Reform

The man from Reform had barely sat down at our table at the French bistro when he leant forward conspiratorially and asked: ‘What’s Boris up to?’ The suspicion that Boris Johnson, Britain’s 55th premier, must be up to something is a familiar one. For the first time in several years, however, the question is interesting. And the fact that Reform is raising it gives a small insight into the current state of politics. The query came just hours after Johnson had taken to Instagram to mark the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum, the defining moment of his career and of our politics since. The 17.4 million voters who backed the Leave campaign were right to do so, he said, before going on to hail the freedoms of Brexit.

The loudest man in politics knows when to keep his silence. Nigel Farage held his tongue on Monday as Keir Starmer’s premiership floundered. Aside from a few PFLs – proper f***ing lunches – to celebrate the local election results, the Reform UK leader was already looking to the next challenge. Like a shark, Farage keeps moving forward, into new waters, hungry for more. One ally sums up his approach to politics in a single word: ‘Momentum’. For the past few months, Farage has had one goal: destroying the Tories. The figure ‘1,453’ was the total of gains proudly pumped out on Reform’s Instagram. For Farage, 7 May was the political equivalent of the fall of Constantinople – the point when the Conservatives ceased to be a national party.

Results are pouring in from across the country, in what Nigel Farage is calling ‘the British midterms’. Swathes of council seats across England have turned teal, from Newcastle-under-Lyme to Essex. Both the Liberal Democrats and Greens have made modest gains, with few rays of light outside the capital for the Conservatives. Yet the main action is still to come with results expected later today for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. Reform UK is expected to make the biggest gains in both while Plaid Cymru and the SNP are confident of taking the respective First Ministerships in Cardiff and Edinburgh.  Discussing all of this on SpectatorTV are Tim Shipman, Noa Hoffman and special guests Lord Glasman, pollsters Scarlett Maguire and Luke Tryl plus STV star Lucy Dunn.

In March, just before Artemis II rounded the far side of the Moon, the Transport Secretary had her own lunar encounter. Heidi Alexander claims that a ‘moon crater’-sized pothole forced her Mini off the road in Oxfordshire. She is far from alone. Pothole casualties in Britain rose from 270 in 2020 to 393 in 2024, including six dead. An RAC Europe survey found that 62 per cent of British drivers thought European roads are better maintained. Britain’s pothole problem is a story of government dysfunction. Local authorities seem unable to perform their basic duties; meanwhile, council tax continues to rise, bin collection becomes more infrequent and public spaces continue to deteriorate.

When Zia Yusuf first walked into the headquarters of Reform UK, he gestured at the empty room and asked: ‘Where’s the office?’ Ed Sumner, the party’s director of communications, replied: ‘This is it. It’s empty. This is the party.’ That was not even two years ago. Since then, Nigel Farage and Yusuf have built a party from scratch and expect to be the biggest winners in the local elections on 7 May. With more than 270,000 members, their grassroots base is the largest in Britain, bigger than both Labour and the Tories. ‘I would argue no party has built political infrastructure and established itself more quickly in British history than Reform,’ Yusuf says.

Murton is a rather frowsy former pit village in County Durham, about half a dozen miles down the A19 from Sunderland. Chip shops, tanning salons, elderly people with no teeth on mobility scooters, huge cannabis farm in the disused old Co-op store which has just been busted by the Old Bill. It almost became a ghost town after the pit closed in 1991, but they built a largeish retail park on the outskirts so people could spend money they didn’t have on useless shit and bad food. Its north side has one of the lowest average incomes in the county (£34,400) and a much lower than average life expectancy. Benefit take-up somewhat high, above 50 per cent. I hope, in these few sentences, I have brought the place to life for you.