reallocations of funding from across government departments.”

That’s the door marked “reality.”

“Significant reallocations” means cuts elsewhere.

It means defence does not get more money crafted out of pure fiscal alchemy. It means some other minister, in some other department, opening an email from the Treasury and discovering that national security has developed an appetite for their budget.

This is why the resignations mattered on the way to Makerfield.

They did not merely expose a defence row. They exposed the governing message underneath Labour’s entire offer: we know, we agree, the problem is serious, the inheritance is real, the need is urgent, the public service is broken, the threat is growing, the case has been made, the moral argument is understood — but there is no money, or not enough money to give out quickly, so deal with it.

For ministers who disagree with this message, the government accepts that they may resign. In the case of Dan Jarvis’ elevation to the role of defence secretary, there’s always another MP to replace the one who resigned.

For those who remain and accept the government’s message, or those who are considering resigning, here is the more traditional option: sit quietly, smile bravely, and wait for the Treasury to begin shaking down the DWP again, as though that went beautifully the last time the government tried it.

Subscribe now

One of the many conundrums facing Labour in Makerfield was that even if Andy Burnham won, and then went on to launch a leadership bid and win that, he would still inherit the same Treasury trapdoor that had just opened beneath Healey and Carns.

The arithmetic would not change. The working theory is simple enough though.

Keir Starmer is trapped by fiscal caution, Westminster process, an exhausted public, Reform pressure, collapsing public services, and evidently departmental rationing. Burnham, if his message was to be believed, came with more than just vibes — it came with a change in tone, with equal parts self-reflection, space, distance, and italics. Not the ‘New Labour’ of Blair, or ‘New New Labour’ of Starmer - ‘New New NEW Labour’, with jaunty cartoons for placards and the name ‘Andy’. Not Andrew. Andy.

What made the contest so strange was that Labour (by way of Josh Simons’ resignation) had created a by-election in one of its own seats to bring back the one politician who might save Labour from itself albeit without any kind of guarantee that it actually will. Burnham’s proposition was, essentially, ‘if you hate Labour, vote Labour.’

Constitutionally it’s incredibly bizarre, almost post-modern, because it turned a by-election into a complaint form addressed to the party on the ballot paper. A confession with leaflets.

Reform’s argument, by contrast, was ‘Labour has failed, so punish Labour’. That is a clean message, which is why it works. It does not require much intellectual upholstery. It just requires anger and a direction in which to point it.

The problem was that anger has become a crowded (though lucrative) market, as spoken about in my previous article.

The problem with Reform’s proposition in Makerfield was the class of voter it was trying to attract based on the enemies it was trying to draw votes back from — namely, Rupert Lowe’s very, very far right Restore Britain.

To be clear—

When I say ‘class of voter’, I don’t mean as in income bracket, accent, house price or whether someone says “tea” when they mean dinner (and vice versa). It’s class as a moral category and a question over what kind of voter Reform’s campaign was asking the people of Makerfield to become.

If Reform and Restore were both competing for the same anti-Labour anger and both drawing from the same well of algorithmic (often anti-immigrant, far right) grievance while dressing resentment up as rescue, then a vote for either carried a meaning beyond ordinary protest. It said something.

It identified the protest not simply as frustration with Labour, but as a willingness to express that frustration through a political ecosystem of suspicion, exclusion, punishment and proximity to extremism.

That, for Burnham, was another opening because it allowed him to take inspiration from the Green Party whose ‘Reject Hate’ message was so effective in the Gorton & Denton by-election.

In this context, Reform’s problem was sharper than the pre-by-election polling alone suggested. It was not just Restore looking to split the vote. It was contamination by proximity while Restore helped define the emotional territory Reform was fighting on.

Since 2024, Reform has been battling to professionalise itself without frightening off the people who were attracted to it before it looked professional.

The party has repeatedly insisted that it has improved its vetting, tightened its operation, grown up, smartened up, put on shoes, found a spreadsheet and become a real political machine. But the same problem keeps coming back — and worse, some of the people caught up in it keep being readmitted.

• Sunderland councillor Glenn Gibbins, for example, had been suspended over a reported Facebook post saying Nigerians should be “melted down” and used to “fill in pot holes.” Reform said he had apologised, accepted it was in “extremely poor taste”, and was readmitted with a final written warning.

• Plymouth councillor Ben Rowe was suspended by Reform over offensive social media posts, including material depicting Muslims being bombed at Mecca, antisemitic conspiracy material, comments about immigrants “breeding like rats”, and a post during the 2024 Southport riots urging protesters outside a mosque to “get rid of that filthy building.” Reform said he had apologised and was issued a final written warning — and was readmitted.

• Reform’s chair of North Northamptonshire Council, Maurice Eglin, stood down after he was found to have posted offensive historic tweets, including Islamophobia, support for far-right groups and anti-trans views. He apologised and said he had been a “keyboard warrior,” but remained a councillor.

Elsewhere in the party’s rolling quality-control incident, Robbie Lammas, Reform’s former deputy leader on Medway Council, quit after eight months, calling his defection from the Conservatives “the biggest mistake of my life” and branding Reform “unfit to govern”; Sarah Mason, a Reform councillor, was forced to delete a fabricated Makerfield poll claiming Labour and Reform were level on 44%.

And as for Makerfield candidate Robert Kenyon himself, his past comments (including objectifying posts about women, anti-abortion remarks, Covid misinformation, transphobic slurs and comments appearing to justify Russia’s seizure of Crimea) were dismissed by Nigel Farage as “a few laddish things” and “the sort of thing you’ll hear in every pub.”

The problem for Reform is that in its attempts to professionalise, in dismissing these kind of things, it has opened a door for Restore to say: stop minimising it.

Lowe’s far-right vehicle is dangerous to Reform because it offers the same emotional hit with less shame and fewer table manners. What Reform condemns, suspends, explains away or quietly readmits with a final written warning, Restore can present as the point.

• Rupert Lowe said convicted criminal Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson) could join Restore if he wanted to.

• James Munro, a former member of a now-defunct neo-Nazi group in Scotland who has also been involved with Homeland, claimed he would remain an active Restore member.

• Steve Laws, described in The Guardian as “ethnonationalist” influencer, tweeted: “Rupert Lowe is our leader. GET IN LINE.”

• Former BNP official and leader of the exclusory far-right land-buying project The Woodlander Initiative told followers that Restore was the far right’s last mainstream political opportunity.

• Patriotic Alternative member, Craig Buckley, appeared with Restore candidate Rebecca Shepherd and supporters in Makerfield, while members of other far right groups Homeland, Blood & Honour* and the British Democrats offered support for Restore.

* - To give an insight into the severity of this association, the UK government imposed a full asset freeze on Blood & Honour under domestic counter-terrorism sanctions. The government said it had reasonable grounds to suspect Blood & Honour was involved in terrorist activities, including promoting and encouraging terrorism, recruitment, and making funds available for terrorist purposes.

Put more bluntly, Restore’s pitch is the unvarnished far-right version of the politics Reform has been trying to make respectable.

Burnham’s pitch to voters just had to make that clear.

Subscribe now

The results of the by-election itself were curious.

Some numbers and ‘what they mean’:

Firstly, it can reasonably be considered a landslide Labour victory. Turnout was high, at nearly 59%, higher than the general election, so this cannot easily be dismissed as a sleepy by-election won in the dark by the usual postal-vote machinery.

Second, Burnham won 54.8% against Reform’s 34.5%, with Restore on 6.8%. That means Reform and Restore combined still only reached 41.3% — nowhere near Burnham. Restore did not split the vote and save Labour. Lowe’s party may have mattered politically and morally, but not arithmetically enough to explain the result.

Third, the tactical voting strategy (the ‘Keep Reform Out’ approach) was visible from space. At the 2024 general election, the Lib Dems and Greens took more than 11% between them in Makerfield. In May’s local elections, the Greens alone were in double figures across the Makerfield wards. By the by-election, they had been reduced to political vapour: 0.7% for the Greens, 0.4% for the Lib Dems, fewer than 500 votes combined. That said, it does not mean Burnham was saved by tactical voting; tactical voting helped define the scale and meaning of the victory.

Fourth, if there is any consolation for Reform, Rob Kenyon’s vote did not collapse. The little statistical goblin in the mix shows that his vote actually grew by almost 3,000, while his vote share rose by 2.7 points. The problem for Reform—despite this—was that Labour’s vote grew considerably more. Put simply, Makerfield did not show that Reform had no audience. It showed that Burnham could build a larger one.

For Reform, this was a big loss — not because the numbers were catastrophic, but because the psychology was.

Farage said Reform would “throw the kitchen sink” at Makerfield. It did. It’s just that the sink appears to have bounced off Andy Burnham and landed on Robert Kenyon’s head.

Reform had talked Makerfield into being more than a by-election. It was supposed to be proof that there were no safe Labour seats left. It was supposed to be the place where the local-election earthquake became a parliamentary break through. It was supposed to show that even Andy Burnham, Labour’s emergency candidate, northern premium brand and human escape hatch, could not withstand the force of Reform’s advance.

Instead, Reform increased its vote slightly and still lost heavily. Trounced, actually.

That is the uncomfortable bit for Farage.

The other uncomfortable bit for Farage is that Reform cannot explain the night away by saying Burnham was a one-off. Other context provides another stark reality for Farage: he has lost 4 out of 5 crucial by-elections; the one Reform won (Runcorn and Helsby), was decided by a majority of 6. This is not the ‘earthquake’ Farage warned the SW1 ecosphere about. It is not currently the confidence of a party that could win a general election.

It’s worth pointing out that in the same night, they also lost in Aberdeen South. Thus proving that in two completely different political ecosystems, Reform failed to break through.

That is the bit that’ll hurt the Farage/Reform brand more.

Aberdeen South was a very different contest, however— it was essentially Scotland’s oil-and-gas argument wearing a rosette. The SNP, with its numerous internal issues, had vacated the seat after Stephen Flynn moved to Holyrood. The Conservatives threw serious resources at it. Kemi Badenoch visited repeatedly. Douglas Lumsden MSP (the party’s candidate in the area) made the contest a referendum on the North Sea, telling voters the “destruction” of the oil and gas industry had to stop.

And it worked against Reform’s concerted effort to breakthrough north of the border. Indeed, the Scottish Conservatives took the seat from the SNP with 49.5% of the vote. Reform came a distant third on 8.6% (NB: for what it’s worth Labour were fourth).

The problem for Farage is that the ceiling was there too.

Whether that ceiling holds nationally is another question for another set of results at some point in the future. But on this night, in two very different contests, Reform failed to turn attention into victory. In Makerfield, Burnham built a larger anti-Reform coalition. In Aberdeen South, the Conservatives became the more useful vehicle for anti-SNP and pro-oil-and-gas voters.

The bigger question remains for Labour.

What now?

First, there is the small matter of Greater Manchester. Burnham’s victory in Makerfield immediately disqualifies him from the mayoralty, which means Labour now faces another high-stakes contest in one of its most important power bases. Reform, having been denied its breakthrough in Makerfield, will hardly need telling that Greater Manchester is the next available wall to run at.

Makerfield gives Labour an answer to Reform, but not yet an answer to government. Healey and Carns still resigned. The lights in government across all departments are still flashing red.

For Labour, Makerfield was not a normal victory, but it marks what those in the SW1 political-speak corner of the world would usually call “a turning point”. Ironically, Burnham himself saved his allies in government a lot of work by using this phrase himself.

On one hand, it shows Labour can beat Reform by quite a large margin. On the other, it also shows Labour may need someone other than Starmer to do it.

That is the exquisite little hand grenade now rolling around the Cabinet table. Starmer can say voters chose Labour’s campaign of hope and optimism over division and hate, as he did after Burnham’s victory. He would be right. But they chose that campaign when it was fronted by Andy Burnham, in a contest openly understood as a possible route to replacing Keir Starmer.

What awaits the government now is, in one sense, a foregone conclusion: more proof that the Starmer administration is teetering, unable to pursue its King’s Speech agenda without being dragged into public, almost Tory-esque cannibalism.

On the other side of the debate will be the prime candidate to replace Starmer, arguing that the same departments that still want money simply needed somebody more competent to tell them to stop howling at the patio door.

For his part, Burnham has also been trying to reassure the markets. Burnham said he supports the current fiscal rules and a plan to get debt down, while leaving himself some room to tweak them in office. Reuters reported that credit-rating agencies were already watching the potential “Burnham factor”, with analysts stressing the limited room for manoeuvre created by high debt, deficits and market sensitivity after the brief, ‘I’m, like, so random’ Liz Truss spell of mania.

That is why his next move matters more than the victory speech.

If Burnham simply becomes Starmer with better weather, the moment will curdle. If he promises the moon without explaining the money, the Treasury, the bond markets and every hostile newspaper in Britain will carve him into economically irresponsible slices before breakfast. Makerfield wants a clue. Britain needs a proof of concept.

Yet those words, “subject to fiscal conditions” remain. Words like “significant reallocations” don’t change their meaning if they’re spoken with a regional accent. The trapdoor is still there.

For Labour, then, Makerfield has potentially given it one way out of a crisis by showing that Reform can be beaten. It does not yet show how Labour intends to get Britain out of the trap.

Imagine: an actual Ukrainian president, in the middle of an actual European war, has had to politely involve himself in the civic flag arrangements of Reform-run English councils. It reads like the opening premise to a lost Charlie Brooker political satire: a damp little constitutional horror story in which the fate of Western solidarity is accidentally outsourced to a county hall flagpole, an ominous man with a laminated lanyard, and a Union flag hanging out of his pocket.

This is not, it is fair to say, where the geopolitical frontline should be.

And yet here we are.

Read more

Electoral law calls the mechanism a “casual vacancy”. According to the Electoral Commission, that can happen when an elected member dies, resigns, becomes disqualified, or is no longer qualified to remain elected. Usually, that vacancy leads to a by-election.

The council has to run the process.

It provides notices, nominations, ballot papers, postal votes, polling stations, staff, verification, count, administration, election paperwork; the Electoral Commission’s guidance is blunt on the issue of who pays for it:

“The costs for running a local government election are paid for by the local authority.”

So—

When a councillor resigns, the cost does not disappear into the warm spiritual mist of “personal circumstances”. It lands on the council. Which means, ultimately, it lands on the public.

In Gateshead, Reform UK councillor Danielle Cavanagh resigned less than two weeks after being elected to represent High Fell ward. Reports suggest Cavanagh had been elected on 7 May 2026, and had stepped down because her business commitments had expanded during the final weeks of the campaign.

The result was a by-election. Estimates placed the cost of that by-election at between £10,000 and £16,000.

In much broader analysis, by mid-May, less than two weeks after the supposed shift of the electoral tectonics, Reform councillor departures had already left local authorities facing an estimated £287,000 in by-election costs—cases linked to vetting or conduct issues, lack of engagement, or administrative errors, one Reform councillor in Bradford pulled out before polling day and then was elected anyway.

Since the May 2026 local elections specifically, the churn has continued.

To be clear, not every suspension, defection or loss of the party whip automatically creates a by-election. A councillor can leave Reform and continue sitting as an independent. When the councillor resigns the seat itself, is disqualified, or fails to take office, however, the machinery starts again.

The council pays. The public pays. The ballot papers come back out.

That is why Reform’s councillor churn matters.

It is not merely embarrassing. It is not merely another candidate-vetting story, or another round of: “whoops, we appear to have selected a neo-Nazi and a male porn actor moonlighting as a local politician.”

It costs money.

The irony is that Reform presents itself (with its DOGE failure) as the party of cutting waste, and yet its own discrepancies in the selection of its candidates, discipline and basic organisational seriousness are already generating avoidable public cost. Bad vetting becomes a vacancy. A vacancy becomes a by-election. A by-election becomes an invoice.

And the invoice does not go to Reform.

It goes to everyone else.

The point is, there is a cost to Reform.

The far bigger point is that it does not really seem to be Reform doing very much to pay for it.

When Reform councillors resign, the bill lands locally. The Electoral Commission says a councillor resignation can create a casual vacancy, and that a casual vacancy will usually lead to a by-election. It also says the cost of running a local government election is paid by the local authority.

The sequence is not complicated: Reform selects the candidate, Reform gets the seat, Reform loses the councillor, the council runs the by-election, and the public gets the invoice.

That would be bad enough if Reform were merely another party with ordinary levels of personnel collapse. But Reform’s entire political brand is built on waste, value for money, public discipline and the moral superiority of common sense.

It is the party of “your money is being squandered” somehow finding a way to make local taxpayers fund the administrative aftershocks of its own candidate selection.

And that is where the argument broadens.

Councillor resignation stories are not a side issue. They are small, local versions of a much larger Reform problem: the party’s instinct to privatise the benefit and socialise the mess.

Follow the money out of the parish hall, and things do not become clearer. They just become stranger.

I’ve spoken about the issue of Reform’s finances countless times - most recently here:

Reform’s money problem is not simply that it has more than the other parties—and the money generated is not down to ‘business confidence’ or ‘a feeling’. In fact, Christopher Harborne, Nigel Farage’s Thai-based crypto billionaire and main backer, has recently donated another £3 million to Reform.

All political parties have money, donors, backers, accountants, statements, filings, loopholes, thresholds and people hanging around in exclusive, establishment Mayfair night-clubs plotting to take down… er, the establishment.

The overarching contradiction is that Reform’s entire political personality is built around exposing waste, corruption, self-interest and the cosy little cronyist arrangements of the old parties — while its own finances rely exclusively on the funding capacity of mainly old party networks.

There’s also the gap between the party’s rhetoric and the public’s ability to inspect the plumbing. Reform, like the Brexit Party before it, and like UKIP before that, has built a political brand on the idea that Britain is being cheated by hidden interests, obscure institutions and systems nobody can properly interrogate. Then, when asked about its own money, the answer too often appears to be: ‘nothing to see here, and what you can see is all perfectly above board.’

As explored in my previous pieces, the donations the party receives, and that Farage receives personally—most notably from Thai-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne—still remain open to scrutiny.

It was reported that Farage bought a £1.4m Surrey property in cash shortly after receiving a £5m gift from Harborne. Farage has said the purchase was unrelated to Harborne’s money and that it was funded through his reported £1.5m fee for appearing on I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!

Reform also said the property purchase process had begun before the gift and that anti-money-laundering checks had been completed. This explanation itself is open to some criticism.

Accounts for Farage’s company, Thorn in the Side Ltd, appeared to challenge his claim that the I’m a Celebrity fee had paid for the house, because the accounts indicated the funds remained in the company and were not paid out as a dividend. The property was also reported to have been bought personally by Farage, mortgage-free, not by the company.

At this point, as if the story did not already contain enough combustible material, Russia arrived.

After the initial reporting on the Harborne gift, Farage claimed the disclosure may have resulted from a Russian-linked hack of his phone, email and bank accounts. Interestingly, Ciaran Martin, the founding chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre, described the claim as “without any merit” and “entirely unsubstantiated” on the evidence Farage had provided publicly.

Martin’s point was simple and devastating: if Farage’s claim were true, it would not be a media spat, and Farage would not be explaining it away so casually by pointing at Putin like a dog that ate his homework. It would be a serious hostile-state intervention in British democracy.

The problem with throwing Russia into the slurry is that you can’t just use Moscow as a rhetorical umbrella and then wander off before the rain starts.

If—and it’s a big if—a Russian-linked hack exposed the financial affairs of the leader of a major UK political party, that is a very serious national security matter. It requires evidence, reporting, investigation and official handling; not Farage ‘saying so’ on social media and that being absolutely fine, presumably blasé about the notion that it’s just Russians doing Russian-y things.

If it did not happen, then the claim looks rather like an attempt to redirect attention from perfectly legitimate questions about money.

Enter the Labour Party, which effectively called Farage’s bluff and reported the alleged hack to the Metropolitan Police, and the National Cyber Security Centre, after Farage failed to do so himself. And rightly so.

The outcome, as of yet, remains unclear, but is where the story stops being merely financial and becomes political. It’s the optics of a party that wants to be treated as the hard-headed exemplars of grown-up accountability: waste-cutting, truth-telling, system-smashing, no more excuses.

But when scrutiny lands on its own money, its own donors, its own leader and his questionable house purchase, its own undeclared gift, its own explanation for that gift, and its own extraordinary claim of a Russian-linked hack, the party suddenly discovers nuance, privacy, process and the sacred constitutional importance of everybody minding their own business.

That is not anti-establishment politics. This is pretense.

Discussing the issue of Farage’s own financial discrepancies is not a tangent from the cost of councillor resignations. It’s interlinked by the idea that a benefit arrives in private while the mess becomes public. The explanation changes, then the bill, literal or political, is handed to someone else.

At council level, the pattern is simple: bad candidate selection creates vacancies, vacancies create by-elections, and by-elections cost local authorities money.

At national level, the pattern is murkier and darker: billionaire money flows in, explanations shift, regulators circle, journalists ask basic questions, and the party that built its brand on suspicion reacts as though scrutiny of politicians is tantamount to blasphemy. At the heart of it, there’s a real, establishment arrogance and entitlement to it all.

For those looking for a precedent, this page throws a ‘Boris Johnson’ grenade into the article and reminds readers of his trip to Mustique in 2019, that was open to similar standards committee investigations over who funded it.

What matters is that Reform is no longer merely a protest vehicle or just a way for angry voters to kick Westminster in the shins. Although there has been a notable drop in recent months, it still remains ahead in the polls.

The point being that Reform seeks power. Real power. Council power on one hand, but also Parliamentary power, and with it the power to make decisions, control budgets, appoint people, set priorities, shape institutions and demand trust. Fundamentally, what happens when Reform’s anger is given a seat, a salary, a budget, a vote, a constituency office and access to the machinery of the state?

This is where the upcoming Makerfield by-election matters.

On paper, Makerfield ought to be exactly the kind of place Reform dreams about when it finally drifts off to sleep beneath a duvet made from grievance. A Labour safe seat. A post-industrial constituency near Wigan. A strong Leave-era emotional geography. Voters frustrated by flooding, rubbish, public transport, local neglect and the feeling that Labour has treated them less like citizens than inherited furniture. Reporting from the constituency found residents talking less about Westminster theory and more about flooded streets, illegal dumping, tired town centres and the sense that Labour has simply lost its way.

That is fertile ground for Reform. Extremely fertile. You could probably grow a 30-foot Nigel Farage in it by accident.

And yet Makerfield is also the place where Reform’s problems become visible in miniature.

Putting aside how awful, how deeply unsavoury — and strangely contradictory — Reform’s candidate Rob Kenyon appears to be, the first published constituency poll from Survation put Labour ahead of Reform by 43% to 40%.

More recent polling looks like this, however:

A number that is equally worth looking at is the percentage of the voting intention given to Restore Britain (at 8%).

Initial numbers and projections show that things are close enough to worry Labour, but incredibly awkward for Reform. The numbers suggest that two things can be true at once: Reform is strong enough to make a noticeable scratch on Labour’s bodywork, but vulnerable enough to be a written-off by the dent caused by Rupert Lowe’s 8%.

That is the shape of the problem.

Reform’s pitch in Makerfield is brutally simple. Kenyon is local. Burnham is ambitious. Kenyon, however questionable the statements are, is a plumber and army reservist. Burnham is the professional politician using a constituency as a ladder back to Westminster. The idea is that Reform is presenting Kenyon as a local champion against a professional politician using the seat for his own advantage.

On one hand, the PR challenge has not gone terribly well for Reform, as noted. Robert Kenyon, can be local, direct, working-class, and not part of the regular Westminster churn, but he can also be wrong—and from what Kenyon has said previously, apparently quite a nasty individual indeed.

Reform’s defence was that much of what Kenyon said previously was made before he was in politics, and that he was simply ‘unpolished.’

That it is to say, the party wants the romance of the outsider without the obligations of the candidate. It wants voters to believe its people are more real because they have not been sanded down and varnished by Westminster, but it also wants scrutiny of those people treated as snobbery, elitism or media sabotage.

Makerfield makes that difficult it is a parliamentary by-election being treated as a possible hinge in British politics. Voters seem to be telling Reform that it can’t have it both ways.

Burnham’s return to the Commons could change Labour’s leadership dynamics. A Reform win could potentially be a national earthquake. A narrow Reform loss, especially one caused by Restore Britain splitting the right-wing vote, would expose the fragility beneath Farage’s polling lead.

This where the Reform story begins to fray into something bigger.

Behind the polling, Makerfield is not just Labour versus Reform. It is also Reform versus Restore, Farage versus Lowe, undisciplined populism versus algorithmic escalation.

Reform and Restore spent as much energy attacking one another as attacking Burnham, in fact. Rupert Lowe claimed Restore was surging. Elon Musk appeared to amplify Lowe’s side, leading Farage to complain that Musk was trying to split the right. Lowe attacked Reform figures. Reform figures attacked back.

The whole thing started to look less like a political campaign and more like a custody battle over a comments section.

It’s worth noting that this is not a side drama. It is central.

Reform’s national pitch depends on the idea that it owns the insurgent right. But Restore Britain, Lowe’s vehicle after his bitter departure from Reform, is now pressuring Farage from the right. It does not need to win Makerfield to matter. It only needs to take enough oxygen, enough attention and enough votes to make Farage look like yesterday’s outrage.

Farage has begun to feel the heat. Naturally, to turn the heat into an opportunity, Farage reached for the petrol.

That is why the tragic murder of Henry Nowak has become such a grimly important moment in this story. And although it would be too simplistic to attribute Farage’s intervention entirely to pressure from Lowe and Restore, there is enough context.

The case itself is horrific. Nowak, an 18-year-old student, was murdered by Vickrum Digwa in Southampton.

Reports say that Nowak was handcuffed by police after Digwa falsely claimed he had assaulted him in a racially motivated attack; Digwa was later sentenced to life with a minimum term of 21 years, and the case is under investigation with the police being left with having a lot to answer for.

The horror is real. The questions about policing are real. The family’s grief is real. The institutional failure deserves scrutiny.

And this is precisely why Farage’s political exploitation of it is so grotesque.

Hansard records that Henry Nowak’s family asked for his death not to be used “to create further division, hatred or tension”, and quoted the prosecuting lawyer: “This is not a case about Sikhism. This is not a case about racism. This is a case about murder.”

Farage ignored the spirit of that plea.

Farage called for “pure cold rage” in response to the case. In reality, Farage’s response, including language around “white lives matter”, marked a worrying racialised turn in the politics of the British right — which is only intensified by competition from Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain and the broader nexus of Far Right influencers operating across social media profiting from the outrage and content generating machine.

That is the thread.

Reform is under scrutiny over money. Reform is under pressure over candidate churn. Reform is fighting Labour in a seat it badly wants. Reform is being squeezed from the right by Restore. Reform’s candidate in Makerfield is being dragged through old posts. Farage, under pressure to pull the gravitational field of the right back towards himself, seized on a horrifying murder and turned it into the opportunity of a ‘national address.’

It is disgusting to watch grief, institutional failure and a family’s explicit plea for restraint being converted into such political heat.

But Farage is doing several things at once here:

• He is competing with Rupert Lowe and Restore for ownership of the hard-right emotional space.

• He is responding to an online ecosystem already turning the case into racialised grievance.

• He is trying to present himself as the authentic voice of public anger.

• He is using a policing failure to connect crime, immigration, race, institutions and national decline into one tidy, broadcastable package.

• He is finding the point where public anger, media attention and institutional failure meet, then standing directly on it with a microphone.

The issue is not so much that Farage commented on the murder. The issue is how he commented on it: against the spirit of the family’s plea, in racialised terms, and in a way that appeared to convert grief and institutional failure into opportunity.

His response should be understood less as a single cynical calculation than as a revealing political reflex.

Under pressure from Rupert Lowe, Restore Britain and the wider online right, he moved instinctively toward the hottest available grievance. The tragedy was real. The policing questions were real. But instead of treating the case with the restraint requested by the family, Farage turned it into political weather.

The right-wing outrage economy is accelerating, and Farage — who built his career by standing at the front of that current — now has to fight to remain its central figure while fighting to ‘restore’ the credibility of his own party.

This is where the problem stops being merely rhetorical.

The same pressure that pushes Reform towards harder, hotter, more racialised public language also creates problems inside the party’s actual policy machinery.

It is one thing to sound tougher than everyone else in a video. It is another to turn that toughness into a coherent position that your own spokespeople can explain without immediately contradicting one another.

A smaller story that emerged out of all of this was a spat between Zia Yusuf and Robert Jenrick over deportation policy. Yusuf publicly contradicted Jenrick over Reform’s deportation policy after Jenrick said foreign nationals living in social housing would not be deported solely for that reason.

Yusuf responded by saying that Jenrick’s answer was “not Reform policy,” and said that a foreign national living in social housing at taxpayer expense would automatically fail Reform’s economic test.

To be clear, this is not a minor comms wobble.

This is the party’s home affairs spokesman and its Treasury spokesman publicly disagreeing over the human consequences of one of Reform’s central policies—while the party is trying to prove it can govern.

Why mention it? All of it together proves one thing: Farage’s address to the nation made something quite simple visible, insofar as something is not right in Reform at the minute. Behind the scenes is a real sense of content panic driven by a desire to be seen as more extreme.

The party is ahead nationally, but brittle locally, and deeply insecure internally. It is rich in donors, but poor in transparency. It is loud on waste, but expensive in practice. It is furious about the establishment, but increasingly dependent on establishment money, establishment defectors and establishment-style evasions.

Reform talks about discipline, but cannot keep its senior spokesmen aligned on deportation policy. It attacks chaos, while generating it. It claims to speak for ordinary people, while being dragged around by billionaires, algorithms, old tweets, private money, personal feuds and the gravitational pull of a content-creator moonlighting as the MP for Great Yarmouth.

This is why the Makerfield by-election matters probably most to Reform. By their own admission, Farage and Co. half-joked that they intended to “throw the kitchen sink” at the campaign, and yet they wouldn’t need to if they felt so certain.

As a consequence, maybe for the first time, people are beginning to catch up with the news long reported on this page of just how fragile (and insecure) Reform seems to be, and just how frayed around the edges the whole thing is.

The good news is that people can experience this before Reform enters government.

The worst outcome is that Reform enters government at some point despite it.

It was, officially, the moment the government set out its plan for the country. Unofficially, it was another episode in the Schrödinger’s leadership challenge: both happening and not happening; both terminal and survivable; both a crisis and, according to everyone paid to stand in front of microphones, absolutely not a crisis at all.

The result is paralysis. Not merely in governance, or in the ability to deliver meaningful change, but in the more basic constitutional question of who exactly is going to be in charge of the country by the time the first druids appear at Stonehenge to celebrate the summer solstice.

For now, the media continues to froth at the mouth while Starmer remains.

He is, he insists, “not going to walk away”.

There is Andy Burnham, openly positioning himself around the Makerfield by-election as though it were less a parliamentary contest than an assisted escape tunnel back into Westminster. There is Wes Streeting, who has somehow managed to reopen the Brexit mausoleum while also reminding the nation how difficult it was growing up in the hardened concrete jungle of London’s East End.

Nobody seems entirely sure what is happening with Angela Rayner, Ed Miliband or wildcard potential Al Carns.

Out of sheer, 2026 British apathy, most people probably don’t really care.

And yet, amid all this, the King was wheeled out to announce an administrative Booker Cash & Carry multipack of national renewal: police reform, NHS reform, courts reform, SEND reform, water reform, housing reform, leasehold reform, asylum reform, digital ID, cladding, late payments, (the belated) Hillsborough Law, social housing, rail, airports, steel, growth, security, opportunity, fairness, and several other items from the constitutional middle aisle.

What was remarkable about the programme was just how large it was.

Read more

It isn’t because this page is pro-Reform. Just to clarify.

It’s because it’s really the only way voters can gauge what the party might be like if they achieved similar success on a national level.

For purely educational purposes, Reform winning locally has always had a certain appeal. Not as an endorsement. More as a controlled demolition. A practical civic trial.

Put simply, it’s a way of taking the party’s entire proposition, and gently placing it inside a building full of planning committees, adult social care budgets, statutory duties, SEND provision time-bombs, procurement rules, audit reports, bin rounds, homelessness, and men called Derek who have been waiting since February for a hedge to be cut—and waiting to see if they can actually negotiate all of the challenges.

The experiment is well and truly under way.

In fact, it’s been under way for over a year in the various councils and mayoralities they occupy following the 2025 local elections.

It’s been a mixed bag up to now. This page has covered a lot of it in micro-scale analysis. It’s been chaotic in virtually every place they’ve occupied, bordering on anarchy in some, fueled by feuds, bitter resignations, suspensions, defections and disputes, general weirdness, anxiety, paranoia, and a much broader overarching sense that nobody really seems to have any idea what’s going on.

Last week, the party surged past 1,400 councillors and gained control of a string of councils; thousands of new councillors, thousands of new seats.

They achieved success in the Senedd in Wales, and in the Scottish Parliament. The momentum appears currently strong with Reform.

Nigel Farage called the results a “historic shift in British politics”. This page might understate it a bit—the results were notable. But the point is that Reform have now acquired the one thing protest parties traditionally spend years trying to avoid: providing answers.

Worcestershire is a cautionary tale.

David Taylor, Reform councillor for Redditch East and former deputy leader of Worcestershire County Council, quit the party live on BBC Politics Midlands in February 2026 over the party’s council tax rise. He said he had walked into the studio as a Reform county councillor but would not be leaving as one, adding that he had “several issues with the running of the council” and could not support asking people “who are already not doing so well” to pay more council tax.

What was the issue? Anger on contact with arithmetic, basically.

At the time, the council approved an 8.98% council tax rise for 2026/27. Of that, 2% was the adult social care precept, with the remaining 6.98% going towards general services.

For a Band D property, Worcestershire’s own council tax booklet put the county council element at £1,760.80, an increase of £145.09, or £2.79 a week.

Why the decision? Because the council was already in a deep structural hole. Its own budget papers said the authority could only balance 2025/26 by using reserves and applying for Exceptional Financial Support from central government; without that temporary support, it said it would have been required to issue a Section 114 notice—essentially, it was on the precipice of bankruptcy.

The numbers were bleak.

Worcestershire identified a £74.3 million funding gap for 2026/27, rising to a cumulative £297.1 million by 2028/29. Were the numbers driven by giant woke piñatas full of uncollected efficiency savings and DEI schemes? No. The council said the pressures were being driven by statutory services and other stuff councils are legally required to provide — particularly adult and children’s social care — alongside inflation, workforce costs and more complex needs.

Worcestershire’s 2026/27 net budget requirement was £620 million.

Of that, £246 million was for adult social care, public health and communities; £160 million for children’s services; £48 million for home-to-school transport; and £85 million for economy and infrastructure.

The pressures were not abstract.

Worcestershire’s own booklet says 64% of the net budget is spent on adult and children’s social care. The number of children in residential care rose from 87 in 2020 to 180 in 2026. The number of children and young people with an Education, Health and Care Plan rose from 4,312 to 8,346 over five years.

Home-to-school transport more than doubled, from £17 million in 2021/22 to £48 million in 2026/27. Learning disability services rose from £61 million in 2021/22 to £103 million in 2026/27. In fact, Worcestershire also received a warning over special educational needs spending. LocalGov reported in November 2025 that auditors Grant Thornton had issued a statutory financial warning, concerned that the council’s ability to cut Dedicated Schools Grant expenditure was “weak”.

Basically, it’s the sort of thing that doesn’t give a damn about your flags and memes on Facebook. It’s a bit like watching a dog finally catch the car, only to discover the car has a medium-term financial plan, a statutory duty to safeguard vulnerable children, and a consultation deadline.

The defence, of course, became obvious. It was a necessity to backtrack on their pledges to “cut your taxes…”

…because, in Farage’s own words regarding Worcestershire, Reform had “[inherited] a catastrophic mess from the Tories.”

That is to say, inherited a mess from some of the same Tories who later defected to Reform to form the minority-controlled local council that Farage himself would go on to describe as:

“a basket case.”

Why this matters now is because following last week’s local elections, Britons across the country get to see proof that Reform are vulnerable to the same physics as everyone else.

The problem for Brand Reform is that they are supposed to be immune from those physics.

Worcestershire gives us one version of the Reform problem: what happens when the protest party is handed the machinery of government and discovers that the machinery has statutory obligations, social care pressures and a deep personal hostility to slogans.

There is, however, another problem, and it may be even more revealing.

It isn’t what Reform does when it reaches power, but rather what starts happening around Reform before it even gets there. Or rather, if this is the gravitational field before office, what exactly happens when the party gets hold of the state?

One of the striking things about Farage’s party is how much scandal, money, opacity and weirdness already seem to orbit it while it is still, technically, outside government. If anything, it should serve as a warning to voters now that more than 1,000 Reform councillors have actually been elected.

The party has not yet entered Downing Street. It has not taken control of the Treasury, the Home Office, the honours system, public appointments, procurement, regulation or the national machinery of patronage.

And yet already the fog is gathering.

Most of those who voted in last week’s election have never heard of Chakrit Sakunkrit. It isn’t some fantastic new yoga move that might provide the answer to fibromyalgia, it’s something far more interesting - a name.

Specifically, the Thai name of British crypto billionaire and Reform chief donor Christopher Harborne.

A constant feature on this page, subject of several articles, Harborne once again makes an appearance having been found to have donated £5 million to Nigel Farage personally in 2024, shortly before Farage reversed his decision not to stand in the general election and announced he would run in Clacton.

Farage has said the money was for personal protection. Reform figures have insisted it was a personal gift rather than a political donation.

This is where the story becomes more than just another Westminster bunfight over declarations, forms and the ritual public humiliation of the register.

House of Commons rules say new MPs must register “current financial interests” and any registrable benefits received in the 12 months before election within one month of becoming an MP. The purpose of the register is to disclose financial interests or material benefits that “might reasonably be thought by others” to influence an MP’s actions, speeches or votes.

That is where the problem lands.

Farage has said the money was needed to pay for private security, saying he has been “physically under attack since 2013” and cannot use the Underground; he has also said there is “no case to answer”.

Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice similarly told the BBC that Farage had complied with the rules, that the gift was personal, and that Harborne wanted to keep Farage “safe and secure”.

This appears to be changing on a daily basis, and is also where Reform’s defence begins to sweat.

Reports have muddied the defence by saying Farage completed the purchase of a £1.42 million property in cash on 10 May 2024, shortly after receiving the reported £5 million gift from Harborne and weeks before reversing his decision not to stand in the general election. Reform says the offer and purchase process had already begun before the gift, that Farage had passed proof-of-funds checks before receiving it, and that the purchase was proceeding independently of Harborne’s money.

Politically, it turns the “security money” explanation into something much harder to sell as a closed matter. Indeed, the problem has deepened because Farage’s own explanation appears to have shifted. Having previously said the money was for security, he later described it as a “reward” for campaigning for Brexit for 27 years.

That may help explain why the money was given. Perhaps. Maybe.

It does not help explain why it was not declared, why it should be treated as obviously private, or what exactly the public is supposed to understand the £5 million was actually for.

To put it simply, the Commons rules do not simply ask: “Did the recipient call it personal?”

They ask whether the benefit could reasonably be thought to relate to political or parliamentary activity. The guidance explicitly says that when considering apparently personal gifts, MPs should consider the possible motive of the giver and the use to which the gift is put. It adds: “If there is any doubt, the benefit should be registered.”

And there is quite obviously doubt here—namely over the issue of whether or not the donation was personal or political.

By Farage’s own account, he needed it because of the risks attached to being Nigel Farage: political leader, public provocateur, party figurehead and candidate. That does not automatically prove a breach. But it makes the claim that the gift was obviously, cleanly, purely private much harder to sustain, especially when the story about why he received the money keeps changing.

In any case, the Commons rules separately mention donations or gifts intended to provide personal benefit, which may need registration under gifts/benefits categories; and they say donations or assistance supporting parliamentary or political activity should be registered under political support categories. It is not a trivial distinction.

The political problem becomes much bigger because Harborne was not just any private individual. I’ve written previously that Harborne gave Reform £9m in 2025, which reports described as the largest single donation from a living person to a British political party.

The optics of Farage receiving £5m personally from a man who was also underwriting the party are particularly grim.

The scandal is not that Farage has already been found guilty of anything. He has not. At least not yet. That’ll require a more formal investigation first. And rightly so.

But the consequences, if the commissioner and then the Standards Committee were to find a serious breach, are not trivial. At the lower end, Farage could be required to correct the register, apologise, or face a formal reprimand. At the higher end, a serious breach could lead to suspension from the House of Commons.

If that suspension reached 10 sitting days or more, it could trigger a recall petition in Clacton under the Recall of MPs Act — the mechanism by which constituents are given the chance to remove an MP and force a by-election. The Standards Committee itself notes that a suspension of 10 or more sitting days triggers recall procedures, and the Electoral Commission explains that a recall petition succeeds if 10% of eligible constituents sign it within the six-week signing period.

That is the far end of the process, not a prediction. Farage denies wrongdoing. Reform insists the gift was personal and unconditional. But the fact that the possible consequences even extend that far tells us why the story matters.

Of course, the bigger scandal is the contradiction.

It’s that the leader of a party built on transparency, anti-elite grievance and cleaning up politics accepted £5m from his party’s dominant donor, did not declare it, and now asks voters to believe this was so obviously private that nobody could reasonably think it had anything to do with politics.

It’s a lot to ask; a party promising to drain the swamp while arguing that the very large crocodile in its own bath is merely a misunderstood emotional-support reptile providing much-needed security.

To be clear, however, the problem facing Farage is not simply that, like certain prime ministers from years gone by — specifically Boris Johnson, who governed as if Downing Street were an after-hours branch of the Bullingdon Club with nuclear codes — scandal appears to follow him wherever he goes.

Issues like those above involving the Harborne donation, if the local elections results are anything to go by, don’t cut through quite as well as they should.

A £5 million personal gift from your party’s dominant donor ought, in a healthy democracy, to create at least a brief national pause, or perhaps even a small collective noise somewhere between “hang on” and “absolutely not”. Instead, it largely enters the atmosphere as just another object in the Farage weather system ready to be bulldozed by images of the ‘Man of the People’ planting flowers in potholes— while sipping a pint.

The problem isn’t Richard Tice’s questionable tax affairs either, allegations of Farage’s schoolboy racism, or the awkwardly recurring presence of Reform-linked money in other corners of the right, including donations to Robert Jenrick’s failed Conservative leadership bid.

And of course we will just casually forget the Nathan Gill saga, in which a former Reform UK Wales leader and Farage-era Brexit Party MEP was jailed for ten and a half years after admitting taking bribes for pro-Russian interventions, because apparently British politics is now so fully cooked that “foreign-linked bribery conviction” is merely Tuesday with a lanyard.

We will also casually forget George Cottrell, Farage’s recurring aristocratic money-world satellite, whose US wire-fraud conviction arose from a money-laundering sting, and who continues to hover around the Farage project like a compliance officer’s sleep-paralysis demon.

And let us casually forget Laure Ferrari’s ownership of Farage’s Clacton home, an £885,000 cash-purchased constituency property that Farage first presented as his own, then clarified was actually hers, then insisted involved no financial interest on his part whatsoever.

We will casually forget Reform’s Mayfair anti-establishment cosplay: the party of ordinary people raising more than £1m at Oswald’s, Robin Birley’s private members’ club, while former Tory donors paid up to £25,000 for top-table proximity to the man supposedly leading a revolt against the elite.

We shall forget Farage’s 17 late registrations of financial interests, which the standards commissioner accepted were inadvertent, but which still leave the leader of the clean-up-politics party looking like a man whose personal finances require a dedicated incident room, three whiteboards and a small team from the National Grid. (This is secondary to Farage’s phenomenal outside earnings, of course — approx £2 million).

There’s more we should casually forget, too. There’s always more.

In short, it’s the cumulative impact of all of these stories plus the incompetence that already exists within its ranks. The vetting problems, the internal rupture and lingering paranoia, the amateurism, the permanent sense of a party being assembled at speed minus quality control, ripe for mass production.

Reform’s biggest threat, quite simply, is Reform itself.

It has been barely a week since the local elections and Reform’s newly elected councillor class has already started behaving less like a government-in-waiting than a cursed WhatsApp group granted planning powers.

Stuart Prior was elected to Essex County Council and also won a seat on Rochford District Council. Days later, he resigned after allegations that he had posted racist, Islamophobic and white supremacist material online, including alleged references to white people as the “master race”, Muslims as “rats”, and a response appearing to celebrate the rape of a Sikh woman.

Reform said his membership had been revoked; Prior denied being racist and disputed the posts.

There’s Glenn Gibbins, newly elected for Hylton Castle ward on Sunderland City Council, was suspended by Reform after allegedly posting that Nigerians should be used to “fill in potholes”. ITV reported that Reform suspended him pending investigation, and that he will sit as an independent.

Ben Rowe, newly elected Reform councillor for Ham ward on Plymouth City Council, was suspended pending investigation after alleged racist, antisemitic and Islamophobic posts resurfaced. ITV reported that Reform confirmed his suspension on 11 May, only days after the election. It was also reported that Rowe allegedly urged rioters during the 2024 disorder to “get rid of” a mosque, accused “the Jews” of creating division, and described immigrants as “breeding like rats”; Reform said he had been suspended pending investigation.

There’s Jay Leslie Cooper, who was elected for Reform in Bootle West, Sefton. Reports state that Cooper had allegedly posted that the Holocaust was a hoax; Reform said he had resigned the party whip and had his membership revoked, shortly before going on holiday.

Nathaniel Menday was elected as a Reform councillor in Woodhouse, Sheffield, then was later found to have described himself as an ethno-nationalist, encouraged white supremacist symbols, and praised the builders of Berlin’s Nazi-era Olympiastadion as “real visionaries”.

It goes on and on and on. There are reportedly dozens upon dozens of examples.

One final example, however, brings us full circle to Worcestershire — remember, this was even described by Nigel Farage as a “basket case.”

Reform did not merely inherit a financial crisis — or so it claims — raise council tax by nearly 9%, seek exceptional government support and blame the previous Conservative administration while being led by ex-Conservatives.

It has now proceeded to turn its own leadership into a small internal civil war—with committee papers.

Jo Monk, the former Conservative councillor who became Reform leader of Worcestershire County Council, has now been suspended by Reform.

So has her son, Ashley Monk.

It was reported that Reform said Jo Monk had been suspended for “refusing to accept the democratic decision of the Reform UK Group on Worcestershire County Council”, while Ashley Monk was suspended after allegedly “bringing the party into disrepute”.

This followed Jo Monk losing the Reform group leadership to Alan Amos — himself a former Conservative MP, a former Labour councillor, a former Conservative councillor, an independent, then Conservative again, then independent, and finally Reform councillor. It’s been a hell of a metamorphosis for Amos, it seems.

In any case—

Reporting on the internal contest said Monk lost to Amos, putting him in position to become county council leader by May. Monk then went public.

According to LBC, he claimed that after Alan Amos became group leader he had received screenshots from a WhatsApp group from which he had been removed, containing what he described as “threatening messages” towards him because he refused to support views he said were incompatible with Reform and the people they represent.

He also attacked Farage and accused Amos of “jumping from party to party for personal gain”. The result is that Worcestershire now looks like one of the first places where Reform has effectively split into its two natural forms: the recycled establishment politicians trying to run the council, and the insurgent true-believers accusing them of becoming exactly what they claimed to oppose.

Later, after being put forward as the party’s candidate for council leader after Jo Monk’s departure, opposition parties, out of sheer exasperation, then combined to oust Reform altogether. Green councillor Matt Jenkins — leader of the Green and Independent Alliance group — was elected leader of Worcestershire County Council, with Greens, Liberal Democrats, Conservatives and independents forming the new administration. Reform, which had been running the council as a minority administration, was pushed into opposition.

Worcestershire, then, has now completed the full Reform governance arc at breathtaking speed—a basket case? Absolutely, but imagine this on a national level.

What’s remarkable for this page in its analysis, is that while all of this is written about Reform, links in various tabs that get bookmarked and saved for resource material, predictions by Electoral Calculus suggest the party may achieve of remarkable feat of gaining 248 seats at the next general election, 78 seats short of a majority.

The usual caveats apply. An election is, on paper, around three years away. Polling is not prophecy. Models are not ballot boxes. Much can change.

But it does beg a very urgent question: Who the hell are these 248 MPs likely to be?

Let’s call this prophecy…

The Whipping Forecast

If those MPs are anything like the current crop of Reform councillors then the forecast for a Reform government is not national renewal but rather the legislative paralysis that has fundamentally killed all governments post-Brexit.

Remember the Conservatives. It was not simply Partygate that destroyed them. Partygate mattered, obviously, because it exposed the governing culture that the rules were for other people, the truth was elastic, accountability was optional, and the public could be patronised until the polling said otherwise.

But Johnson’s government was not felled by one scandal in isolation. It was the accumulation. The monthly scandal. The weekly scandal. The daily scandal. The sense that government had become a permanent clean-up operation for the behaviour of the people supposedly running it.

And that had consequences.

The 2019 Conservative manifesto was not just defeated by opposition parties, economic shocks, COVID, or the passage of time. It was eaten from the inside by the culture of the administration itself. Government became reactive. Political capital that should have been spent on ‘delivering’ the post-Brexit Xanadu the Conservatives promised was expended on survival mode.

This is the future that awaits Reform. The good thing is that we get to see it now, today.

Any legislation Reform hopes to pass would have to survive the ordinary British political obstacle course: drafting, consultation, civil service resistance, legal challenge, parliamentary arithmetic, committee scrutiny, the Lords, implementation, costings, media pressure, and the slow constitutional trench warfare by which a slogan becomes a Bill and a Bill becomes an Act.

That is, if everyone is very patient and nobody has resigned in disgrace by Wednesday before it has even staggered towards a second reading.

Add Reform’s likely contribution to the process: a vast litany of scandals, suspensions, donor rows, candidate embarrassments, personal controversies, ideological incoherence, internal faction fights and MPs who may behave rather like some of its councillors have behaved within approximately four working days of election.

That is not government.

In my last piece, I deliberately went through what Labour had actually done legislatively. Boring, yes. Procedural, yes. Dull enough to make a select committee clerk briefly experience nirvana. But real. Labour is so boring that it has somehow managed to pass 64 Acts of Parliament. It’s a remarkable achievement.

By contrast, Reform does not ‘do’ boring.

It cannot do boring.

And that is the problem.

If Reform entered Parliament with anything like the projected 248 MPs, its problem would not merely be passing laws. It would be controlling the people expected to vote for them. The whips’ office would not be a disciplinary machine. It would be a wildlife sanctuary

Every week would bring some new revelation. Some old post. Some undeclared interest. Some local grudge. Some “common sense” backbencher explaining on regional radio that the Human Rights Act can be repealed by noon, only to be clipped, ratioed and eaten alive by social media for demonstrating, in real time, why it cannot.

For all the talk of how bad Labour is, or has been, it is genuinely difficult to imagine Reform surviving a year in government without becoming trapped inside its own weather system.

But then perhaps that is the point.

As this page has long argued, the post-Brexit political economy does not merely tolerate chaos. It feeds on it. It has become normalised as part of the insatiable hunger the media has developed over the last 10 years in the post-Brexit chaos.

That is why Reform is dangerous in a way that goes beyond policy.

The measure of success is not legislation, delivery, or making the quality of our lives better. It is how spectacularly the party can fail in exactly the way modern Britain has been trained to enjoy the political theatre of collapse.

It actually received Royal Assent on 27 October 2025, but its major private-rented-sector reforms came into force on 1 May 2026, described as the biggest changes for renters in nearly 40 years, affecting around 11 million private renters in England.

The big-ticket Renters’ Rights Act elements are genuinely substantial, too.

Abolition of Section 21 “no-fault” evictions, replacement of fixed-term private tenancies with rolling periodic tenancies, rent rises limited to once a year with challenge rights, a ban on rental bidding wars, a one-month cap on rent demanded upfront, protection against discrimination for tenants with children or on benefits, and a new right to request pets, with landlords required to consider requests reasonably.

And there’s more to come.

A private rented sector database, a free independent landlord ombudsman, consultation on extending Awaab’s Law-style hazard protections to private rentals, a 2030 target for EPC C in private rented homes, and a Decent Homes Standard for private rentals by 2035.

It sounds… fine. Many private rented tenants around the UK likely felt that perhaps for the first time in years, they might not be arbitrarily launched into the housing market like a Victorian orphan fired from a municipal cannon even if it wasn’t accompanied by Angela Rayner descending from a cloud holding a laminated Section 21 notice torn neatly, and ceremoniously, in half.

It simply came into force. Quietly. Administratively.

In fact, as of now, the current 2024–26 parliamentary session has 64 Bills that have received Royal Assent, according to Parallel Parliament’s enacted Bills list. That total includes government legislation, private members’ bills, private bills, routine supply/finance machinery — put simply, this has not been a paralysed parliament.

Among them are serious, material reforms: employment rights, rail public ownership, Great British Energy, water company sanctions, football governance, planning reform, children’s wellbeing, mental health law, Martyn’s Law, tobacco and vapes regulation, and the final removal of hereditary peers from the House of Lords.

In a world of politics where it’s easy to ask ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ Labour has actually done quite a lot. Quite a lot of it positive.

The problem for the government is that it has simply found a way to make quite a lot feel like almost nothing, and without much electricity — certainly not enough to prevent what happened overnight on Thursday going into Friday.

Read more

In Westminster terms, this was a victory for Starmer.

In every other recognisable human language, it was a government using its majority to prevent a formal inquiry into whether its prime minister had been entirely straight about a scandal involving Peter Mandelson, Jeffrey Epstein, security vetting, questions about business links involving China and Russia, Downing Street pressure, missing records and the phrase “full due process” — which now seems to have all the structural integrity of a two-year-old Mini Cheddar.

But even before the vote, the scandal showed little sign of politely climbing into its coffin.

Earlier that day, Morgan McSweeney and Sir Philip Barton had given evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee that added fresh layers of confusion to a story already thickened by the previous testimony of Whitehall mandarins Sir Olly Robbins and Cat Little, and by Keir Starmer’s own fighting-talk Commons performance — all of which I covered in my previous piece.

What emerged from Tuesday’s two testimonies was not a single clean contradiction, the sort Westminster likes because it can be packaged neatly into a hot-take headline and a resignation demand by lunchtime.

It was something more irritating, more British, and therefore more lethally beige.

A process that everyone insisted had been followed was also being described as a chain of events involving haste, pressure, an appointment announced before clearance was complete, absent records and enough retrospective clarification to make “full due process” sound less like a constitutional guarantee than a slogan on the side of a collapsing portakabin.

Crucially, though, neither McSweeney nor Barton provided the smoking gun that Westminster had spent the previous week trying to hallucinate into existence: the one neat, lethal fact on which Starmer’s opponents could hang the words “the prime minister must resign” and not sound as though they had brought a trebuchet to a damp paperwork dispute.

This is not the same as saying the evidence helped Starmer. It did not. It was a bit more typically boring of the Starmer administration than that.

There was, in Cluedo terms, no single dead body in the library, cleanly despatched with a lead pipe by the unassuming Reverend Green.

There was just a strong smell from under the floorboards, several different witnesses looking at different corners of the carpet, and the government insisting this was simply what carpets smell like under a mature democracy.

But—

There was enough of a stink to generate a lot of swarming media horseflies, a point raised in my first article on the whole affair last year.

So why, after all that, did neither testimony become fatal?

Read more

Yet, as chronicled in the first two instalments of this miserable saga, Keir Starmer’s government arrived in power gripped by the adorable, sepia-toned delusion that Westminster is still a 19th-century agricultural college.

The Starmer administration genuinely believed in a five-year crop rotation: plant a sensible policy in 2024, diligently water it with focus groups, and wait for a grateful electorate to harvest the fruits in 2029.

Unfortunately—

Modern politics is a lobotomised Tinder-swipe of disposable doom-scrolls and shite. The digital content treadmill demands daily psychodrama, while Reform UK waits in the wings to serve up a greasy, nutritionally void slop for the Just Eat generation—a ready-meal which, if you scratch the cellophane, usually has a few fascist rats scurrying inside.

In recent months, nothing has destroyed Labour’s grand ‘Phase Two’ reset faster than the spectacular, grotesque exhumation of Peter Mandelson.

For those requiring a rapid refresher on how we arrived at our current state of administrative necrosis, the timeline of the last few months is a masterpiece of unforced errors.

As documented in Part One, Starmer’s decision to appoint a man whose name is whispered into the mirrors of St Stephen’s Tavern toilets to summon demons as our US Envoy went exactly as well as a chocolate teapot factory.

When US lawmakers released Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th-birthday scrapbook, nothing screamed “world-leading diplomatic standards” quite like your US ambassador beaming in a bathrobe, dubbing a now-dead prolific sex offender his “best pal.”

Number 10 frantically tried to deploy the ‘nothing to see here’ umbrella, only for it to be instantly shredded by a cache of over a hundred emails that provided insight into the cosy relationship between Mandelson and Epstein.

The correspondence proved a warm, persistent relationship long after Epstein’s 2008 conviction, obliterating the stock “I regret ever meeting him” defence. Starmer dutifully engaged the classic Westminster protocol: defend, delay, dump. He stood at the despatch to declare his “full confidence” in Mandelson, only to sack him some time later citing “new information.”

This plunged the government straight into an excruciating US State visit, resulting in the searing hypocrisy of Starmer smiling next to a President allegedly listed in the exact same Epstein birthday book. While Sadiq Khan did the heavy lifting of calling out the creeping fascism, Starmer staggered through the pomp, awkwardly clutching £150 billion in tech investments.

Trump, naturally, spent the trip rambling about wind turbines, disagreeing on Palestine, and proudly touting a handwritten “great job!” note he had just gifted to the very man Starmer had sacked.

But as Part Two detailed, the clown car had only just taken the brakes off. Starmer had China to escape to.

Clinically speaking, the Prime Minister secured some deeply boring but mathematically undeniable wins: a halving of tariffs on Scotch whisky (projected to be worth £250 million over five years), a unilateral 30-day visa-free travel arrangement, and a $15 billion investment from AstraZeneca.

He even managed to get Chinese energy firm HiTHIUM to throw £200 million into the UK pot, secured an agreement to disrupt the supply of dinghy engines for Channel smugglers, and practically begged Xi Jinping to un-cancel six blacklisted British politicians.

Starmer deftly ignored Donald Trump’s caps-lock heavy warnings that UK-China ties were “very dangerous”, successfully presenting himself as a sophisticated geopolitical operator.

And then he flew home.

The minute his sensible, pragmatic, long-game shoes touched the tarmac, he was violently ambushed by the Ghost of New Labour Past.

Disclosures alleged that during the 2009 Great Recession, Business Secretary Mandelson was effectively treating his official red box as a lucky dip for Epstein’s investment strategies—providing prompt clarity on banking levies via private channels, miraculously timed alongside a £10,000 transfer from Epstein to Mandelson’s partner.

Suddenly, the Metropolitan Police were investigating Misconduct in Public Office—a common-law offence carrying a maximum life sentence.

At this point, the camera violently panned to Morgan McSweeney. The Conservatives weaponised parliamentary chicanery and old fashioned skulduggery, launching a Humble Address to force the release of Cabinet Office vetting documents. Their crosshairs were locked onto Labour’s most powerful unelected wizard.

It transpired that McSweeney—the great architect of Starmer’s squeaky-clean “Integrity”/’Change’ brand—had been the internal champion of the Mandelson appointment. He was reportedly “very insistent,” aggressively bullying the appointment through while completely ignoring Cabinet Office due diligence that was flashing brighter than a radioactive distress flare.

The optics were cataclysmic. Starmer was forced into a staggering admission at PMQs: he did know about the post-conviction ties when making the 2024 appointment. The scandal irreversibly shifted from a ‘Mandelson lie’ to a catastrophic ‘Starmer judgement’ failure. The Met Police conveniently requested Downing Street delay the publication of McSweeney’s vetting documents to “avoid prejudicing a jury”—a majestic euphemism for ‘please don’t let the public see the bodies.’

But the political damage was terminal.

The Gorton and Denton by-election mutated into a graveyard for New Labour 2.0. With the Greens surging, and Reform sucking up the detritus, Labour canvassers were laughed off doorsteps by an electorate vibrating with visceral disgust over the sheer hypocrisy of rewarding Mandelson—while politically sidelining Andy Burnham.

The “Forensic” brand was officially declared dead at the scene, and the Mandelson-McSweeney-Epstein nexus became Starmer’s terminal narrative anchor.

It reframed his entire premiership through one devastating question: how did a government of ethical restoration end up revolving around a figure under investigation for one of the most serious misconduct offences in British law?

Which brings us, inevitably and exhaustingly, to today.

Read more

Some may remember a few weeks ago when I spoke about how it was revealed that Tice had avoided paying nearly £600,000 in corporation tax by exploiting legal financial quirks, HMRC grace periods and a vast network of offshore trusts and shell companies.

Recently, it was found that it was found that the self-styled tribune of the plebs hasn’t just been exploiting esoteric loopholes; he’s been actively breaking the law.

Read more

It turns out that it was complete nonsense—Greater Manchester police issued a statement following a short investigation suggesting as much, concluding that there was no evidence that the practice had taken place.

Days following the by-election, the Trumpian narrative that somehow the by-election had been ‘stolen’ from Reform dominated their output. For their fans online, it was the only way to address their grief, and the seemingly unbelievable possibility that somehow, not everybody was convinced by Reform as a serious political force.

There are two common questions that pervade the political landscape now that relate to Reform: the first is, ‘have Reform peaked?’ while the second asks ‘have we reached peak Reform?’

They mean two separate things.

The first question relates to the ‘ceiling’ — or rather, polling numbers that show a distinct slide in support for the party.

Reform’s drop in support is not a partisan smear; it is a cold, inescapable mathematical reality. Naturally, the Reform elite responded to this with their usual quiet dignity: by declaring political jihad on a spreadsheet. In an online tantrum, Farage and his disciples took to social media to aggressively gaslight YouGov, claiming the pollster was essentially worthless and permanently wrong.

Yet the figures across the board show a consistent haemorrhaging of support. YouGov’s maths, tragic as it may be for the Clacton massive, are not anomalous.

Reform genuinely are shedding support across a vast array of polling data. Though the real question—the dark, howling void at the centre of modern political journalism—is why anyone is bothering to obsess over weekly micro-fluctuations in voting intention anyway. We are staring down the barrel of a three-year wait until the next general election; pretending these fractional decimal-point shifts mean anything at all is essentially just a coping mechanism to distract us from the cost of diesel.

That said, if the data were to provide an answer to the question of whether Reform have peaked in support, the answer seems to be ‘yes’.

The second question relates to the ‘unexpected’ yet completely expected events that transpire when Reform appear to drift closer and closer to power, and are asked for more details on what their plans look like.

‘Peak Reform’ is the derisive term deployed when the party unveils a new masterplan—usually via the medium of a carefully orchestrated PR-dump—only for it to instantly detonate in their faces like an exploding novelty cigar.

It is less a ‘distinct lack of professionalism’ and more a relentless, institutional compulsion to sprint blindfolded into a field of self-laid rakes. Without a shred of exaggeration or hyperbole, this happens all the time.

Read more

An effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, for instance—an event that many of the world’s leaders may be grappling with for some considerable time—triggers a cascading shock across supply chains that extends far beyond the local Little Tesco forecourt.

In fact, it’s a massive bottleneck for the raw materials that underpin modern manufacturing, agriculture, and logistics.

Read more