“Up for an adventure” a sign declared outside the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre. You certainly need to be. After navigating a half-hour queue to get through security, a group of us were told we needed to go back outside, walk 10 minutes and then go through security again to reach the media centre.
Which would have been fine except the staff at the new entrance had been given instructions not to admit the media, and told us to go back to where we had started and queue for security a third time. The theme for this year’s Reform party conference is “Ready for government”. It would have been nice if they were ready for their own conference first. Piss ups and breweries.
Still, Reform can’t prepare for every eventuality. Labour couldn’t have come up with a better way of derailing the opening day of Reform’s conference if they had tried. The downside was that it came at the cost of Angela Rayner’s enforced resignation. Many hacks were already on the train back to London before the Reform show had even started. In hindsight, the Labour spinners might have preferred to let Nigel Farage take centre stage on the news bulletins.
The derangement had clearly hit the running times. The main stage speeches were supposed to start at noon, but by 12:20pm there was no sign of anyone. Perhaps they were hoping the hall might fill up. Reform might attract 6,000 delegates, but many find better things to do than listen to speeches from the supporting cast. Nige tries to pretend Reform isn’t a one-man band but he’s kidding no one. People don’t care about Richard Tice, Zia Yusuf and the other nobodies. It’s all about Nige. And he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Enter David Bull, the party chair and daytime TV minnow. Brexit was the happiest day of his life, he began. Maybe he should keep quite about that. Nige has been trying to distance himself from that disaster for a while now. He then went through a few Reform greatest hits. Immigrants. Boo. Woke. Boo. Net zero. Boo. Make Britain Great Again. Hooray. All this from a man who recently went on TV to say he had been strangled by a ghost. You can’t buy that level of levitas.
Andrea Jenkyns performs self-written song Insomniac at Reform UK conference – video
Hold my beer, said Andrea Jenkyns. Coming on stage in a purple sequined jump suit with a giant union flag and singing the self-penned Insomnia. No one should have been made to endure this. Once seen it can never be unseen. She then went on to slur her words as she boasted about how she had got rid of both Theresa May and Rishi Sunak. Parading disloyalty would be a theme of this conference. Nige beware.
Then the man himself. The charlatan’s charlatan. The establishment man posing as the voice of the people. But no one in Birmingham cared. For them, Nige can do no wrong. They don’t care if he’s a fraud. Because he’s their fraud. He is forgiven anything. Every day a tabula rasa. The fact he contradicts himself and changes his mind on a regular basis is of no bother. That’s just Nige being Nige. For his opponents he is a nightmare. An ever-moving target.
Nige was meant to be on at 4.10pm. But in a sign of Rayner-induced panic, he was bumped up the order. Never mind the hall was nearly empty on one side. Anything to get the broadcasters attention. Even if it meant effectively ending the day’s schedule before it had really started. Lee Anderson and others would be no more than an afterthought. Perhaps it made no difference.
Amid pounding music, dry ice and pyrotechnics, Nige appeared on stage through an arch like a TV evangelist. He began with a takedown of Rayner’s £40,000 tax avoidance. Unbelievable. So what if he has his own arrangement to avoid paying a higher rate of tax on his TV earnings. Do as I say, not as I do. The march of Reform. No mention of the attrition. The denouncement of Britain as an authoritarian state. Just seconds before he proposed an entirely unelected and unaccountable Reform cabinet. A cry for free speech. Forgetting he had banned some journalists from attending the conference.
Nige rushed on stage because Mad Nads was not having a good day and he needed a drink. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty
Then a break. The appearance of Nadine Dorries. Mad Nad was not having a good day. She could scarcely manage a coherent sentence. “You’ll never take me alive,” she mumbled. “Loyalty in a political party is everything.” From a woman with disloyalty running through her veins. She loves only Boris. Her whole career, the victim of The Plot. A woman in mourning for the peerage that never came her way.
Nige rushed on stage before Nads could embarrass herself any further. He needed to get things wrapped up. He could do with a drink. A bit of culture war. Promises to stop the boats in two weeks flat that he would never be called on to keep. All he had offered was anger. But that was enough. The crowd loved it.
Back in London, Keir Starmer was completing a reshuffle that was as good an admission that every minister had been shit so far. An endorsement of failure. Meanwhile Nige was saying he would be prime minister in two years’ time. Job done. And maybe he was right. If so, Labour and the Tories would have no one to blame but themselves.
