Those demanding the Conservatives address their recent past could do with doing the same themselves

“The Reform Party is nothing but a hotchpotch, a mess, a corpse infested by waifs, strays, weirdos, charlatans and crooks, offering the whole political spectrum from the seriously deranged to the criminally insane”

It’s a spicy line to start with, but before Reformers blow a gasket and accuse me of libel there is something they should know. This line was written by satirist Mark Taverner, in his novel “In the Red” who died in 2007, eleven years before Reform UK  were founded – as the Brexit Party – and was actually written in 1989.

In 1989 Nigel Farage was still three years from the founding of UKIP. He was then a commodities broker and metals trader and even he’d admit, probably with a grin, they were a gaggle who had their fair share of ‘charlatans and crooks’. But the quote cannot have meant his current political vehicle, first in the polls, and positioning itself for Government.

Besides, outwardly Farage is Teflon-coated to accusations his outfits are full of misfits.

His reaction in 2004 to the accusation from the then Tory leader, Lord Howard, that UKIP was filled with “cranks and political gadflies” was to have a tie made, adorned with both the tool and the insect, for members of a dining club of the same name, in Brussels!

He is, and always has been very good company socially, whatever you think of his politics. As is Lord Howard for that matter.

Attending one of these events at Nigel’s invitation twenty years ago was how I first met him. He wasn’t leader at the time, but chatting it became clear he would be. However the only ambition he’d admit to was his “own show on LBC, that would be brilliant. Did it before and loved it’” You can hear him saying it.

His ambition now is still to ‘lead Britain’s conversation’ – not from LBC’s studios but 10 Downing Street.

Many of Reform’s outriders have nearly as long an association with Farage. Reform UK may be a new insurgent party but many of its passengers and drivers – those not pushed under the bus for ‘disloyalty’ – are old hands in the insurgency business. Some of them demand the Conservatives don’t just recognise past failings, but crawl in ‘shame’. Arron Banks and newbie Zia Yusuf, a Tory until Aug 2024, like the language of snivelling abasement as the Tory price for sharing the same air!

Imagery aside I’ve said before, they and Tory defector Robert Jenrick make a challenge to the Tories that should not be airily dismissed but addressed. This site has seen Tories argue the same in order to avoid the risk of looking like they don’t need to.

It is bizarre to criticise the Tory Government as ‘a total failure’ whilst simultaneously welcoming some of its players into your ranks but there is still a feeling that – even if changing under Kemi Badenoch – the Conservatives haven’t changed enough or fully accepted why the electorate rejected them in 2024?

Suella Braverman says: “The truth is no Tory Party Leader has ever wanted to stop the boats or cut migration”.

Now despite the fact that measures brought in November 2023 by the Conservative government she’d just been removed from, have significantly cut migration – and if only someone like her had been in a position to do that, as, say, Tory Home Secretary – her defence is, the same as Robert Jenrick’s as Tory Immigration Minister; that they tried but Rishi Sunak wouldn’t let them.

It’s hard to utterly dismiss that, when the Conservative leader, who has put the entire party ‘under new management’ says similar; that she argued in Cabinet for certain courses of action but that she wasn’t ‘in charge then’ when challenged with why she didn’t do these things in Government.

Now in opposition, Badenoch and her shadow Cabinet argue they’re relentlessly focussed on the future. There’s a sound logic to that as people are crying out for vision. But having acknowledged the mistakes of the past, they’d have to accept it hasn’t landed as well as they’d have hoped. The argument about blame still continues on ConservativeHome, even this week. 

Those who demand repentance have as many different things they want it for as people doing the demanding, but if the ‘new’ Conservative party has a shrewd idea of what the old party got wrong, then maybe it needs to say so more clearly. You own the future if you can leave the past comfortably behind, not burying it and hoping people forget. Kemi is improving her standing with the public but the brand still has a long way to go.

Reform also have a past. Much shorter but nonetheless instructive.

Farage said, early on, that he knew Reform would “come under more scrutiny than probably any other party ever has”. He wanted to make this sound unfair or conspiratorial but it’s neither, nor true. They are getting exactly the same scrutiny, which they deserve as serious contenders to govern.

They jettisoned their 2024 manifesto within a year, because they recognised it was economically illiterate. They supported the scrapping of the two child benefit cap – for months backing billions of spending on top of an already ballooning welfare budget – only to U-turn on it yesterday and supporting the ‘disastrous Tories’ who’d brought it in and wanted to keep it.

Reform councils, like many others, are putting up council tax having said locally they’d cut taxes, despite denials at the top. In an emulation of Trump’s America, they instigated DOGE into local authorities. Predictably, Cllr Paul Chamberlain, one of their cabinet members in charge of such cuts at Kent County Council, told the FT:

“We made some assumptions that we would come in here and find some of the craziness that [Musk’s] Doge found in America … and that was wrong, we didn’t find any of that.”

In Warwickshire the nineteen year old leading Reform on the council – age not in itself the weakness some make out – has admitted “I had to learn very quickly” before complaining about the ‘blockages’ officials had put in his way. Doge-meister Yusuf has yet to visit Warwickshire. These are less ‘failings’ and more a wakeup call that promising the moon often hits hurdles higher than bravado and slogans can overcome in delivery. Reform’s solution to national problems they claim they, uniquely, can solve, too often involve just bravado and slogans.

On Monday Farage launched a telling social media attack on Charlotte Cadden, Conservative Candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election. A police officer for 30 years who wants “a proper inquiry on grooming gangs” and “to get rid of carbon taxes“, both policies he agrees with, instead highlighted a fun run she did 15 years ago, as somehow a symbol of the entire Conservative now. But don’t anyone ask him about things he did fifty years ago.

Conservatives are not going to quit – in Gorton or anywhere else – to help a party that insists it wants to destroy them, but the tragedy of trading blows over the past of both parties is that it distracts from directing ire and fire at the party in charge of the present.

The past, is Labour’s well of sour motivation. Deepest dipper is the Education Secretary whose entire ethos is to attack everyone, including her own party’s legacy on education, to settle scores from when she was a school girl in an A-line skirt.

The soul raison d’etre for the now farcical Chagos deal – that no amount of phantom billions ‘won’ in China will pay for – is to apologise, to the wrong people, for the ‘colonial’ past.  Labour demand an apology for the mini-budget, an issue Badenoch has addressed more than once, and soemthing Farage supported, but Peter Mandelson’s past is apparently a closed book. Saw nothing, heard nothing, did nothing is not going to save Starmer and Morgan McSweeny was never going to bite the hand that fed, and is now punching him and his boss in the teeth.

L P Hartley once wrote “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. Everyone in this now crowded political landscape is trying to express the same, but it might be an idea for all to visit it occasionally and say ‘you know what? We got that wrong’.

That goes for all politicians not just the ones you want it to.