Malcolm Cupis: Have the Conservative rats just leapt aboard the RMS Titanic

Malcolm Cupis is a public relations consultant, strategist and writer. He stood as a Reform UK candidate in the 2024 general Election and was a constituency chairman. He resigned from Reform UK in February 2025 and has since rejoined the Conservative Party. 

I started my last column with a reference to a friend who was a former Conservative MP and I’m going to start this one similarly, albeit a different man and, sadly, under very different circumstances.

David Warburton was found dead in his Chelsea flat last month, aged just 59. David was formerly the MP for Somerton and Frome, a neighbouring constituency to Melksham and Devizes, where I live and which I contested in the last General Election.

I had got to know David pretty well and even though we only met in person a few times, we communicated regularly by email and directly on social media. I recognised that he was a great communicator, a man with strong political convictions and that we shared very many views. I also recognised that, like me, he was not a conventional politician. He came from a different background – had been extremely successful in business in the music industry, and as a result didn’t conform to the archetype of a modern careerist MP. He said what he thought and wasn’t afraid not to conform. He put his electorate first.

As an unconventional MP David was also, like all of us, an imperfect human being. That made him vulnerable to attack from political opponents. Despite convincingly winning his seat in 2015 and again in 2019 David was targeted by political opponents and brought down following lurid headlines over drugs and allegations of improper behaviour. He admitted that he had taken drugs but denied the other accusations and these were subsequently withdrawn.

The whole affair had a disastrous effect on this talented, hardworking and dedicated man and following his resignation he, his family and friends suffered horribly, to the extent that he ended up being treated in a psychiatric hospital.

I don’t know how David died, but I do know that he was just 59 years old and died alone in his flat.

I do know that he was just the latest victim in a long, long line of political assassinations and that what happened to him politically had a disastrous effect on him and those close to him personally. He was a talented and committed politician who got involved not through personal ambition but through a love of his country and his county and a desire to serve the people of both.

I will make the point.

I was politically targeted when I stood in the last general election and ended up having lurid national headlines written about me.

What was written about me was historical, deliberately taken out of context, embellished with lies and then gleefully further distorted by political opponents. Unlike David I was not a politician – I had not been elected. I was just a normal man who had been moved to get directly involved in politics for much the same reasons I know David did. The effect of this has been terrible. I was not elected, but the headlines live on. My wife and family were distraught because they knew that what was written was not true and is not a fair representation of me as a person. It has had a significant negative effect on my business. I have lost contracts directly as a result of the headlines that appeared and have found it difficult to replace them. Those headlines remain immediately accessible to anybody who sticks my name into Google.

The length and breadth of the country people bemoan modern careerist politicians, who have gone to approved schools and universities, who have limited or no life experience, have commonly not worked in a “real” job or run a business. They use the speak the same approved language, do not voice strong opinions or deviate from the approved path.

People want to see politicians who have a breadth of knowledge, who have real world experience, who have led normal lives, suffered normal setbacks, made normal mistakes and, as much as possible, have been successful despite all of this.

Politics is the most vital job that there is.

Running the country is more important than running any business. We need to encourage the brightest and best to be politicians. When you look around Parliament instead you find it stacked full of people who quite honestly wouldn’t have a hope of forging a career anywhere else and they protect their positions by actively targeting those who have trodden different paths, because they are a threat to their hegemony.

David Warburton was one of those who had trodden that different path and who had been successful. He did have more to offer and his electorate loved him enough to return him twice. Yes, he was imperfect. Yes, he made mistakes. But he made mistakes because he was human, not because he cravenly fiddled the tax system to his personal benefit or returned fraudulent expense claims or voiced support for a proscribed terrorist organisation.

We need more MPs like David Warburton and in order to get that we need to encourage the best people to take on the most vital job there is, not tolerate the assassination of those brave enough to try.

David Warburton was a good man and a great MP. Along with many others who knew the real person, I shall miss him.

When my situation occurred Reform not only studiously failed to defend me, but actually refused to allow me to defend myself.

As a PR man, I knew the implications of this and chose to defend myself to a limited degree despite my clear instructions. The result of this was that despite performing well, and being made the Chairman of the constituency branch after the general election, I was subsequently failed in vetting. My old friend Gawain Towler broke this news to me in a telephone call, explaining that I hadn’t done anything wrong, but was failed because I had generated negative headlines. This led to me resigning from Reform and walking away from the party, which I had dedicated myself wholly to for almost two years as a volunteer. I cannot support an organisation that does not support me and nobody likes a hypocrite.

The sight of Nigel Farage standing before a committee of the US House of Congress this week presenting himself as some kind of champion of free speech has, unsurprisingly, left me feeling frankly nauseous.

Farage doesn’t even tolerate free speech in his own party, let alone the wider world. My experience proves this and I am far from alone. I know scores of other talented and committed former Reform candidates, chairmen and officers from up and down the country who have been similarly treated.

To be a Reform Officer now you have to sign an NDA and are given a tome of a rule book to abide by, which demands absolute compliance at all times. Any deviation will result in your likely instant removal and quite possibly in the party taking action against you. The idea that Reform is any kind of liberal democracy is frankly laughable. It is at least as authoritarian as any of the most authoritarian parties in British political history.

All the more remarkable then that last week ended with the news that Nadine Dorries had taken the decision to defect to Reform. Remarkable that she has decided to put her own values aside to this degree, but also remarkable that Reform should entertain her. Dorries is, of course, one of the co-authors of the Online Safety Bill, which now threatens our fundamental freedoms of expression, choice and access to information, and which is being used as a handy pretext for the imposition of compulsory digital ID.

All of which Farage and Reform will have you believe they regard as anathema.

Farage continues to boast that he will destroy the Conservative Party, yet continues to seek to subsume significant components of it. A look at the names giving speeches at the Reform Party Conference at the NEC this week – from Andrea Jenkyns to Lee Anderson, to Laila Cunningham, to Sarah Pochin and Jacob Rees Mogg proves the point. You can be sure that none of these will have signed the NDA and will be bound by the rule book, so what message does that give to all those officers and candidates who have?

You can also be sure that none of them have joined Reform because of a Road to Damascus political conversion. None have suddenly concluded that Nigel Farage is a political titan who must be lionised as the saviour of the nation. All of them are those same careerists who abound throughout Parliament, who the electorate increasingly recognise and regard with contempt.

It doesn’t take much cynicism to suggest that they are simply rats leaping from a sinking ship, for expedience and to satisfy their personal ambitions. Time will tell if their added weight will turn their new vessel from an Americas Cup winning racing yacht into the RMS Titanic.