It was the dog that didn’t bark in the night. After Sunday night’s ITV exposé of widespread racism and misogyny within Reform, you might have expected one of its MPs to have taken to the airwaves on Monday morning to defend the party’s honour. To try to persuade viewers that the real problem lay with the journalists who couldn’t stop themselves from investigating Reform rather than the fact that the party’s bigotry was endemic.
Instead, we got nothing. Every Reform MP was otherwise engaged. Were too busy having breakfast. Nothing from Nigel Farage. Nothing even from Robert Jenrick. Maybe he realised he had crashed and burned a few days earlier by suggesting it was just one of those things. One of life’s little mysteries. The BBC was riddled with paedophiles and Reform was awash with racists, said Honest Bob. No big deal. Every organisation had its crosses to bear.
The only MP to post on X in the morning was Richard Tice, who was feeling decidedly grumpy, having only just got married to Isabel Oakeshott. Perhaps he had a hangover. Though his main gripe was that British Airways was yet another failing British institution because it had mislaid at least one of his bags.
Dicky’s social media post had more than a touch of the “don’t you know who I am” to it. You can only imagine the baggage handler may have known exactly who Dicky was and had taken great pleasure in diverting one of the fake Louis Vuitton suitcases from Dubai to Manila. Via Buenos Aires.
The one person out and about for Reform was the one person you would have thought the party would want to keep hidden. Step forward Matt Goodwin, the party’s failed candidate for the Gorton and Denton byelection whose own views could easily pass off as borderline racist in polite circles. Matt is going through his own personal anti-growth agenda. Working hard to deconstruct himself from low-level academic to incredibly dim primate with low social skills. Almost every day, voters in Gorton and Denton thank their lucky stars for having dodged that bullet.
Matt’s defence of Reform was … unorthodox, to put it kindly. So much so that you began to wonder whether he was even conscious. Luckily for him, he was only allowed out on Times Radio. Though that was more than enough. To try to understand Matt is to make a category error. The whole point is to not understand him. That’s the way you stay sane. Because what he wanted listeners to believe was that Nige was a buffer zone against racism. That hordes of would-be racists begged to be allowed to join Reform, only to find out that Nige was a man of peace and love. The one politician who wanted nothing but good things for all immigrants.
It got better. Because Batshit Matt also wanted us to believe that the ITV documentary had just uncovered a few bad apples in the party. So in a way it had done Reform a favour. What were the chances? The ITV journalists had managed to uncover the only seven racists in the Reform ranks. Everyone else was Team Nigel. Never had a bad word for anyone. Except, there was another way of looking at this. That ITV had filmed about 10 Reform councillors and found that seven of them had views that included beheading King Charles for being a Muslim. Some statisticians might put that down as a 70% hit rate. Not so much a few wrong ’uns but a whole army of them. Poor Nige. Always the victim.
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Over in the Commons, Wes Streeting was preparing for other threats during departmental defence questions. Though John Healey was not one of them. You’d have thought that Wes might have wanted to schmooze the chancellor before next week’s budget. To try to get the best funding settlement he could. Not a bit of it. Wes began by slagging off his predecessor as defence secretary for wasting money on unnecessary training exercises and then announced he was confident that Healey would reach the necessary 3% and 3.5% targets at next year’s spending review. So, no, Wes wouldn’t be resigning any time soon. Let’s hope his confidence is well placed.
Instead, Wes seemed more interested in persuading himself that there was absolutely nothing unusual in Donald Trump switching the Starlink satellite system on and off at random moments, thereby allowing Russian drones to do untold damage on Ukraine. This was just standard procedure. The only way you could tell the system was working properly was if you turned it off from time to time. Obvious when you think about. Wes was also totally chilled about Trump trying to lower US pump prices by allowing Russian imports of diesel. Fuel that the Russians had also imported from Iran and with whom, coincidentally, the US was at war.
All of this apparently made perfect sense not just to Streeting, but also to Labour and opposition backbenchers. Wes could reassure us because he had had a personal meeting with Pete Hegseth the previous week, during with the secretary for war had reiterated Trump’s claims that Nato forces had been a waste of space in Afghanistan and that the US troops had fought alone. A nice ice breaker. After that, Pete went out of his way to say Washington was totally behind Ukraine, just so long as Russia won the war.
Curiously, the shadow defence secretary, James Cartlidge, didn’t use his questions to talk up the four drones of the “Britannia shield” that the Tories were sure would protect the UK from nuclear war. So it remains a mystery. Almost as if it was a bullshit party conference announcement that was designed to be forgotten within days. Highlight of the day went to Sharron Davies, the former swimmer turned Tory peer, who demanded to know why Andy Burnham hadn’t invaded France to stop the rioting. Can you explain it to her?
