Rod Liddle

I have read countless commentaries explaining why we shouldn’t take Reform’s victories last Thursday too seriously. They are all wrong. I have the distinct impression that these were the most significant election results for a good few decades. Up here in the north, everyone I know voted Reform. More importantly, when I used to ask people how they voted, they would beckon me to one side and, through a cupped hand, whisper ‘Reform’. Now they say it out loud and proud. And the apology is because I had doubted Reform’s ability to climb above 30 per cent – the crucial figure. I also doubted that they were serious enough about the Blue Labour/SDP levelling-up stuff. And I doubted their ability to make serious inroads into local government. All of this was wrong too.

It is ten months since the then merely aspirant education secretary Bridget Phillipson addressed the important issue of where transgender people should go for a quick slash. Bridget was very much of the opinion that if you had a gender recognition certificate, then you should make for the cubicle which matched with whatever it said on that piece of paper, because it’s the ‘humane approach’. She added: ‘But I would expect that if you were someone that had gone through that formal process of recognition you are, to all intents and purposes, for legal purposes, regarded as being in a different gender, regardless of the sex into which you were born.’ This week, Bridget changed her mind.

My contention was always that Reform UK would struggle to reach 30 per cent in the polls and, while the party is edging upwards, that still seems to be a ceiling. However, the latest MRP poll in the Sun suggests that, for Nigel Farage to become our next Prime Minister, the party need not gain much more support than it is currently attracting. The Sun had Farage on course to win 180 seats, largely by polling at about 30 per cent in some of the red wall constituencies. Labour and the Conservatives were each predicted to gain 165 seats. In such a finely balanced parliament, discussions about a Conservative–Reform deal would become otiose: a Reform–Conservative coalition would almost certainly emerge, regardless of any prior negotiations.

The dewy-eyed and rather dim-witted vision of globalisation is dead, I think for good. Labour is to effectively re-nationalise British Steel in Scunthorpe and in making the announcement that Parliament was to be recalled, Sir Keir Starmer said: ‘This afternoon, the future of British Steel hangs in the balance. Jobs, investment, growth, our economic and national security are all on the line.’ The crucial part of that sentence is ‘national security’: an acceptance that trade does not happen in a vacuum, separated from the rest of life. It was always contingent. It was never sensible to have the Chinese running our only virgin steel blast furnace, just as it was not sensible to allow the same country to run our nuclear plants.

If, for some unfathomable reason, you missed Newsnight last night, do make sure you see, somehow, the interview between presenter Victoria Derbyshire and the former deputy assistant to Donald Trump, Sebastian Gorka. Derbyshire has had it coming for a long time. She believes it is sufficient, when interviewing somebody who takes a Trumpish view of the world, simply to screech her idiotic objections and prevent the interviewee from speaking at all. This happens every time a supporter of Trump is allowed on to her show. She is as bad as Maitlis, except without the charisma. Gorka refused to stand for it and told her three times to shut up – which, in the end, Derbyshire did while glowering like a smacked arse. “77 million Americans have spoken.

In an Appalachian high school, the kids were set the task of writing about Europeans as part of their history curriculum. When the day came to hand in their work, the teacher took one boy aside and expressed displeasure about the sheer lack of effort he had put into his homework. ‘You have had three days, Bubba. And all you have written is “Europeans are bastards.” Would you please take your work back and expand it considerably by tomorrow.’ The following day the teacher approached Bubba for the finished article – and he took from the child an essay which read, simply: ‘All Europeans are bastards.’ I was told that joke when I was about 12 years old – so the timing makes it impossible for Bubba to have been J.D.

Cindy Yu (CY): Slashing winter fuel allowance, keeping the two-child benefit cap, cutting foreign aid, cutting the civil service, axing NHS bureaucracy and slashing welfare spending. Rod, are we actually living under a conservative government? Rod Liddle (RL): No, because the Conservative government didn't do any of that, because they didn't have the appetite for it or the bravery. I've actually, in the last month, considered rejoining the Labour Party. It's a blue Labour Party, it reflects pretty much everything I ever wanted from the Labour Party. There are a few problems. I think Rachel Reeves is a problem. But other than that, I think Labour is doing things which will make it appeal to working class voters far more than it did in the first 100 days of its existence.

It is difficult to gauge who is the more discombobulated by the Labour government’s recent Damascene conversion to a political viewpoint roughly approximating to common sense – the Labour left, Reform or the Tory right. It is equally difficult to believe that the current administration is the same one which took office on 4 July last year, so wildly different is its apparent ideological viewpoint. You will remember Keir Starmer’s first 100 days without much affection, I suspect.

In early June last year I had a reasonably agreeable meal with a bunch of Reform UK activists at a restaurant in Guisborough – the main town in the seat which I would be contesting for the Social Democratic party, Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland. There were four of them, united primarily by one thing – a visceral loathing of the Conservative party. Beyond that they were basically anti-woke and economically dry, as we used to call it. But all that took second place to the animus against the Tories. I have met pink-haired, nose-ringed, utterly vacuous LGBTQI sociology students who were more kindly disposed to the Conservatives than this lot.

Forgive the mordant tone, but this article was written in a desolate post-industrial nightmare girdled by diversionary roads going nowhere aside from away from places. It is somewhere in middle England, where the West Country merges into the Midlands and the north into the south: it is essentially delocated, it is nowhere. There are 15 or so deserted light industrial units, vast metal hangars for storing stuff, acres of car-parking spaces and a few trees suffering from rickets or polio. There are also huge and very bright lamps shining in through my hotel window, betraying no evidence of their purpose other than to keep me awake, and in the foreground a continual mechanical hum, the source of which remains a mystery.