1) THE SPEECH
Nigel Farage has made his big speech to Reform’s party conference in Birmingham this evening. It was a bravura display which had his army of supporters in raptures.
‘I believe there will be an election next year’, Farage said, demanding a vote and branding Burnham ‘the Messiah without a mandate’. ‘We will fight to win,’ he said.
If he wins power, Farage pledged:
- ‘We will stop the boats within 100 days of a Reform government. End of.’
- Slash benefits spending by £50 billion.
- Cut taxes on working people ‘in a radical way’. Cut energy bills by £250 ‘and end the net zero lunacy’.
- Stop judges leaning on the European Convention on Human Rights.
- Boost NHS training to produce more home-grown nurses and doctors.
‘These aren’t vague empty promises, we believe in jeopardy, we believe in accountability’, he added. Vowing to deliver in Downing Street, he said that if, after 100 days, his cabinet fails to fulfil its promises, ‘I will sack them and replace them with someone with more courage’. He signalled that spokesmen on both health and defence will be appointed soon, plugging key gaps in his frontbench team.
‘Our attitude is can-do. And will do.’
To achieve his goals, Farage vowed to declare a national emergency where ‘all recess of Parliament will be cancelled. ‘Parliament will sit 24 hours a day for six days a week.’ He warned that if the House of Lords tried to stop him he would ‘hold a referendum’ to scrap the Upper House and ‘they will be swept away’. Civil servants who tried to resist ‘will be fired and replaced with business people from outside’.
He denounced the Conservatives for wanting ‘power for its own sake’ and said Labour are ‘set for more failure’. He said the government was ‘leading us to national bankruptcy’ and that ‘national security is not safe’ in Burnham’s hands. He concluded by saying to the crowd: ‘I love you all.’
2) THE THREAT
Farage’s speech was delayed by nearly an hour because of a serious security threat. ‘Counter terrorism wouldn’t let me on until they swept the stage,’ Farage confirmed to the redoubtable Chris ‘Chopper’ Hope of GB News. An exploding banner, planted by protestors, went off during deputy leader Richard Tice’s speech, which occurred when Farage had originally been due to address the conference. Greenpeace claimed credit for the disruption. ‘The stage was interfered with,’ explained Nick Candy, one of the party’s key money men. ‘We’ve seen one MP murdered, we don’t want to see another.’
When Farage was interrupted, he said: ‘Oh we’ve got a screamer.’ The 5,000 delegates present did a pretty decent job of shouting them down. ‘Boring, boring, boring!’ Farage yelled as the words flashed up behind him — proof that disruptions were expected.
One day left-wing protestors will realise that these stunts are pathetic, undemocratic and counterproductive. They fuel the anti-establishment victim narrative which some Reformers love to peddle. More seriously, party conferences are usually watertight from a security point of view. The idea that someone unvetted was able to breach the ring of steel will lead to serious questions about the police and security operation.
3) THE DEFENCE
Before he got to his feet, Farage and his team spent most of the day dealing with the fallout from Channel 4’s exposé of how two of his closest aides appeared to solicit donations in a way which would breach electoral rules. I wrote at length this morning about the meaning and consequences of the sting operation. The two in the firing line, Dan Jukes and James Orr, were suspended this morning.
Farage held a press conference in which he read out a prepared statement saying Reform had ‘done nothing wrong’ and defended himself after having a drink with a fake American donor, where it appeared that he was aware of the arrangement. ‘I was in the middle of a by-election,’ he said. ‘I was told I had to go and meet these people. I was told they had a global family trust headquartered in London. If you look at this video I asked the question “is this all above board, has this been legally checked”. I’m not an expert in how family trusts work. I didn’t give it a second thought. It was just one of those things.’
He dismissed Jukes and Orr as ‘a couple of contractors’ who have said some ‘injudicious things’, which is the purest cant since Jukes is widely regarded as like a son to him. Farage said claims in the film by Jukes that other dubious donations had been made were untrue and that no donations from those he named had arrived.
It’s not just the prissy mainstream media who are troubled by this. Arron Banks, that well known crypto-communist, talked about too many young, inexperienced people around Farage and called for more ‘grey hairs’. Another senior figure suggested to me that Farage might one day see jettisoning Jukes and Orr as an opportunity to reform his operation and the ‘best thing that ever happened to him’. Other serious figures voiced growing frustration with Farage’s operation. One prominent public cheerleader told me: ‘It’s so exhausting defending all this stuff.’ The question is whether serious cultural change is really possible for people who have been operating the same way for 15 years when the stakes were nowhere near where they are now.
4) THE DEAL
All this rather overshadowed what was meant to be one of the key set pieces of the day. Farage and wannabe French prime minister Jordan Bardella signed a memorandum of understanding on the main stage of conference to stop the small boats in the Channel. Bardella could take over the French government if Marine Le Pen becomes president.
The party faithful loved Farage and Bardella, and many of them I spoke to dismissed the fuss about the donations
In the MOU, Bardella agreed: ‘The United Kingdom will intercept boats which have launched from French shores and entered British territorial waters and will return the persons on board to France.’
In his speech, Bardella said a National Rally government would ‘do everything in its power to ensure that France is no longer the gateway for illegal migration into the United Kingdom’.
Party spokesmen like Zia Yusuf and Robert Jenrick claimed this was a deal which none of the other parties could have secured.
5) THE BUSINESS
The party faithful loved Farage and Bardella, and many of them I spoke to dismissed the fuss about the donations. ‘I don’t care about the details,’ said one party member and podcaster who saw the whole thing as a ‘get Reform’ operation. But business leaders attending the conference, many of them for the first time, were deeply perplexed by the party’s approach to companies and to organisation. The business day, on Thursday, was widely derided as poorly put together. ‘It’s one of the weirdest experiences I’ve ever had at conference,’ said one former Downing Street aide present to shepherd their clients around.
When he turned up to the business dinner on Thursday evening, Farage proceeded to denounce many of those who had paid for tables and hoped to get to know the party leadership. One of those he called out was NatWest, who Farage criticised for debanking him. Serco were attacked for cashing in on the asylum business (they run some asylum hotels). There were other victims. Others complained that there were empty chairs at their tables, where they had expected Reform representatives to talk to. Reform’s spindoctors had spent a lot of time hailing the increased business presence as evidence that they were being taken more seriously by the City. Farage’s angry performance frankly bemused many of those present.
Are Reform ready for government? Farage hoped people would leave Birmingham with an emphatic ‘yes’ to that question. The events of the last two days mean the answer still remains ‘perhaps’.
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