One of the more irritating responses to Reform UK’s historic election result last week ran along these lines: “Can’t wait to see Nigel Farage and Richard Tice having to spend Fridays in their constituencies talking about potholes.” It was a joke cracked largely by those on the other end of the political spectrum who still feel that, despite the enormous impact that Farage has had on British politics over the past few decades, he is in some ways not all that serious.
The normal reality of an MP’s life is indeed filled with Friday nights in a parish hall in the constituency listening to people who hate each other arguing about speed bumps. It is also speaking in adjournment debates about building regulations that no-one pays any attention to. But to measure Farage et al by this standard yardstick would be to miss why they have been elected. Sure, the five Reform UK MPs will probably do a degree of constituency work. But that wasn’t what got them into politics, and it wasn’t what motivated their voters to turn out for them either.
To a certain extent, typical MPs spend too much time doing constituency work, taking on problems that are really the preserve of local councillors or members of the devolved legislatures. They also deal with crises caused by legislation that they voted on but didn’t understand at the time. And they don’t tend to hold onto or lose their seats depending on whether they have worked flat out on potholes or not.
I’ve stood on countless doorsteps over the years with incumbent MPs who’ve been greeted like a long-lost friend by constituents whose drains they had fixed, whose children have their special educational needs met, and who managed to resolve a lengthy dispute with the NHS thanks to the politician who they nonetheless did not vote for in the election a few days later. Now, most MPs don’t do their constituency work as a means of winning votes: they do it because they see it as a duty. But they also don’t have to take on all the cases that they do.
When Tice was elected in Boston and Skegness last week, the front page of the local paper splashed on his comments that “I’m a doer”. But as a member of a smaller party, he doesn’t need to return to his voters in five years’ time with evidence that he’s personally built the local bypass or the kinds of things that MPs in the party of government couldn’t show their voters in the election. He will be judged on how much noise he has made nationally about the dissatisfaction of those constituents with politics in general.
Reform will be much more visible in Parliament, where its MPs will use set piece moments to press home its points about immigration, about the Brexit “betrayal”, and about taxation. Farage did just that on the first day he could when responding to the election of the Speaker.
He is a populist politician, but he is also one of the most hard-working: anyone who has spent much time alongside the Reform leader will testify to that. (He also takes relaxing extremely seriously, but that’s another matter.) His focus will be on pulling the Conservative Party towards Reform, and enticing as many as possible of its remaining right-leaning MPs over to his benches in the Commons Chamber.
The bigger adjustment for Reform now is not the drudgery of politics, but trying to professionalise. And this is where the strongest tensions have been. Farage’s reshaping of Reform’s top team this week was, he claimed “the first step to ensure that Reform UK is fit and ready to take forward its positive message”. He added that “I have no doubt that we will professionalise the party and change politics for good”. It is easier to do this, of course, when the entity that you lead isn’t actually a party, but a limited company. The professionalise line came straight from Reform’s difficult election campaign where a number of candidates were ejected after being found to have said or endorsed deeply unpleasant comments.
Farage was largely able to use his grand theme of everything being a stitch-up against him during the campaign, but he knows that this has a shelf life. He could easily say that the party was new, rough and ready and that it had been let down by vetting companies or set up by actors conniving with hostile broadcasters when he’d only taken over as leader during the campaign itself.
Now, he needs to show that he is a “doer” and that he can make the MPs that he leads pack a punch in Parliament. It just won’t be the kind of activity that you would expect from your average group of backbenchers. But then, Reform is very much not average.