Sorry to call it early, but the worst trend of 2026 is politicians who are graciously doing us all a favour. “He doesn’t need to be here,” declared Nigel Farage on Monday of Reform UK’s newest sloppy second, Nadhim Zahawi. “He could have gone abroad.” Ooh, aren’t we lucky! Thanks for stopping by, Nadhim!
If you missed this, the former mayfly Conservative chancellor Nadhim Zahawi has switched gravy trains. If that sounds like the sort of death-defying stunt Tom Cruise might break his ankle doing in the Mission Impossible franchise, it’s nothing like as exhilaratingly watchable. The Tory gravy train has ground to a halt, and Farage will stop his Reform train even between stations to pick up any old has-been you may remember from episodes like “deathbed Boris Johnson appointments” or “my horses are warmer than pensioners”. (More on that latter one shortly.) Needless to say, Farage is doing his best to explain that these guys aren’t secondhand, they’re pre-loved. They’re vintage, they’re appealingly worn in, they’re heritage pieces. They may even have increased in value – they’re basically political Birkin bags.
But, as I say, you’re lucky you’re even being allowed to look at them. Don’t dream of touching what you can’t afford. Farage’s party is increasingly full of people who’d like you to know they’ve got way better options than power and don’t actually need to do this.
Nigel’s one himself, of course, having declared “I want my life back” in 2016, before repeatedly presenting his frequent un-retirings as some kind of regrettable sacrifice he could well afford not to make. He doesn’t need to do this, guys! Or take Richard Tice, the Reform deputy leader given to making grandly self-dramatising statements like: “My job pays for everything. The politics just costs me.” (By way of a quick sidebar, incidentally, do spare a genuine thought for Tice. He’s been a Successful BusinessmanTM, he led Reform for almost three years when they leapt from 0% to 15% in the polls, and he then dutifully surrendered the leadership to the endlessly un-retiring Farage. And still Farage has resolutely declined to name him the unofficial opposition’s shadow chancellor and clearly never will, waiting instead for a Tory of the right perceived calibre to defect so he can give it to them instead. It’s like Nigel loves Richard, but knows he is not serious people.)
Anyway. Now, take Nadhim Zahawi, who spent Monday’s unveiling press conference making much of the fact that a successful businessman such as himself could have chosen to enjoy a “comfortable retirement”, but instead is joining Reform, apparently as an act of national philanthropy. But is Zahawi truly one of life’s most selfless givers, or is he a career chiseller whose interactions with the taxpayer include simply not paying his own taxes, and putting in expenses for heat and lighting for the stables on his Warwickshire estate? Something to bear in mind for Reform supporters currently feeling too cash-strapped to put the heating on. Zahawi accepted more from the taxpayer in energy costs for his second home than any other MP. He was forced to repay those, as he was forced to settle his unpaid bills with HMRC after concealing the investigation into his affairs led to him having to resign as chancellor.
Below these upper echelons of Reform, this attitude that politics needs you far more than you need it persists. The recently resigned leader of Staffordshire county council is a guy called Ian Cooper, whose Reform party membership was suspended last month after the discovery that social media accounts linked to him were a “top fan” of a white supremacy page, and that he had been posting stuff like a diatribe against David Lammy that included the dictum: “No foreign national or first-generation migrant should be allowed to sit in parliament.” Yet when a Labour councillor questioned the deafening silence among his colleagues about all this, Cooper reacted airily. “The good thing is I don’t need to be a politician for the money, unlike some,” he sniffed. “I can walk away without consequences.”
Strange times we live in, when a consequence-free lifestyle is now being presented as an ideal characteristic for a politician. People didn’t used to talk like this, constantly implying they were far too good or well-feathered for this crap, and only here as a favour to the little people. It’s such an eye-catching reframing of public service for the hyper-individualised age, yet at the same time its practitioners don’t even seem to realise that they’re doing it.
Nor, indeed, is the tendency limited to Reform. Back when the Conservatives were looking to expand their pool of MPs, Rory Stewart has recounted asking David Cameron if he’d be made a minister fast. “What I was saying was: ‘Do you want me? Because I can do other things. I’ve got a chair at Harvard. I don’t need to do this.’”
Not needing to do this was the absolute keystone of Donald Trump’s first White House run, with the future president reminding voters at every turn that: “I’ve built a great, great company. I don’t need to do this.” That great, great company has, of course, enriched itself beyond measure during Trump’s two stints in office – which rather disproves the man we might consider the daddy of this particular streak in modern politics, Ross Perot. By way of a recap, tech-firm billionaire Perot ran as an independent US presidential candidate in 1992, and a big part of his norm-shattering shtick was the fact he was so rich that he couldn’t be corrupt like all those other politicians. Perot explicitly believed that autocratic businessmen were the answer, and that government was something that could be fixed if you just got “under the hood”. One in five Americans voted for him. (By the way, the next time he ran, in 1996, he called his party the Reform party.)
Last week I saw a poll that found 74% of people across the UK, EU, US, Canada and Japan believed the world is “hopelessly rigged for the rich”. It’s kind of nuts that in an era in which this outlook is overwhelmingly prevalent, the supposed great knights in shining armour are men who keep telling you they are doing so well that they really don’t even need to bother. They’re doing it for YOU, and you need to follow them into battle in what Zahawi called Farage’s “glorious revolution”. Is there any armour for the foot soldiers, as they march towards their own consequence-free promised land? Look, I’m sure the guys at the top are working on it. You’re just going to have to take it all on trust.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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