The surging insurgents Reform UK are being led by a man who needs to be turned into a cartoon
‘You talk about him every day!’ says my partner about my obsession with Nigel Farage, who was actually born in Bonn, West Germany in 1964 before coming over to England as a very young child. He wasn’t, but why let the facts get in the way of a good story?
Reform UK, formerly known as The Brexit Party, is shaking up how politics is covered in the UK. In the July 2024 General Election, five Reform UK MPs were elected to Parliament: Lee, H, Claire, Faye and Lisa. Sorry, I mean Lee, James, Nigel, Rupert and Richard. Yes, the new boyband Right Direction are, in many ways, Britain’s hottest vocal harmony group, if by harmony you mean they all pop up on GB News, the propaganda channel which I call SovereignTV.
Reform in all but name are the former Conservative MPs Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson. My nickname for the party is Boris & Nige’s Anti Elite Party (That Are Actually Elite), in spite of Johnson not formally declaring for the start-up party.
In the USA, Donald Trump and his Project 2025 acolytes have completed a takeover of what is laughably still referred to as the Grand Old Party, the Republicans; in the UK, where we have a king and we thus can never be a republic unless something very, very funny happens, the Conservative Party are the instruments of political force. In the last century, they have pushed neoliberal policies on to the masses, among them buy-to-let home ownership, entrepreneurship and the Big Bang of financial systems.
And yet in 2025, led by a lady called Kemi, they hold just over 120 Parliamentary seats out of 650. The Labour Party hold over 400, but they are being assailed from their right side by the newspapers. But who under the age of 60 reads a newspaper in 2025? I’ll tell you: people who used to read them in 1975 and 2005.
Thus, if you run through a typical Times, Mail, Express or Telegraph, you will see news fit to print for the views, prejudices and recidivism of their constituency. These newspapers also hire magnificent journalists, who send dispatches from warzones, campaign on assisted dying, and who forced the reform of MPs’ expense accounts and register of interests declared.
Every two weeks for about four years now, I have received a satirical magazine with cartoons, parodies and also serious hard news concerning the Horizon scandal, the John Smyth pederasty, the (alleged and very well reported on) activity of the South Tees Development Corporation, and Phil Hammond MD’s chronicling of the Lucy Letby verdict and aftermath.
Private Eye (for it is it) is a bastion of integrity in a slough of despond. Editor Ian Hislop has been in his post since 1988, and the magazine has 250,000 subscribers who were made aware early of the useless, incompetent and (allegedly) criminal Paula Vennells, whose crocodile tears at the public inquiry into the Horizon scandal were oh so little, oh so late.
The magazine, and its accompanying podcast, has told me so much about the British media, and has reminded me that when a new broom comes in to sweep the detritus of the last government out of SW1, it is so easy for the new one to fall prey to scandal themselves. Witness the Lord Alli fiasco, winter fuel kerfuffle, inheritance tax squabbles and the general nonsense behind the scenes as Sue Gray (from The Report) clashed with Morgan McSweeney, a man who is helping Sir Keir Starmer set the country aright after 14 years of mismanagement.
And there, lurking to Starmer’s literal far right in the Chamber, are Right Direction: Lee Anderson, a suspended Labour councillor turned suspended Conservative MP turned Reform UK representative for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire; Rupert Lowe, former chairman of Southampton FC and MP for Great Yarmouth; and James McMurdock, who famously went to jail when he was younger for assaulting a partner but because of ‘Christian forgiveness’ was voted in to represent the people of South Basildon and East Thurrock.
Then come the big two, the Lennon/McCartney of the Anti Elite Party: Richard Tice, whose mum (allegedly) loved horses more than she loved her son, MP for Boston and Skegness; and the MP for Clacton, Love Him Or Loathe Him Nigel Farage, who was actually (not) born in Bonn, West Germany.
Private Eye have already popped him on the front page of the magazine, and the BBC’s Nick Robinson has already taken him to task, on his Political Thinking podcast in March 2024, about his repeated slights against ‘globalists’. ‘Absolute cobblers’ was Farage’s response to allegations that he is hostile, via criticism of George Soros, towards Jews: ‘Globalism is about big decisions in your life…being taken by the EU, the World Health Organisation, the United Nations, higher courts’.
And how, Robinson posited, can Farage support Donald Trump, a man who wants to eliminate ‘vermin’? ‘Never take anything Trump says literally,’ chortled the then Reform UK chairman and TV presenter, before he declared himself absolute leader. Farage spotted that communities full of people of ‘different cultures’ with ‘little in common historically or culturally’ was ‘a recipe for problems’ ripe for exploitation by (alleged) chancers and con artists.
Robinson, who also asked Farage ‘are you Islamophobic and proud of it?’, then mentioned ‘communal violence’, as if he knew that within six months the murder of three girls would precipitate what was effectively Kristallnacht on the streets of England. ‘We’ve seen Hindus against Muslims,’ the Reform UK leader offered, with a huge degree of sophistry.
Farage called Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech, the one with the ‘river Tiber foaming with much blood’, the ‘biggest mistake’ Powell ever made. Perhaps this is because Farage himself knows that he is one Enoch Powell-type oration, or TikTok video, away from ending his own career.
He also knows exactly where the line is, which is why after the Stockport riots his stance of just asking questions fanned the flames without spraying fuel all over it. Someone very smart is, or some very smart people are, advising him. Is it Steve Bannon, who sold Trump to America the first time around and, just in time for the 2025 inauguration, is a free man again after serving some time in prison?
Right Direction and their supporters such as Bannon are claiming to be friends of the Jews because it is politically expedient; watch how they play and prey on the three monotheistic religions. In fact, in the coming quadrennium – before the expected General Election in 2029 which will be a referendum on what Labour have accomplished, or failed to do so, in their five-year term – we should watch everything Farage says or does. He is, after all, employing a playbook that has worked in Italy, Argentina and the USA.
How many more weeks can the deeply objectionable Lee Anderson, who is today leading a Westminster Hall debate on (cue irony klaxon) antisocial behaviour in council housing, stick around and toxify the brand whose slogan is Join The Revolt?
For how much longer can Reform UK stay amateur at a time when 4,117,610 people chose to stick a cross on their ballot paper next to the Anti Elite Party? Today Clacton; tomorrow the North.