Too Weird To Win

Ben Wildsmith

When you’re a bought-and-paid-for mouthpiece for Plied and Liebour, inflicting woke propaganda on a Welsh public that you secretly despise because of their inherent decency and traditional values, you have to pick your battles.

So, I’m not going to let the outbreak of World War III knock me off course this weekend, not before Reform’s latest battering at the polls has been properly savoured.

It’s in defeat that the strange psychology of these tormented souls is revealed to us in all its fevered disorder.

In the good times, Nigel Farage’s blokey waggishness is designed to recall gun dogs drying off by a roaring fire in a country pub where the beer is brown and the clientele white.

We are encouraged to imagine him slinging a Barbour-clad arm around our shoulders and sharing a harmless joke about nuns losing a bar of soap.

Weaponised bonhomie has been his stock in trade, artfully normalising social taboos that grew from decades of progressive education.

He’s no longer a one-man band, though. If the UK had a presidential system, do you think Farage would be hanging around with Richard Tice and Robert Jenrick, let alone Lee Anderson?

Unlike Donald Trump, Farage’s populism must find expression through a parliamentary system that requires a plurality of voices and, inconveniently, doesn’t allow for the signing of executive orders.

So, A-list showman Nige is forced to share the bill with a collection of ex-Tory malcontents who couldn’t draw a crowd if they self-immolated.

Duffers

These duffers are happiest in a shared fantasy of Reform’s future. A couple of weeks back, when Nige was dishing out meaningless ‘Shadow Cabinet’ roles, it was all smiles.

Even Tice, who was humiliated again by losing the ‘Shadow Chancellor’ role to Robert Jenrick, accentuated the positive and rationalised his business brief as being just as important come the revolution.

The Reform ship is built to sail on calm waters. The fragility of its construction, however, becomes obvious with the first breath of wind.

I took some startling photos of despairing Reformites at the count in Caerphilly in October. They had bustled into the leisure centre in their matching black suits – think David Brent cosplaying Reggie Kray.

By the end of the night, they were slumped across plastic chairs in sullen, flaccid impotence.

That night, I witnessed the Welsh campaign managers chewed out by their superiors from London, and in that I suspect the party found some comforting reasoning.

Culturally, Wales is so ‘other’ to those at the top of Reform that any failure here can be ascribed to our strangeness rather than problems with the party.

Xenophobes gonna xenophobe.

Not so Manchester, which was supposed to prove that Reform can win anywhere in England.

Defeat here was, statistically, highly likely for Reform. There are 400-odd seats ahead of Gorton & Denton on the party’s hit list, it’s not natural territory for them.

Labour’s support, though, was predicted to collapse and for Reform’s narrative about the UK to persist required those voters to turn right.

That would have required a serious campaign from the party, one that acknowledged the leap of faith it was asking from the constituency’s electorate. Reform, though, is high on its own supply.

Thinker

In the social media bubbles, where the party’s consistent 30% support spends its time, candidate Matt Goodwin is a celebrity and renowned thinker.

As a GB News personality, his academic background is peddled as intellectual astroturf for the extreme, minority views he holds.

So, Reform’s base cheered a TV star and cultural heavyweight whilst everyone else was discovering an awkward sounding oddball who thinks the tax system should penalise women for failing to breed.

Goodwin’s gracelessness in defeat – refusing to applaud the winner – set the tone for his party.

We are now being encouraged to believe that Islamic fundamentalist men were allowed by woke election officers to intrude on their wives in voting booths and command them to vote for the party led by a gay Jew. Whatchootalkin’ ‘bout, Willis?

The reality is that, as in Caerphilly, Reform ran into a likeable, local candidate who shares the concerns of voters.

The Greens’ victor, Hannah Spencer, spoke in her victory speech of how ‘working hard should get you a nice life.’ That may be simplistic, but it’s an objective we all agree with, and it doesn’t require a time machine to take us back to the 1950s or the forced deportation of our neighbours and work colleagues.

The longer Reform go on, the harder it becomes for Farage to disguise the sheer weirdness of those around him.

The party’s base support is drawn disproportionately from retirees, and the reality-gap between their imagination of the UK, as shaped by GB News/social media, and the lived experience of people in diverse workplaces is stark.

Fantasists

Reform UK may be funded and backed by some sinister right-wing ideologues, but its members are, at heart, fantasists.

Their endless conspiracy theories, projection of illusory power, and hallucinatory yearning for a nation only achievable in AI paintings speaks not of an organised political movement, but a pastime for disgruntled Walter Mittee characters whose lives have been a disappointment.

The sheer joy that accompanied the Greens’ victory on Thursday echoed that I witnessed for Plaid in October. The people celebrating looked like the folks we work with having a laugh and enjoying life.

Contrast that with the belligerent ‘you’re not laughing now’ triumphalism that marked the aftermath of the Brexit result and the real division in British politics becomes clear. Reform is too weird to win.