TWO days of Reform conference felt gratuitous.
The action all took place yesterday. Nigel Farage’s big announcements were all blown out of the water by the shattering revelations of yet more dodgy donations.
His big speech was marred as protesters were hit and grabbed at by party members, who did not appear to see any irony in perpetrating violence against women while they argue against immigration on those grounds.
But after all the noise had faded away and the dust had settled came the unavoidable question, as I made my way back to the conference centre: Why are we all still here?
There was a speech from Reform UK Scotland leader Malcolm Offord, the moment that no one was waiting for. And there was another speech from Farage to get through.
Offord’s speech was rambling, eccentric and met with a muted reaction in the hall. His gestures to a lost Scotland that, per Winston Churchill’s famous maxim, was to the modern world what Greece was to the ancient world, got the biggest applause.
A tangential rant about how the SNP had stymied Scotland’s potential to “feed the world” with genetically-edited potatoes – they could “grow in the desert”, Offord declared at one point – baffled rather than inspired.
Still, it was strange to hear a Unionist politician speaking about how most of the important political powers were still reserved to Westminster, where he said that Farage and Zia Yusuf would “pull the levers” to sort out the economy and crack down on immigration.
But he’d be in Holyrood “pulling our own levers, don’t worry about that”, Offord reassured us.
Offord and his lever pulling aside, there really wasn’t a great deal to do on the final day of Reform conference. There was Suella Braverman’s speech where she rhymed off examples of the apparently limitless munificence of the British Empire, while Farage’s closing remarks rounded things off with something less than a bang.
Lots of people had left after the action-packed opening day, others were likely seen off by powerful hangovers cooked up at the exclusive Reform UK bash the night before, featuring a special performance from disco legends Boney M (which comes with the substantial caveat that original singer Liz Mitchell has said this iteration of the band “simply isn’t Boney M”).
It was the day for the diehards. I entertained myself by speaking to the members who’d stuck around till the bitter end.
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Dariusz Piekarski, a member from Chesterfield, told me about how his Polish father had ended up in England after the war, having fought against the Nazis – a refugee.
His father had ended up working as a miner and he was so proud that his old man had built a new life for himself after the horrors of war. Piekarski was emphatic that his political affiliation was not at odds with his family history; his father was different, because he worked, paid tax, he said.
That the asylum system forces people into dependency and that refugees go on to work, pay taxes, start businesses did not occur to him.
A little later, I managed to grab an eccentric young man called Charles Amos for a quick chat. I’d been seeking him out because I recognised him from a GB News appearance he did a while back where he delivered a doughty defence of incest.
Wasn’t he worried that airing these views would be damaging to the party? Surely Reform didn’t want to be publicly associated with a man who thought people should be allowed to procreate with their siblings and cousins? It didn’t seem to bother Amos terribly much and besides, he added, he’d promised his mother to stop talking about it in public. Thank God for that.
As things were winding down, I spoke briefly with a young Scottish member whose idea of conversation amounted to rattling off a list of the most notable Government defeats in the House of Lords. In the toilet, a man stood at the urinal wearing a T-shirt with the words “Chagossian Government” emblazoned on the back.
Heading for the exit, I felt glad to be returning to the real world, away from these people.
Then I realised: I could leave the NEC, I could leave behind the politicians and Farage fanatics, but I couldn’t leave the country they were creating, the one I lived in. I couldn’t leave the Brexit Britain Farage has helped mould.
Maybe the torrent of dodgy money will eventually extinguish his latest political project, but not before he’s dragged Labour and the Tories further to the right than ever thought possible.
As I began my journey home, I realised: there was no escape from Reform.
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