Forget roast swan and paracetamol, or taxi drivers for sharia law, Reform need to wean themselves off always backing Trump

Reformers. Don’t all jump at once, I’m not about to tear lumps – just offer a bit of advice.

I suspect it will be ignored or disputed but I still think it’s good advice.

Reform have made some small but noticeable slip ups recently, that haven’t landed with the sure-footedness they often assume they now have.

Yes, they are still way ahead in the polls, yes, I’m sure I’ll get my daily reminder from some readers that the Tories are doomed, dying or dead, but it’s honestly water off a swan’s back these days.

This is not a tribal attack it’s an observation about their future.

If Reform headquarters are serious about closing the deal with the British electorate (and they actually haven’t yet), the wiser ones (and they do have them) could do worse than heed my warning. I don’t underestimate them at all, and if you are not a supporter, neither should you.

So, as my friend and newspaper columnist Dan Hodges noted recently, when it comes to potential Reform missteps who the hell had swans and paracetamol on their bingo card? I confess I did not.

Don’t bother telling me it’s all confected media nonsense, you’d be missing the point. To be honest I was far more focussed on analysing their plans to scrap Indefinite Leave to Remain. It was a serious policy announcement, not throwaway radio nonsense, and as such warranted serious study.

Then I realised all these issues were linked, and may have highlighted a weakness I think they’d be wise to avoid.

I’m not actually having a go at the current incumbent of the White House, when I say a rigid adherence to absolutely everything he says, and the way he says it, is not something Farage and team really need to follow if fact if they do it could hurt them.

I can’t quite believe I’m about to borrow from the embarrassing leader of the Golden Parrot clan but Trump’s America, should not be carbon copied, if the electorate choose ‘a Farage Britain’. Indeed in order to seal that potential deal with the British electorate Reform would be wise to understand and highlight the differences. Davey tried to but ended up talking about school shootings in Britain for some reason.

My reasoning is this:

If reform want to get to 34-40 per cent in the polls they need to bank their current support and reach across for that extra that will make them unassailable. Within that potentially convincible – but not yet convinced – group are people who care about the future of Britain but are not necessarily fans of the Donald.

Fact is, television’s Dr David Bull who replaced the ‘exuberant’ Zia Yusuf as reform Chair dealt with the Tylenol question on LBC quickly and efficiently. He said it was, what it is, essentially nonsense. He’s a doctor.

There I suspect it all would have stopped had it not been for Nigel Farage and the ever loyal Richard Tice suddenly deciding to go into battle against science because …why? I think they just didn’t want to be seen to disagree with Trump.

Just for avoidance of doubt the report Trump’s Tylenol assertion is based on does not proscribe it’s use, it outlines a ‘potential risk’. Find me a medicine in common usage that doesn’t have those in the small print. After the blow back Reform got for having – sorry I have to say it – a complete vax-quack on stage at their Conference, I thought they’d have just brushed past this by saying (and it would have been smarter) “of course we don’t stand by everything Trump says, we let people make up their own minds”

Also, you can have your views, as Trump does, that London is about to be taken over by Sharia Law, but if you are going to echo that here, probably don’t cite your source being “some taxi drivers told me”. I hate seeing radio bore James O’Brien handed a box of ammunition for his smug-gun, but I fear that is what Nigel Farage did.

The accusation that migrants were eating swans – despite the existence of a TV clip of the RSPCA visiting someone suspected of having done just that – didn’t stand up beyond a day as the Royal Parks denied having a single report of having lost a swan to a migrant dining club or anyone else. Of course Trump did this during his election campaign. Remember his repeating the – as it turned out – baseless claim that illegal immigrants from Haiti had been eating domestic pets in a small Ohio city.

The world has got used to Trump saying stuff, but even many of his supporters don’t take everything he says seriously, and Reform should know Britain, and the British public aren’t the same as Americans. Our cultures are not ‘exactly the same just with different accents’. Close friends though they are.

Let me repeat again, before our Reform readers froth at the mouth. I’m merely saying I’m surprised Nigel tried all this. He doesn’t need to. What he needs is just to maintain steady momentum. This was always a marathon; I’ve always doubted the sprint speed.

Truth is, you can’t govern Britain like a President does America so don’t just copy Trump’s style or words. You don’t get to sign executive orders, and you have to persuade far more than order to get what you want. It’s naff all to do with political will, and if you think it is you are going to come a cropper fast. Farage will find that true as much as any of this century’s Prime Ministers, if he gets the job. And remember, if Nigel does become the UK’s Prime Minister, Trump won’t have long in the White House left. Vance might, but not Trump.

So what of the arguably more serious and weighty issue, the proposal to scrap Indefinite Leave to Remain and remove people potentially who have been here some years? Well the proposed savings of £230 Billion have already been questioned the day after, and a clarification on EU citizens resident here had to be issued, as per a Reform announcement, but for the sake of this argument, I’ll let that pass.

It’s a significant sum and not to be discounted out of hand.

Where I think Trump again has led Reform astray is unnecessarily going too far down the anti-immigration track.

Let’s just say there is broad agreement in most parties that legal migration numbers are too high and for too long on a Conservative watch were even higher. They’re falling significantly thanks – I would say – to measures brought in in November 2023, that Labour who tried to take credit for it, fought against tooth and nail. But they are too high.

Let’s acknowledge that almost every party knows stopping illegal migration and small boat crossings has to be a top priority. No party is all in favour, and the British public simply won’t wear failure to tackle it. I should know. I own my part in that failure. It wasn’t for the want of trying, and I still believe Rwanda and similar schemes would have been a significant game changer, on the deterrent front. But there we are.

What the British people are less sure about, and there’s polling to show it, is a focus on everyone here who may have been here for a while on Indefinite Leave to Remain.

The problem has always been, for every community that rightly worries about the sexual assaults by an asylum seeker in an Essex hotel, or a Afghan man who harmed a woman and two children with a corrosive liquid because she’d rejected him, or convicted foreign rapists who according to lawyers have more ‘right to family life’ than their victims do to see them deported: for all of them – there are also people who have come in good faith, been granted asylum, make connections, get on, contribute, and many native Brits often know and like them, even if they have valid concerns about the boats.

This is why Labour flooded social media with words to the effect “he’s coming for your neighbours and friends”. That might be equally hyperbolic, but I think it might just strike a chord. One Reform didn’t need sounded.

Again in outlining a policy that echoes Trump’s ICE raids, I genuinely ask if Reform didn’t overcook this in a way they didn’t need to. At 28-30 per cent in the polls, who exactly were they appealing to with this? Was it, ‘we’ll be as tough as Trump’? Because I suspect Reform has those voters that that would appeal to, already signed up.

Stop the boats, make the asylum assessment far more rigorous, and have a credible deterrent, would do the job for many voters. I don’t remember being lobbied to get rid of people already here for years, unless they were convicted criminals or had long outstayed a visa.

Illegal migration is a mission to zero. Legal migration is a mission to control. They aren’t and shouldn’t be bundled together.

Will all this knock Reform off the top of the polls? No.

I’d also warn against anyone – Iain Dale – claiming these are the moments the wheels came of the juggernaut. I would say, however – as he had to do with past remarks about Putin – Nigel Farage doesn’t need to, and shouldn’t copy, or defend Trump at every turn.

Not because it’s offensive, or wrong per se, but because I’m not sure it really works, and we’ve just seen that.