When I was young and green and working as a gossip columnist, I learned much from the energy and enthusiasm of my colleague Lady Olga Maitland. Long before Boris Johnson decided he could be an MP at the same time as editing this magazine, Olga – she was always ahead of the curve – combined her duties as a gossip reporter with serving as the Conservative MP for Sutton and Cheam. And my goodness, she was interested in bins. She’d breeze into the offices of the Ephraim Hardcastle column at the dot of 11 every morning, trilling triumphantly – she was a great triller, was Ollie – about the latest development in her campaign to improve the bin collections in Sutton.
Reform has found its white whale, its True Cross, the transformative technology that, would our hidebound and corrupt uniparty establishment only allow it, transform Broken Britain
As a clueless twentysomething living in Lambeth, I was a bit mystified. I didn’t realise bins even got collected (that was Lambeth). But Olga was onto something. She had identified – again, ahead of the curve – that people really care much less about ideology than they do about not being surrounded by piles of humming rubbish, and that regardless of whether improving bin collections was technically a matter for the MP or for the local council, banging on about it would do her a world of good with her constituents.
And so it remains. Rubbish collections and the fixing of potholes are extraordinarily mundane subjects – who wouldn’t rather raise their eyes to the subtleties of the world order, or the thrillingly transformative effects on human society of artificial intelligence? Yet potholes are the stuff of retail politics. And one of his many shortcomings, I think, is that the Prime Minister is too keen to indulge his interest in strutting on the world stage or banging on about AI, and not keen enough on the humdrum stuff.
But it’s hard to make the humdrum stuff sexy. And here, I think, is where Reform have played a bit of a blinder. For in our tech-infatuated age, what could be sexier than a hi-tech solution? In Reform’s campaign literature, you will find only disdainful mention of the pickaxe. Election flyers in Barnet and Kirklees promised something more exciting: “Invest in JCB Pothole Pro – repairs in record time at a fraction of the cost.”
In the JCB Pothole Pro – and doesn’t the name just send a little shiver down your spine, like the rotating spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey? – Reform has found its white whale, its True Cross, the transformative technology that, would our hidebound and corrupt uniparty establishment only allow it, transform Broken Britain.
Nigel Farage rode onto the stage at a rally in Birmingham last year aboard a JCB Pothole Pro, and from that stage paid tribute to “one of the most incredible companies in the world”, whose machine can, he said, mend potholes at half the cost of other methods, and would be in use the length and breadth of this great nation were councils not tied in to contracts with “inferior providers”: “We’ll fix that, won’t we, when we control those county councils?” His home affairs spokesman complained that councils were using “iron-age technology” to fill potholes rather than “cutting-edge tech like the JCB Pothole Pro”.
Lee Anderson posted a video of a JCB Pothole Pro as a social media thirst trap, commenting: “Have a look at this, you’ve got to be impressed.” Woof! The excellently tax-efficient Richard Tice announced at Reform’s conference that he was “excited to see this fantastic machine working”. Not to be left out, Robert Jenrick posted a video of himself visiting a JCB factory in Nottingham and enthused that the JCB Pothole Pro could mend potholes “six times faster” than the competition.
Well, trust a Liberal Democrat to pour cold water on this visionary rapture. They point out that JCB last year donated £200,000 to Reform, and their leader Sir Ed Davey, mumbling sternly about policy “lining up with” political donations, has referred the matter to the Electoral Commission in the hopes of an investigation. Talk about joyless. Reform’s puppyish enthusiasm for the JCB Pothole Pro really is one of the most attractive things about the party, just pipping to the post Nadhim Zahawi’s adorable shiny head.
I ask Sir Ed: what if the JCB Pothole Pro just happens to be a game-changing technological advance? What if it really does repair potholes six times as fast as its nearest rivals, and more cheaply too? And what if the seagreen incorruptibles of Reform have cottoned on to this, and are therefore determined to promote its use in the national interest? After all, Nigel Farage’s declared love of the Pothole Pro preceded, by a few months, JCB’s £200,000 donation to his political party; just as his enthusiasm for deregulating the crypto market no doubt preceded the £5 million he received as a personal gift from a crypto billionaire who stands to profit from such a policy.
What’s more, even *after* JCB were generous enough to donate to Reform, Mr Farage and his frontbench colleagues continued to promote the Pothole Pro – redoubled their efforts, in fact. This despite knowing that the Ed Daveys of the world would make disobliging insinuations about it in the hopes of scoring cheap political points. They did so because it’s the right thing to do. That’s true moral courage. I hope that if he does triumph, as many are predicting, in the next general election, Prime Minister Farage rides to the State Opening of Parliament on a brand new, bright yellow JCB Pothole Pro. Wouldn’t that cheer us all up?
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