When you’ve lost the trust of GB News, when you’re too deranged, too extreme and too outright mendacious for your biggest fan, then you know you are in trouble. You can almost sense the panic beginning to set in at Reform HQ.
No longer topping the opinion polls. A new prime minister resetting the dial, the public increasingly choosing optimism over grievance. A party mired in financial sleaze. A leader turning into a laughing stock in his head-to-head with a dustbin. It was never meant to be this way for Reform. They thought they were the winners.
With Nigel Farage locked away on a self-imposed witness protection programme, Richard Tice on an Accountancy for Dummies summer course and Zia Yusuf on a never-ending anger management retreat, the Reform front-of-house recess duties have been left to Robert Jenrick. Which is just the way Honest Bob likes it.
No one rates Honest Bob higher than Honest Bob. He believes himself to be a winner. Someone who connects with the ordinary people. Which, to be fair, he does. Because Honest Bob has the unique ability to get people to dislike him on sight. It saves time that way. Why waste time getting to know him before you find you can’t bear him? He is a man who radiates inauthenticity. An establishment politician through and through who poses as the voice of forgotten Britain. Who believes the rules don’t apply to him. Who can’t help patronising everyone he meets.
Thursday morning brought Honest Bob’s latest exercise in self-destruction. Giving a speech in a large hall, rammed with about … er … eight people. The only person in the room who actually wanted to be there was Honest Bob himself. Sometimes you have to wonder if it’s all a game on his part. As if he knows just how hopeless he really is and has devoted his life’s work to parodying himself. Reform’s ultimate enemy within. The former Tory politician who switched allegiance merely to bring down Nige, one day to be acknowledged as a hero to the Conservative party.
There again, that would assume a level of self-awareness and intelligence that Honest Bob has never previously shown. So best to work on the basis that what you see is what you get. A not-very-bright opportunist who has bounced his way through life from one bad choice to another. A man with nothing very much to say, who still needs a teleprompter to say it.
What Honest Bob wanted to talk about today was Andy Burnham’s “death tax”, which doesn’t even exist yet other than as a vague possibility to be considered among other options. But for Bob it was as if it had already been implemented. Already HMRC inspectors were hovering around hospices, terrifying dying patients by stealing their wedding rings, confiscating their debit cards and laughing as they emptied their houses and their bank accounts. This was Honest Bob’s wish fulfilment. There’s nothing that excites him more than misery porn.
Then a rare moment of honesty. “I want to level with you,” he said. It would only be the least well-off who would end up paying a death tax. The rich would find ways of avoiding it. And by the rich, he meant himself, Nige, Dicky, Zia and Posh George Cottrell. “That’s what offshore accounts are for,” he boasted. You wouldn’t find any of the Reform elite being dim enough to pay for someone else’s social care.
Dementia and disability were for other people’s families, not his. What was it to do with him if someone got Alzheimer’s and needed full-time care for seven years? In Reform World it’s every person for themselves. Unless they happen to be a party donor and pornographer. Under those circumstances, Honest Bob was sure he would find a way of saving that person £45m in tax by granting an unlawful planning permission. The rich look after each other.
Honest Bob droned on like this for the best part of 20 minutes. Making specious argument after specious argument. Knocking down countless straw men. Lacking the insight to realise he was embarrassing himself. When he finally stopped, not a single person in the room bothered to applaud. Not even the Reform press person who was there to control the complete lack of interest.
The first question came from GB News, more in sorrow than in anger. Why had Honest Bob made such a fool of himself? Why not actually try to join in the cross-party talks to find a solution to such a serious problem? Why the scare tactics of a death tax that isn’t even government policy? If the Tories and the Lib Dems could behave as grownups and engage with Andy Burnham, why couldn’t Reform? Instead, Reform ended up looking like a deeply unserious party. One that didn’t even have a health and social care spokesperson.
For the first time, Honest Bob looked rattled. It hadn’t occurred to him that GB News might desert him. He had believed them to be on the side of grievance and division. What was in it for Reform to behave like a proper opposition? After all, its leader isn’t even currently an MP. Far better to invent a government policy it can then attack than to try to reach a consensus. That was clearly the way forward. Dementia patients were best used as a political football.
It was all downhill from there. Few other media organisations could be bothered to engage with the half-arsed grandstanding. They were more interested in following up the Guardian’s story of Posh George transferring £2m to his mum, moments before she sent money to Thicky Dicky. Why were all the financial dealings of the Reform elite so opaque? Why the need to deal in crypto and offshore accounts? What was wrong with ordinary bank transfers? It was almost as if there was something to hide.
Now Honest Bob got genuinely snappy and tetchy. Why couldn’t people ask him the questions he wanted them to? Where was the respect he deserved? He had nothing to say on the money other than he was sure everything was above board. Of course it was. We had his word for it. Daddy had just been indulging George. Much more of this and the wheels will come off entirely.
