25 quid doesn’t get you much nowadays.
Personally, I’m one to spaff it at the Marquis of Granby on a weekday, getting a round in as the bartender keeps calling me ‘handsome.’ I don’t think he knows my name.
Others, about 280,000 or so, would sooner use it to become members of Reform UK. An odd choice, but each to their own. The difference, of course, is that my £25 buys me and my pals a good few drinks after an arduous day of work. Theirs gets them membership to a party with a whole host of strings attached.
Now, I have no doubt that someone, somewhere is really rather proud of their Reform membership. They paid the fee, added ‘Vote Reform. Save Britain’ to their X bio and are currently trying to convince their significant other to come to the next rendition of FarageFest.
‘No one goes to Glastonbury anymore’ they say. ‘This is the next big thing.’ They are, of course, really rather wrong, but at least they have a glossy membership card to show for their troubles.
Tim Montgomerie was, for about two years, one of those members – though whether he was an ardent supporter of FarageFest I’m not too sure. A Tory for close to three decades, Montgomerie turned his back on the party after becoming convinced that they had failed to get a grip on immigration. His answer was to take a leaf out of the Trump playbook and model the party on the Republican brand, creating what he described as a “working class friendly, traditional values, law and order respecting, immigration controlling party.”
The Tories, rather politely, declined, which may in retrospect have been a mistake, and Montgomerie packed his bindle and began the long march over to Millbank.
It was a move which came to blows with other defections. He wasn’t frothing at the mouth at the chance for a red folder and a ministerial car with tinted windows in a few years time. He really did believe that Reform could deliver the political change that had for so long eluded successive Conservative governments.
But Montgomerie made a mistake. He had assumed that he would be allowed to criticise the party he so dearly wanted to succeed. To point it in the right direction when it was veering off course. For some time, he was granted such freedom, serving as a critical friend to senior party officials. A sort of Kent to Reform’s King Lear.
He sought to push the boundaries of this relationship, however, rallying against Zia Yusuf’s claim that Ben Wallace was a “traitor”, arguing that such language “isn’t acceptable” and that one of the biggest questions of Farage’s leadership was whether he could bring the ex-banker “under control.”
But the founder of ConservativeHome wasn’t finished just yet. Appearing on The Spectator’s Coffee House Shots, he alleged that Yusuf was “completely uninterested” in tackling the issue of tactical voting, and questioned whether he was much of a “team player.”
Little did Montgomerie know, but he had just stepped into the mantrap. Fortunately for him, the higher ups in Reform took a modicum of pity on him, opting against expulsion and handing down a suspension instead.
It’s a peculiar position for Reform to find themselves in. Montgomerie insists that, when he was brought in, he was told by Farage that internal debate would be encouraged. But the party that has long proclaimed itself to be the champion of free speech has undergone something of a transformation. Morphed, it seems, into a slapdash politburo, stamping out dissent and expelling critics from the party wherever they show their heads.
Perhaps this contradiction was always there. After all, Reform lacks a central, binding ideology. Structured instead around loud personalities whose views’ change depending on the day. Mondays are spent romantacising the Iron Lady whilst Tuesdays are reserved for discovering the joys of mass state intervention.
When a party’s identity is so closely tied to its personalities, criticism of the leadership begins to look like criticism of the party itself. One cannot break ranks and speak out against those higher up the food chain without risk of punishment. MPs and spokespeople are effectively gagged, barred from saying anything that may go against the wishes of the Dear Leader. Puzzlingly enough, however, Montgomerie was not some party grandee who would be the target of such restrictions.
He was just another bloke who had paid his £25 membership fee. What does it say, then, to the more than quarter of a million Brits who have signed up to the party as well? Will they be purged for daring to speak out? Can they expect a knock at the door from 30p Lee when they question Yusuf’s suitability for office?
I jest, but they are both worthwhile questions which, at the moment, have not been answered. Worthwhile, internal debate is fundamentally healthy and important for a party’s long term existence. Staking a party’s future on a leadership-focused litmus test is a fool’s errand. As one Tory MP put it to me, Montgomerie’s fate was “as predictable as birds flying south in Winter.” They added that Montgomerie was “not always right, but as a thoughtful Conservative he was a fish out of water in Reform.”
For some time, I have argued that Reform is a one-man band, desperately seeking to detach itself from a dependency on Nigel Farage. This episode only reinforces my argument. If Reform really is bigger than Nigel Farage, then surely they should be capable of surviving criticism of him and of those around him.
Instead, it appears as though the party is still far more dependent on its personalities than it would like to admit. I still very much believe that the grievances which have carried Reform to electoral prominence are real, and are indeed bigger than Farage. What I had underestimated, however, was how difficult it would be for Reform to become bigger than him.