Reform party

Those pondering why Robert Jenrick defected to Reform UK have focused on the political momentum of Nigel Farage or the performance of Kemi Badenoch, but the key conversation was the one he had with his father on Boxing Day. ‘He’s a very straight talker,’ Jenrick explains when we meet at Reform’s headquarters on Tuesday afternoon. ‘He said, “If you weren’t in politics and there was a general election to-morrow, which party would you vote for?” I said, “Reform.” He said, “If you weren’t in politics, weren’t a candidate, had no particular loyalty, who would you want to be prime minister if the choice was Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and Nigel

Contemplating a new year always raises questions. Was there a Third Protocol? What was wrong with Oral-A? Can Keir Starmer survive 2026 as prime minister? It is the biggest question in politics this year and the fact that it does not have an easy answer illustrates the mess Starmer has got himself into over the past 18 months. A few days before Christmas, a senior figure in No. 10 outlined how Labour’s high command still believes the winds will change for the party in 2026: a ‘virtuous circle’ of falling interest rates and inflation, more investment, growth, and rising confidence in the government among the public and the Parliamentary Labour

Keir Starmer will start the new year as he means to go on: by attempting to convince his troops that he is still the best man to lead them. The Prime Minister will begin 2026 by hosting Labour MPs at Chequers. The motive behind the outreach is simple. ‘The only question that matters this year,’ says a non-invitee, ‘is whether Keir can cling on.’ It was not so long ago that a peacetime prime minister with a healthy working majority was thought to be unassailable. No longer. The defining moment in parliament these past 12 months was the summer welfare rebellion. After 120 Labour MPs threatened revolt, the £5 billion

Researchers from Imperial College London this week released an analysis of the health of voters in the UK. In a publication associated with British Medical Journal, the experts claimed to have found that people who vote for Reform are disproportionately sick. I am sure that the researchers in question could not possibly have enjoyed coming to their conclusions. But they reported that the conditions Reform voters are most likely to suffer from include obesity, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and epilepsy. The scientists did not go so far as to claim that voting Reform makes you epileptic. As every smart-aleck first-year at Imperial could tell you, correlation does not imply causation.

British politics often resembles a golden-age murder mystery, with multiple parties sitting anxiously on the sofas/green benches waiting for the detective/electorate to crack the case. The Reform, Labour and Tory conferences provided a plethora of clues. But just as Sherlock Holmes solved ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’ by diving into the significance of the dog that didn’t bark, just as much can be learned from what didn’t happen over the past few weeks. First, there was no serious leadership challenge from the pretenders in Labour or the Conservatives. Andy Burnham turned up in Liverpool with a knife between his teeth, only to discover he neither had a seat nor the

It is the question dominating bars and fringe debates this party conference season: what exactly is driving Reform UK’s popularity? Various explanations are proffered: the collapse of the two-party system, fickle voter tastes, the rise of populism across the West. But these are symptoms of a much greater shift: the new information age, unleashed by the internet. In a nation whose politics have long been characterised by venerable institutions, Reform, born in 2020, can claim to be Britain’s first successful e-party. Like most apparent overnight successes, Reform has in fact been years in the making. For much of the 2000s, Nigel Farage struggled to get anywhere with his Eurosceptic messaging.

When Labour MPs met to hear from their leader on Monday, there was one group who felt particularly aggrieved. In the government’s reshuffle following the resignation of Angela Rayner, the party’s powerful north-west caucus had suffered a ‘machine gunning like nothing else’, in the words of a senior party official. Some 40 per cent of the reshuffle casualties are from this region. The changes risked, in the words of one aide, ‘reopening the whole Keir and Andy psychodrama’. Within hours, Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, had duly attacked Keir Starmer’s new ‘London-centric’ line-up. Lucy Powell, a close Burnham ally, who was sacked as leader of the Commons, announced

It’s a very serious and rancorous time in Britain. Social strife is simmering. The asylum system is at breaking point. The lines on the economics graphs are all going in unsettling directions – the ones you’d prefer to see going down are going up, and vice versa. And inevitably the Overton window is shifting. Though perhaps not in the way any of us expected. Reform is currently odds-on to form the next government. Nigel Farage’s party meets for its conference in Birmingham this week at 35 per cent in the polls. But that’s not because it’s bracingly right-wing. Or not just. It’s because Reform is camp. At a time when