Which one of us has not dreamed of getting a personal email from Nigel Farage? So imagine the excitement that Reform supporters must have felt when a message from their leader dropped into their inboxes late on Wednesday night. And mine. Could he also be about to offer everyone in the country £5,000 in return for electing a Reform government?
Sadly not. Even Honest Bob’s planned welfare cuts won’t cover that. Instead, Nige was treating us all to his reflections on his party conference that had just ended. The only drawback was that there appeared to be some gaps in his memory. Let’s be kind and assume he was pushed for space. So let’s help him fill in the blanks.
Dear John. ‘Wow.’ That’s what I kept thinking as our conference closed. Good start, Nige. Because that’s what I was thinking too. It’s not every party conference that is completely derailed by an undercover investigation into allegations of illegal sources of party funding. And it came completely out of the blue. Who would have thought that a party leader under investigation over a £5m gift from a Thai crypto billionaire, and a party whose main funder is Ben Delo – who was convicted in the US for failing to comply with legislation against money laundering – might be implicated in possible wrongdoing?
But we can all admire the sheer professionalism with which you handled the crisis. It was a stroke of genius to dismiss two of your oldest muckers as mere contractors. After all, Dan Jukes had only been your right-hand fixer for 10 years and James Orr, the Cambridge professor of ethics – nice touch that – was your head of policy. Of course it was all “loose pub talk”. Everyone goes to the pub to discuss how they plan to break the law. And you definitely “hadn’t been listening”. We could tell that by the way you appeared to join in the conversation. Such bad luck it’s all ended up in yet another police investigation. It’s obviously massively reassuring that you say you can’t be bought. But you can clearly be rented.
6,000 of us packed in Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre. And may I say how pleasing it was that none of you felt you needed to come in a balaclava. What this country needs are patriots who are prepared to stand up and be counted. Who can be relied on to protest against the arrival of foreigners arriving by small boats. From now on, it will be Reform policy that the RNLI should be disbanded.
We can’t have a country of volunteers who are prepared to jeopardise their own lives to save others. They are nothing less than traitors and send all the wrong messages to the rest of the world. I know I speak for everyone when I say that all Brits would rather drown than have one more foreigner step ashore in Portsmouth. I was also immensely proud to see so many in the audience at your conference speech who were willing to assault a female protester. Making England Great Again. Robert Jenrick nailed it when he said: “Boohoo.”
We got Starmer out and are still neck and neck with Labour in the polls. Er, yes. That’s one way of putting it. Another is that you were at least eight points ahead of Labour only a few months ago. Your popularity may have peaked. The more people get to see of you the less they like you. It also seems that voters much prefer a leader who doesn’t require a minimum of £1m a year to get out of bed and a party that doesn’t seem to lurch from one financial scandal to the next.
Zia Yusuf and I will put the Royal Navy in the Channel and stop the boats. This is the Zia Yusuf who is so unpopular that everyone in your inner circle privately refers to him as “the wanker” and is so disliked that no constituency wants him to stand as their Reform candidate. Yet he insists on referring to himself as the “shadow home secretary” when he remains outside Westminster. But let’s indulge you. Let’s pretend that Zia is elected an MP. Do you really think the Royal Navy is going to participate in operations to turn back the small boats that could result in the deaths of dozens of migrants?
You saw the odds-on next prime minister of France, Jordan Bardella, sign a historic memorandum of understanding with us to make this happen. Or the memorandum of misunderstanding as we prefer to call it. Still, it gave us a huge laugh to see you pull the wool over the “wet behind the ears” Jordan. It’s so good to see Reform turn over its political allies abroad. A reminder to Johnny Frenchman that when we left the EU it was to put some distance between us and him.
It was a masterstroke to write the memorandum in both English and French, and sneakily adding a clause in English agreeing that France would take back all migrants who had arrived in England. And as Jordan’s English was not that good, he never noticed! Chapeau! Or perhaps he’s a bit thick. Either way, he’s a lot less odds-on to be the next prime minister because Marine Le Pen is furious with him and there’s an almighty row going on in the National Rally party.
In our first 100 days, Richard Tice pledged to cut £250 off your energy bill by scrapping the mad levies on them. No one thinks Dicky is going to do anything. Everyone inside the party thinks he is just an afternoon TV presenter from the 1980s. A man born to be your hype person. Who owes his entire existence to you. The same goes for Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman. Politicians too mediocre even for the Tory party.
It’s looking like we’ll need 10,000 candidates for the general and local elections. Recruiting that many candidates will be a mammoth task. So I need more of you than ever to step forward. It goes without saying that the 6,000 of you in Birmingham are already on the list. But we still need 4,000 more. So, please, I beg you, delete your Facebook and other social media accounts, where you might accidentally have liked something racist or spread idiotic conspiracy theories, and sign up. That includes you, Matt Goodwin. Your country needs you.
Yours, Nigel Farage
