Lee Rotherham: Will Reform form the next Government? If the stars align, maybe

Dr Lee Rotherham has twice been a Conservative parliamentary candidate, three times a council one, and is a good governance campaigner.

In June 1942, questions were asked in Parliament about why censors were allowing newspaper astrologers to publish predictions saying that Germany was on the point of collapse. Was the minister aware that a great many people did treat such statements very seriously indeed and directed their actions accordingly?

Brendan Bracken as Minister of Information declined to intervene in the output of the stars.

Glossed over was the detail that the British Government were well aware of Hitler’s supposed interest in horoscopes. In mid 1939 it had got a book published which happened to foretell doom for the Nazis within a year if a continental war ever kicked off. I have a copy on my bookshelf.

On several levels the example teaches us to be chary about making strategic forecasts, and still less political ones. Commentators of today too often focus on the peripheral, and the omniscient certainties of antiquity are long gone; as dying Delphi answered Julian the Apostate, “the speaking water has been silenced”.

Nevertheless, let’s try our hand at the biggest question of the moment. Will Reform form the next Government?

There are rucksack loads of variables, not least the black swan events that hurtle through your car windscreen on the motorway, as once happened to the stratospherically-polling SDP when an Argentine junta invaded British islands 8000 miles away. Who too can confidently predict what will happen on the Conservative policy front, which may in the coming months generate eye-catching answers to the great problems of our time – or which may just melt in the sunlight. But in terms of what Reform can itself control I would suggest we can narrow the key determinants down to three. All three are still unsettled.

The first relates to the structure of the party. The second is the question of a functional shadow cabinet. The third is the cohesive policy. All of these challenges find antecedents in how Nigel Farage kept UKIP on the road, recentralising after rounds of internecine conflict. A failure to find an answer beyond centripetal retreat also however established a limit for the party’s credibility beyond MEP elections.

Is Reform able to pass this threshold?

The first known unknown then is the future of the party structure.

Arguably there was never one single UKIP party, but one group of associations that were financially dependent on the centre and ultimately had to do what they were told, and a number of others that weren’t and potentially didn’t. Like a mediaeval feudal state, that’s fine until it isn’t.

The recent Reform solution was to incorporate itself as a company with two controlling directors. The trouble with duopolies since the age of Mark Anthony is that it dispossesses everyone else while also not precluding the key individuals from falling out between themselves. The issue of how the party is physically run and where power circuitry is distributed is only gradually getting settled, and much will depend on how the new Party Board with its three elected (and thus empowered) members will fit into the equation. Its membership suggests that the necessary perestroika could happen organically and relatively peacefully.

The second variable is whether Reform can build a credible set of leaders – in the plural – whom voters would trust to put in charge of government departments. Again, the track record of UKIP was one of electing interesting people and then seeing a big falling out, the disaffected leaving to set up their own splinterscule group.

As a poundshop Chinese fortune cookie might say, big fish in barrel eat small but then aquarium get no visitors.

Does the Reform Party have the gifted people it needs to provide enough spokesmen to cover at least the big departments of state without triggering an internal crisis? Other parties manage at least to avoid civil war amongst their spokesmen. But it does require a level of cabinet spirit, loyalty, tolerance, and mutual trust which are not necessarily universal in anti-institutional insurgencies.

Which takes us to the third question.

Can Reform create a policy platform that is competent, fixes all the problems it wants to fix, and doesn’t pull the party apart at the seams?

In a forthcoming paper I explore how many political failures today are interlinked, meaning that fixing them requires a profound understanding of obscure root causes and of the second, third and fourth order effects that will need to be addressed too. That precludes the current default of muddling through with soundbites. The drive to establish a Reform-friendly but independent Centre for a Better Britain is an important step, and the range of good think tank output elsewhere is not proprietorially protected. One might also add that the Lib Dems have been issuing conflicting messages for years depending on which part of the country they are in, and that hasn’t stopped them from getting several dozen seats (though arguably it has been a sea anchor hindering them from going further). More of a question mark is how internal policy friction is handled, and whether dissent and divergence is accepted as local democracy at work. Expect early arguments over the public purse; the NHS budget, deficit cuts, plus industrial bail outs, protectionism and state aid.

Reform may well square these circles.

But there is no way of knowing without being able to peer into souls. What is certain is that parts of the media will mercilessly harry the party at every available opportunity, seeking to disrupt its message, disparage its leadership, and damage its credibility. How credibly these apocalyptic forecasts translate into lost votes will also depend on how the party’s radicalism expresses itself. Will the dominant output be conservationist or climate change conspiracist? Will it be anti-gender activism, or anti-transgender individuals? Will it seek to grip migration policy, or shout in stereotypes? Will it want to restore Common Law, or to remove rights? Will it see some foreign aid through a prism of self-interest and charity, or want to bin it all ‘because foreigners’? Does it want to learn the truth of Covid’s origins, or chase anti-vacc theories?

Every individual councillor and local official who tweets is now a media spokesman for a potential Reform government, whether Reform or the individual wants it or not.

But Nigel Farage is not in the slightest bit the Picrochole caricature his opponents paint him as, to their own embarrassment and detriment. There are also a range of lessons to be drawn from the Trump administration on how to do, and more importantly not to do, massive reform. Whether his party, once it is empowered, gives him the space to occupy the winning ground is a different matter.

So will Reform form the next Government? That ultimately depends upon those three key hurdles – which means it’s down to its membership at all levels, in a party hoovering up recruits.

With those variables still in play, I think I’ll pass on the predictions and stick with the astrologers. But then I am a Leo.