As a sucker for any melody which relies heavily upon fourth and eighth notes hammered out on a piano, I was always going to fall for Billy Joel’s 1978 hit single ‘My Life’. The lyrics were, as ever with Joel, awful, mixing his cringeworthy ordinary guy New York vernacular schtick with what I dare say he thought were original and profound psychological insights. He is such a hack singer-songwriter. He makes Neil Diamond resemble Wittgenstein. But the tune made me swoon, even its two predictable cod-Beatles middle eights.
What to do? Obviously, I couldn’t buy it. There were four record shops in Middlesbrough back then and I was known in all of them. Known for slouching in looking dissolute and rebellious and buying stuff by Television or Cabaret Voltaire or – look, I’m an intellectual! – Satie or Bruckner. It would be social death to be seen buying ‘My Life’. Luckily, I had a very kindly girlfriend called Sharon who thought my sensibilities were absurd, pretentious and embarrassing, and she marched into HMV and bought the single for me as a present. That’s love for you – she was a Clash fan.
I lived in a foetid bedsit at the time, in Redcar, in a 1930s block which resembled a crumbling Lubyanka, a high-security prison built by morons. A day or so later one of my neighbours stopped me in the communal hallway. ‘Hey, were you playing that Billy Joel song last night? Love that song, me. Wouldn’t have thought it was your cup of tea, though, ha ha.’ Christ, the shame. It still rankles. Life as a palimpsest, or a deceitful performance: don’t let it happen to you, kids. Embrace, shamelessly, your inner Billy Joel.
Reform UK has a Billy Joel problem. First and most obviously, there are the Reform voters who refuse to admit to being Reform voters, lying to pollsters because the shame of being seen as reprehensible trumps, so to speak, their natural desire to be candid and honest.
We have seen these people before, of course – the ‘shy Tories’ who, up to a decade ago, ensured that every polling company called election results wrong because they hadn’t taken these strange creatures into account, their shady proclivities, their unspoken adherence to a dark ideology which the pollsters and the mainstream commentators found unpalatable. But hell, at least in the privacy of the polling booth these people do express themselves. It is the others, the multitude of others, who may prevent Reform from forming the next government – and the question, then, is what Farage and Tice et al do about it.
If we assume that Reform is on about 30 per cent – yes, I am probably being a tad generous – my guess is that there is perhaps another 10 per cent, minimum, who would vote for Reform were it not for ephemeral factors which somehow seem to constrain them. How do we know this? Most apparently through the polls, which show a large-ish proportion who agree with the bulk of Reform’s manifesto, particularly the bits which deal with immigration, Islam and crime and punishment, but who are nonetheless disinclined to vote for the party come election time. Something keeps them away.
The perception it is in some way uncouth is the one thing preventing the party expanding its voter base
How does Reform capture these people? Well, there was a fascinating study published at the end of last month by the thinktank Persuasion UK of voters who were ‘Reform Curious’: these were voters who are ‘demographically similar to the Reform vote, and have in common a strong social conservatism. However, unlike the Reform vote, they generally have left-leaning populist views on economics.’
This suggests to me that a bit of congenial rich-bashing wouldn’t go amiss. Now you may argue that rich-bashing is performative and is in any case difficult to pull off when your party leader has just accepted a five-million-quid donation from some loaded crypto monkey, irrespective of the legality, niceties etc of such a transaction.
But a second observation from the report – ‘Anxieties over Reform’s proximity to Trump, Putin and extreme figures generally give these voters pause for thought’ – gets us, I think, a little closer to a definitive answer. I suspect Farage’s connections to Donald Trump probably do cost the party votes, although my guess is not that many. But the perception that Reform has ties to unsavoury people matters, even if those people are not, in the end, that unsavoury. And the perception that the party is in some way uncouth, beyond the pale, is the one thing preventing Reform from expanding its voter base into the realm of people with delicate sensibilities who find themselves agreeing with almost everything Reform says, but not always with the way in which it says it. And then there is – crucially, I think – what these woebegone voters think will happen to their own social standing if they are known to vote Reform.
Appearance is all, I fear. The main source of reluctance among voters to put their cross beside Reform is one which is rooted in class politics or at least a simulacrum of class politics. The Reform-curious voters agree with the policies, but not with the howled abuse at asylum seekers or the profusion of St George’s flags and the belligerent proto-nationalism. And their facade of enlightened liberalism is basically an insistence: we come from a higher class of society than these people and, while we basically agree with them, we will not advertise or proclaim our allegiance. Not even in the privacy of the voting booth.
This is why it is good news that Reform has at last begun to show it can make inroads into the lower-middle and middle-class vote, as we saw at the last council elections. But there’s a vast swath of voters in that bloc who are still, at the moment, averse to voting Reform largely for reasons of appearance. And this has been true of right-wing parties across much of Europe, most of whom have found 30 per cent the pinnacle of achievement.
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