Farage Is Not Reading The Room

The Reform leadership are not reading the room. They think there has been a revolution in British politics and they are it. They think that smashing the two party system (the Uniparty) is it and they are best placed to do that. But they haven’t looked hard enough and have missed the signs of a much deeper rift between the public sentiment and the party political system. The British don’t want another Parliamentary party badged with ‘Reform’, they want a truly representative and brutally honest party which will reject the existing party political system, lock, stock and two smoking barrels and deliver true and lasting reform.

Farage was the man they put up for the job. He is the man who made Brexit happen, after all. Well no, he didn’t actually. He made the Brexit vote happen, then he resigned from UKIP, allowing May to betray the Brexit vote. Then eventually he came back as leader of the Brexit Party whose job was to hold the Tories’ feet to the fire to ‘Get Brexit Done’. But he screwed that up as well when he stood down Brexit Party candidates in Tory seats at the 2019 General Election, effectively handing Johnson a massive majority to ‘Get Brexit Done’ on the basis of a tweaked EU Withdrawal Agreement which was quite obviously not going to get Brexit done. So Brexit hasn’t been done; we got BRINO instead.

Tice was useless as leader of Reform; he just did not garner popular appeal. So Farage took over and the party took off in the polls - and membership took off too, much to the annoyance of the Tory Party leadership. Farage was surfing a wave of public goodwill in opposing the damaging and highly unpopular policies of both Labour and the Conservatives. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, I really was. I voted Reform at the election. But there were signs that all was not well. A public spat erupted between Tice and Farage on one side and Ben Habib on the other. Ben should have been an MP. He has been an extremely popular candidate both in the Brexit Party and in Reform. There are rumours that he was given an unwinnable seat by the Reform Party. Be that the case or not, Tice and Farage have side-lined him since the election and eventually Ben was ejected from the party or left of his own accord. Ben also believes that Brexit has not been done.

Then along came Tommy Robinson and ‘that lot’ who supported him. The Reform leadership rejected ‘that lot’ out of hand. Then ‘that lot’ and their working class hero Tommy Robinson were basically vindicated for their decades-long stance on rape gangs which has seen Robinson repeatedly persecuted by the state and media and now serving 18 months in solitary confinement for the civil offence of contempt of court because he chose to publish a video exposing the corruption of the British state and judiciary. Farage had the opportunity to set the record straight on Tommy and walk back from the leadership’s outright condemnation of the man and his supporters. Instead he chose to double down on that stance. So he lost the support of Elon Musk - and probably a $100m donation to Reform in the bargain.

Isabel Oakeshott has basically told ‘that lot’ to suck it up:

There are many who will disagree with me but I think Nigel’s position as leader of the potential opposition to this deeply rotten Labour government and the Uniparty in general is now untenable. He should step down swiftly and let Ben Habib or Rupert Lowe take over for the good of party and the country as a whole.