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Like a 1970s rust-belt serial killer, Nigel Farage is painstakingly assembling around him the political corpses of Boris Johnson’s final, terrible cabinet. Think about it. You never see Reform’s defectors after the initial unveiling press conference, and I’m beginning to wonder what happens to them. I think Nigel amateurishly embalms them or stuffs them with horsehair and sackcloth, then seats them round a “cabinet” table in his cellar, where they all silently agree with him at all times, and never interrupt him.
But look, I’m prepared to consider more outlandish fan theories too, particularly after the sheer farce of Robert Jenrick’s defection on Thursday. If Nigel’s sloppy-seconding carries on at this rate, the Reform/Conservative party differentiation is going to feel a lot like it did when Bucks Fizz factionalised and split, then mounted rival tours of the UK. Neither music nor the United Kingdom was the beneficiary.
For now, Farage is really leaning into the enemies-to-lovers trope. On Monday he cosied up to a man who’d previously said of him: “Yr comments r offensive&racist. I wld b frightened 2live in country run by U.” On Thursday, he did it with a guy who he’d incredibly recently negged as “a fraud”. Personally, I have found both these episodes of Heated Rivalry the least appealing.
Hopefully, though, one day someone will write an interior fiction novella that takes place within the five hours of limbo on Thursday when Jenrick was whereabouts unknown. During this period, he had been stripped of his home in the Conservative party, yet not granted citizenship of Reform – kind of an SW1 version of Shamima Begum. During these hours, something had to fill the vacuum, and there was much to enjoy in all the staged fretting from Reform about the threat of cultural pollution from outsiders. “The worries I get from within Reform,” confessed Farage of all these defections, “are … will they bring Tory infighting with them?” Listen, someone’s got to say it. If you allow these people in, they do bring their primitive, vicious culture with them.
Although this was not how Kemi Badenoch framed it in her viral video message. Incidentally, one of multiple problems with Kemi is that she seems to have stolen her act off Dolores Umbridge. Even the voice, with that treacly-steely delivery, is straight out of the Ministry of Magic’s supply teacher department. Or, even worse, the shadow Ministry of Magic’s supply teacher department.
Anyway, on both off- and on-the-record briefings, the Conservatives have been keen to play this as a double-agent plotline, casting Jenrick as maybe the Ozempic Guy Burgess. As revealed by the Times, Badenoch had been informed by a mole that Jenrick was planning to imminently do one, and was furious that he “came to shadow cabinet and behaved as if nothing was going on”. I hope you love the idea that anything is going on at shadow cabinet. And are even more intrigued by reports that, the week before, Jenrick had “sat through a shadow cabinet awayday taking copious notes” about strategy. Wait – the Tories have a strategy? If so, Farage is very keen to tell them how it ends up panning out, constantly making reference to what happens “after the May 7th catastrophe”. A catastrophe which, given it happens on 7 May, can technically not yet be called, but in Nigel’s telling has already occurred. Then again, Farage undoubtedly has political gravity and momentum working for him, so there’s no reason to think he can’t master time as well.
Given the reputation of “Honest Bob”, it remains unclear whether Reform will ever really trust Jenrick, or whether he will have to live under constant oppressive surveillance by the party’s security services/a disgruntled Richard Tice. A bit like when Lee Harvey Oswald went to the Soviets and he just got a load of monitoring and a factory job in Minsk. You get the feeling Jenrick wants more than a factory job in Minsk. Or as he put it yesterday: “I’ve put aside my personal ambition.” (Genuinely the most hilarious thing that was said yesterday.)
As for the upshot of it all outside the Westminster dramasphere, you hear a lot from Reform about the uniparty, the epithet meant to embody the necrotic consensus between failed Conservative and Labour parties. But yesterday risked shifting the vibe to unichaos, in which Reform joined the big tent, too. Certainly, the lesson of the past 18 months in British decline is how easily the feeling of “same shit, different clown show” sets in, with even Farage now offering repeat variations on how short his notional period of grace with the British public will be.
But why should anyone feel patient? To pick just one example, it is stunningly appalling that thousands of people cursed with living under South East Water have now been without water in their homes for a week, after having already suffered repeated outages since November. The government has asked the regulator to “review” South East Water’s licence, but it has emerged that even if they did want to terminate it, they would have to give the firm 25 years’ notice. You read that right: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. This is one of many, many reasons why people have had it with the current system, and why many will give Farage a chance. It doesn’t, however, make him the answer. I am sure Farage has the will and possibly the ability to tear dysfunctional things down. It’s the fixing them or building them back up I just cannot see, no matter how many “gamechanging” press conferences he calls. After all, if Nigel’s allowed to report back from the future, so are we.
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
