Daniel Hannan: Reform aren’t finished but Farage needs to overcome his demons about ‘rivals’

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020 and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.

Can Reform survive the loss of its most impressive and popular MP? Of course it can!

Reform has never been about effective parliamentary opposition. Nor has it been about a realistic programme of government. It’s one stab at policy formulation was downright embarrassing.

No, Reform represents a mood, a vibe, a feeling that Britain is run by crooks and liars, that “the uniparty” are “in it for themselves”, that you can’t say you’re proud to be English, that kids these days have no respect, that we need a proper shake-up.

My sense is that, like Donald Trump (whom he has observed at close range), Nigel Farage can shrug off rows, gaffes and scandals that, under the old rules, would have brought a leader down. As his American idol told a rally in Iowa in 2016, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

Farage has decided, metaphorically, to shoot Rupert Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth, who has arguably been more active than all 233 Labour backbenchers put together. Lowe is a Eurosceptic Long Marcher, a Referendum Party candidate as long ago as 1997. Having succeeded in business, he can afford an independent, take-it-or-leave it attitude to politics.

It is precisely this independence of mind, say his allies, that upsets Farage. “Nigel wants sycophants, not colleagues,” a former UKIP MEP tells me, recalling that, in 2015, when the UKIP MEP Patrick O’Flynn made similar criticisms of his leader, Farage responded by announcing that he would be “more autocratic”.

Lowe, on this reading, is the latest in an ample meadow of tall poppies to be hacked down. Any UKIP or Brexit Party politician who became too popular, going back to Suzanne Evans and Douglas Carswell, ended up being banished. The suave Old Radleian was doomed, according to his supporters, once Elon Musk had endorsed him.

Faragistes retort that it is the other way around, that Lowe criticised Farage to distract from some bullying allegations that had already been levelled against him. And it is true that he is being investigated by the police over “verbal threats” against the party chairman, Zia Yusuf. But does this really merit removing the Whip?

Perhaps Farage and Yusuf know more than they are letting on. But the row is going down badly in the ranks. A different friend, who stood as a Reform candidate at the general election, texts: “If they have made up accusations to get rid of a rival, I will never have anything to do with them again.”

It is not a good look.

Reform prides itself on its free speech absolutism. The party rightly complains when the cops go after people for using offensive language rather than investigating proper crimes. Yet here it is lodging a complaint with the Met over… well, over offensive language.

The odd thing is that Farage had until last week been displaying exemplary self-discipline. I wrote in December that his goal was not so much to destroy the Conservatives as to take them over, rather as Stephen Harper came from Reform to lead a merged Canadian Rightist party.

Everything since has confirmed my view. Farage has been saying some spectacularly unpopulist things for a supposedly populist leader. He has spoken out against the tax changes that have driven nondoms overseas. He opposes VAT on private schools. He wants to end the Free At The Point Of Use dogma that stops the NHS from growing.

He is 100 per cent correct about all this.

But he is hardly appealing to his target voters. Or, rather, his comments make sense only if his target voters are found, not in Darlington or Warrington, but on the Conservative benches in the House of Commons.

Indeed, to the extent that there is a policy aspect to this row, it seems to be over Farage’s refusal to have anything to do with the Tommy Robinson wing of British politics and his welcome insistence on drawing a distinction between being anti-immigration and being anti-immigrant. Once again, it all suggests a determination to become a mainstream political leader who can, in one configuration or another, command a majority.

Which is what makes l’affaire Lowe so significant. What matters is not whether Reform has five or four MPs, but what kind of party it is. If Farage means to shift from protest to government, he needs to give the electorate some sense of who would form his Cabinet. He needs, in other words, to have big beasts around him, men and women with impressive real-world backgrounds, with their own media profiles and, yes, with some independence of mind.

On the evidence of last week, it seems that, far from having a couple of dozen such people, Farage finds it hard to tolerate any.