Harry Yorke, the Sunday Times’s Deputy Political Editor, has been on the campaign trail with Nigel Farage and Richard Tice and thinks he’s rumbled their dastardly plan – to take over the Conservative Party after they’ve reduced it to a smoking ruin after the election. Or is it just that they hope Reform will replace the Tories over the course of the next Parliament?
Here’s how it begins:
It is 4.30pm on Friday and along Skegness high street a large crowd is gathering outside Indulgence, an ice cream parlour.
Here, in the country’s biggest Brexit-supporting seat, Richard Tice, the leader of Reform UK, is seeking to overturn a 25,000 majority, replace the local Conservative MP and turn the right of British politics on its head.
It is not Tice, a former Tory donor and successful businessman, who people are craning their necks to catch a glimpse of, though. Most do not know his name, although a handful recognise his face from TV.
As Tice sets to work, making introductions and distributing leaflets, the man pulling in the crowds emerges, sporting his customary tweed jacket and mustard corduroy trousers.
Nigel Farage has arrived, surrounded by bodyguards, aides, cameras and broadcast journalists. It is abundantly clear to all who is really calling the shots.
As the pair make their way up the street towards the working men’s club, the commotion around Farage grows louder. Three young men, inexplicably dressed in pink hi-vis jackets, begin chanting his name and ask for a photograph, as Tice trails behind making further introductions to locals.
Minutes later, a middle-aged couple ask Farage for a picture. Tice dutifully snaps away.
Farage is undoubtedly a hit here, which is why it is perplexing — and frustrating — for some party figures that he has chosen not to stand in this election.
Instead it is Tice, a man who has sunk £1 million of his own money into rebuilding Reform from its old Brexit Party incarnation, who is the figurehead.
Sipping an alcohol-free Guinness 0.0 at the Stump and Candle pub in nearby Boston, Tice insists he is not only unfazed by Farage’s continued pulling power but actively welcomes it.
“I want as many people talking about us, for whatever reasons,” he says. “And the fastest way to do that is taking the benefit from the fact that Nigel is the best known politician, I think equally with Boris, in the country, and would be recognised as much. That is a huge opportunity.”
It goes on like this at length before finally arriving at the headline news.
The biggest question of all, however, is what Farage wants to do after polling day. For months now, a growing band of Conservative MPs have been agitating openly for him to be admitted to the party; even Rishi Sunak now says he “respects” him.
Close friends of Farage believe his real plan is to wait for the Tories to implode, and in the aftermath arrive as a saviour in waiting. “He doesn’t want to be the person who puts the bullet in the back of their heads, why be seen to alienate Conservative voters?” said one, while a second, a senior Tory, said: “Our party needs to be able to come back with people like Nigel, where we basically go back to be that authentic Thatcherite party — his natural home.”
Tice says he wants to destroy and replace the Conservative Party, but when asked if he feels the same, Farage says: “I certainly don’t have any trust for them or any love for them.” So does he want to change it? “I want to reshape the centre-right, whatever that means.”
Asked directly if his friends are right and he wants to join the Tories, he adds: “Why do you think I called it Reform? Because of what happened in Canada — the 1992-93 precedent in Canada, where Reform comes from the outside, because the Canadian Conservatives had become social democrats like our mob here. It took them time, it took them two elections, they became the biggest party on the centre-right. They then absorbed what was left of the Conservative Party into them and rebranded.”
I suggest this sounds a lot like he’s floating a merger. “More like a takeover, dear boy,” he replies, grinning like a Cheshire Cat.
Worth reading in full.
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