Newsletter #13: A report card for Reform UK’s first six months in Parliament

PLUS: Reform UK versus the Online Right; and a Reform UK council by-election round-up

Good morning.

The need to discuss the many Multipolar Bears on Monday meant there was no space to do what I had been planning for a few weeks now: a review of Reform UK since the 2024 General Election.

This newsletter’s agenda: A report card for Reform UK’s first six months in Parliament (free); Reform UK versus the Online Right (paid); Reform UK council by-election round-up (paid).

The first section of this newsletter is free. Upgrade to a paid subscription — £8/month, or £80/year — to read the rest.

A report card for Reform UK’s first six months in Parliament

At 10pm on 4 July, I — like many other young right-wingers — was ecstatic when I was greeted with an exit poll that projected thirteen seats for Reform. My main goal in the election was the following: Zero Seats for the Conservatives. Although that was not achieved, my second goal was achieved: a right-wing alternative to the Tories ensconced in the Commons — something that seemed impossible just a few months prior.

So now we’ve had the chance to see them in Parliament for six months, how have they done? Here’s my half-term report card:

5. James McMurdock

Four of the five Reform MPs elected in 2024 were candidates that most political aficionados would have been aware of beforehand: Lowe, Anderson, Tice, and Farage. ‘Some back four’, was the phrase used online; a prime 2004-6 Chelsea line-up, or a ‘Proper Pub’ with Peroni, Asahi, Guinness, and Pravha on draught. With Reform continuing to suffer from unvetted mystery candidates, it was — with the benefit of hindsight — probably good that wins projected elsewhere, such as the two Barnsley seats, did not materialise, as it is highly likely that these unknown candidates would have become a distraction if they entered the Commons.

In the end, the only mystery candidate was James McMurdock, who — after a triple recount — won South Basildon and East Thurrock with a margin of just 98 votes. This was not a seat that Reform were expecting to win. In the aftermath of McMurdock’s surprise victory, Farage said that McMurdock was meant to be a paper candidate. He had campaigned largely by himself, relying upon his parents to act as agents and to support him. At first glance, McMurdock seemed exactly like the sort of MP Reform should want: someone who had worked in finance; who was engaged with social media (including TikTok); who was, so it seemed, fundamentally likeable.

Unfortunately, shortly after McMurdock’s victory, it came to light that, at the age of nineteen, he was sent to prison for three weeks after assaulting his ex-girlfriend during a night out. At first, he claimed that he had pushed her; he had handed himself in soon after, and was deeply sorry and regretful about what had happened. That’s fine though, right? Do your time; admit your wrongs, and move on — and, after all, it was two whole decades ago. And it was just a push… right?

Unfortunately, it hasn’t been quite that simple. The Times requested information from the courts in November, and the information provided gives a rather different story to the one that McMurdock has owned up to: that of repeatedly kicking her to the point of leaving marks on her body, and of being uncooperative at the trial. Although McMurdock ‘absolutely rejects’ this, it does leave a sour taste in one’s mouth. In any other serious political party — usually with far more MPs, so that negative attention is diffused, or at least with a far less hostile media — McMurdock’s past might be mostly ignored by the public. This is less likely to be the case with Reform: McMurdock himself makes up fully twenty percent of the parliamentary representation of Britain’s third biggest party. This could also become a problem if Reform want to do better with women in the next election.

Aside from this, McMurdock has been mostly as expected from our first impressions. He has been fairly quiet in the Commons, but has been very active and very canny on social media, especially X. In fact, he has replied to me on X many times, and liked my tweets complaining about my 2:1 in International Relations (BA, Hons.) from the University of Portsmouth.

But unfortunately, despite some genuinely good work since the election, the fallout caused by the above scandal alone is sufficient to push McMurdock into last place.

4. Nigel Farage

If you told me on July 5 that Nigel Farage, after his resounding win in Clacton, would have been towards the bottom of this list I would not have believed you.

We were expecting him to rattle the Woke weekly, using Parliamentary privilege to tear into both Starmer and the Tories. Unfortunately, this has not come to pass. Farage has had a couple of good moments in the Commons: bringing two-tier policing to attention; noting that people have been locked up for Facebook posts in anger after the stabbings in Southport. Otherwise, he has been surprisingly quiet. On X, he has been good on Southport (again) and the Chagos Islands, but not much else. A concerning number of his posts on X have related to American politics, not British politics, and he does not seem to have fully gotten past somewhat inane culture-warring in an era where people want solutions, not yet more diagnoses.

Many on the online Right have criticised him for rejecting ‘mass deportations’ in an interview with Stephen Edginton, and some have even alleged that Farage is falling in popularity as a result of this. Despite my many criticisms, this view seems like the product of a severe echo chamber; certainly, it is hard to square with the polls, which continue to show Reform success after Reform success. Farage is still incredibly popular offline: let it never be forgotten that it is he, and his personal profile, that managed to transform Reform from a minor irritant into a genuine threat.

If Farage is no longer leader after the 2029 General Election, I would not be particularly surprised. Farage has dreamed of becoming an MP for years: now, he has finally done it. We can let him rest like a retired service dog soon enough. It is just that I expected much more from him over the past six months — or at least a bit more energy.

3. Lee Anderson

The only man elected who had any previous experience in Parliament, Lee Anderson, MP for Ashfield, is an ex-coal miner who rose through the ranks of first Labour, then the Tories, and now Reform. Anderson is the ultimate no-nonsense, no-filter, anti-Woke warrior, both for good and for bad. You know what to expect from him, and he usually delivers it well, but not much more than that. With Anderson, expectations management is key.

He is already familiar to most people, either as ‘30p Lee’ for the FBPE mob, or as the guy in your dad’s ‘forwarded many times’ WhatsApp videos discussing the Churchill statue and Islam or questioning Dorset’s fire and rescue authority chair about ‘institutional racism’. This approach is useful, and indeed popular, but it does have its limits.

Anderson hasn’t been particularly active in Parliament recently, but he has been active elsewhere: you can see him sinking pints on GB News on his Real World show, which sums him up best — a speaker for the real world. It is unlikely that Lee Anderson will develop into the sort of person who could grab a political party by the scruff of its neck from Opposition and into Government. You shouldn’t expect him to become a ‘policy wonk’; nor is he an amazing orator. But he does have his finger on the pulse, and he is brilliant at generating anti-Woke soundbites your dad would love, which is more than we can say of most online right-wingers.

We can just hope that in the future he avoids some needless blunders, like complaining of threats via WhatsApp that appear to have been sent by himself, or saying how white men need to deal with the Battle of the Somme. This just plays into the hands of the man pretending to be Larry the Cat on X.

2. Richard Tice

Richard Tice has been a great surprise over the last six months. Prior to the election I — like many others — was fed up with Tice’s leadership of Reform. He was still overly preoccupied with lockdown, fifteen-minute cities, taxes, and so on. Now, there is nothing wrong with this per se, but this was a tactical error at a time when there was a real need to start focusing much more on immigration — as the public desperately wanted. He lacked the public profile, and seemingly also the charisma, to boost Reform sufficiently so it could win seats at a General Election rather than merely act as spoiler to the Tories.

Although Farage’s return was clearly necessary, I will first to admit that I was wrong about Tice on a personal level: I have previously wished that he would ‘fuck off on a P&A Cruise to the Bahamas already’, and that ‘his heart was not in it’, and have alleged that Reform was purely a hobby for him. But since stepping down as leader, he has shown more charisma, more energy, and indeed more leadership than he ever did whilst he was leader. Farage and Tice are the same age, but Tice looks and acts like he is far younger than Farage; partly a matter of different lifestyles, but partly because being an MP seems to have given a massive boost of energy to Tice.

Tice really stepped up when it came to two of the ‘popular’ talking points of the summer: the stabbings in Southport, and the assault on the police at Manchester Airport. Tice has been amongst the loudest on these two topics (especially the latter), consistently applying pressure to force the media and the police to provide the answers that they don’t want to give. He was one of the few people to not immediately assume that the assailants at Manchester Airport were in fact victims — a bold view to take, but one that has now been vindicated after the full CCTV footage was leaked to the press. A big test, and Tice passed with flying colours. Following Southport, he has been relentless in highlighting the many cases of ‘two-tier policing’ in modern Britain. But his best moment was when he called for the arrest of HOPE not Hate’s Nick Lowles for misinformation and incitement. Certainly Reform UK’s ‘Most Improved’ figure.

1. Rupert Lowe

Rupert Lowe has been brilliant. He has been the embodiment of Mr Smith Goes To Washington, if it was Mr Lowe instead, and he went to Westminster, not Washington, and in no time had them posting fresh immigration and nationality statistics. Lowe has been both articulate and clever in his questions to the Department for Work and Pensions and the Home Office, and has been a real thorn in the side of the Home Secretary, unearthing some truly staggering data for us. But he has not forgotten his constituency either, and has even named repeated foreign criminals in Great Yarmouth in Parliament. He has also been active on X as well as in the Commons, and right now it seems as if he cannot miss, garnering thousands upon thousands of likes on virtually everything he posts.

In short, Lowe has been consistently asking the right questions, bringing up the right topics at the right time, and putting across his anti-Woke ideas in a more thoughtful way than most others. It is evident from the questions he asks that he is using his new office to the best of his abilities. He is not only a model Reform MP — he is a model MP, full stop.

In summary, the first six months have put Reform in a very good spot for the future. Although it may seem as though McMurdock and Farage have done badly, I would like to stress that this is not the case. None of the five MPs have genuinely done badly just yet; they are all doing well with the (very limited) power that they have. Of course, many online will continue to bring up Farage’s comments on ‘mass deportations’, but these are off the mark, at least when counterbalanced by MPs like Lowe banging the drum on benefits and immigration statistics, and calling for the deportation of foreign criminals and illegal immigrants. The result of 2024 will not be a one-off, at least with Kemi Badenoch leading the Conservative Party. With better vetting, more funding, and more organised campaigning, who knows how many more seats we might win in 2029?

—WolfOfClapham Contributor, Pimlico Journal

Reform UK versus the Online Right?