Reform UK begins its annual party conference in Birmingham today facing a question. Can it be taken seriously as a political force, and not a general expression of voter disgruntlement?
We’ve heard a lot about Labour’s big-but-thin majority, but Reform’s result was even more dispersed. Four million people – 14.3 per cent of the electorate – backed them, but in small increments across the country. None of Reform’s MPs has a majority of more than 10,000. James McMurdock won South Basildon and East Thurrock by 98 votes.
This is why Reform received more votes than the Liberal Democrats, but the Lib Dems got more than ten times the representation in Westminster: the Lib Dems field candidates people might have met, and whom they vote for because they want that person to be their MP. Reform fielded large numbers of “paper candidates”, some of whom lived hundreds of miles away and were never seen in the constituency. Theories spread that Reform’s candidates were invented. One – Helen Burns, who ran for Glasgow North – was forced to issue a statement confirming: “I do exist.”
Nevertheless, Burns (who lives in the East Midlands, 280 miles from Glasgow North, which she did not visit once to campaign) won nearly five per cent of the vote, because 1,655 people in Glasgow North were sufficiently disillusioned with the other three parties to vote for Reform. I suspect that if you’d stopped these people to ask who they had voted for, many would have said “Nigel Farage”.
These paper candidates gave Reform a much bigger slice of the popular vote and a thus a handy bit of funding – about £380,000 a year in “short money”, the financial assistance provided to opposition parties, which is calculated using the number of votes.
This will help to pay for the regional directors Reform is hiring, according to a recently posted job ad, “in every part of the UK”, at £50,000 a year. “The party is professionalising in order to support its elected members,” reads the ad, which seeks people to “oversee the establishment and growth of constituency branches within the region” – in other words, to help turn Reform into a real political party.
Farage’s grip on Reform has been formalised by its structure: unlike the other parties, which give members power to vote on policy and leadership, Reform is a simple limited company in which Nigel Farage owns more than half of the shares. At the beginning, this may have been because the Brexit Party (as Reform was originally known) was largely funded by a single donor, Christopher Harborne, who might have wished to keep things direct. And when Farage wanted to return to Reform this year, it meant he was able to nudge Richard Tice to one side without any need for a leadership contest.
Yesterday, Farage announced he would address this by surrendering all of his shares in Reform and “giving up control of the party to its members”.
But Reform isn’t moving its shares into a mutually owned trust, like John Lewis or Richer Sounds. It is becoming another type of company, a “company limited by guarantee”, which typically doesn’t have any shareholders. The voting rights of members will be decided by the company’s articles of association, which haven’t been made public. They don’t have to be democratic; law and accountancy firms use this type of company, and not because they want to give everyone an equal say in how they’re run.
Ben Habib, the former deputy leader of Reform (whose job was handed to Richard Tice when Farage returned), claimed last night that Reform’s new constitution would not allow members to remove the leader. The process, Habib claimed, would only allow members to ask the company board to do so.
Leaving control with the board might also allow Farage to step back for a bit, then return when convenient. That would fit the pattern for his past political victories; he stepped down as Ukip leader after the EU referendum – “I want my life back,” he claimed – then quit the party in 2018 before returning to politics with the Brexit Party the following year. After his success in the 2019 European elections he stepped down again as leader in March 2021, declaring the party would “democratise itself” after he’d gone. “I’ve knocked on my last door,” he told the Telegraph, adding that he would have “no executive position at all” in Reform. “Party politics, campaigning, being involved in elections, that is now over for me,” he added. Clearly, it was not.
This arrangement works for Farage, who can grab the wheel when there’s credit to be taken and distance himself when the party does something grubby. But if Reform wants its vote to become anything more than a broad smear of discontent, it will have to become something more than a platform for one man.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
