Newsletter #52: Reform UK conference preview

PLUS: Nadine Dorries, Rachel Reeves, and Angela Rayner

Good morning,

Nigel Forrester is away on holiday again, so I am filling in (see Newsletter #50 for my previous effort). Parliament’s back on this week, and we’ve got a minor (but internally significant) reshuffle and a scandal about the Deputy Prime Minister’s tax arrangements. I will also be giving you all a preview of what I hope will be the first of many Pimlico Journal in-person reports.

This newsletter’s agenda: Nadine Dorries defects to Reform UK (free); Reform UK Conference Preview (paid); Is Starmer preparing to sack Reeves? (paid); Angela Rayner’s stamp duty controversy continued (paid).

Nadine Dorries defects to Reform UK

This came across my desk quite literally in the process of writing this newsletter. Nadine Dorries, formerly Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport under Boris Johnson, has left the Conservative Party for Reform UK on the eve of the party’s conference. ‘The Tory Party is dead. Its members now need to think the unthinkable and look to the future’, said Dorries in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail in which she announced her defection. Her former colleague Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has also had to deny that he’ll be defecting after he was unexpectedly revealed as a speaker at Reform UK’s conference.

This is an incredibly stupid and pointless decision. Dorries brings literally no positive qualities to Reform, and her toxic political brand due to her infamous association with Boris — a bond so close some people seriously speculate they had an affair — is the very last thing Reform should be attracting. Dorries wrote and proposed the draconian Online Safety Bill that Farage, somewhat to his own detriment, has wholeheartedly committed himself to repealing. Nor was it just the Online Safety Bill: on several occasions, such as Jimmy Carr’s 2022 joke about gypsies, she was a proponent of the incredibly heavy-handed state censorship that Reform oppose. Aside from this, her whole career has been a bit of a scandal-mired grift. She made her money writing erotica slop, was selected as an MP via what were effectively DEI mechanisms, and has had various run-ins with the press over her expenses and participation in B-tier reality television. Most notoriously, the main thing she’s currently remembered for is ‘squatting’ on her Parliamentary seat for several months after stating her intention to resign.

In terms of her actual beliefs, the worst of them is her continuing sycophancy for Boris Johnson. Why would a party decrying the Boriswave accept one of Johnson’s few remaining cheerleaders into its ranks? The one good thing she’s arguably done is expose the high-level corruption in the Conservative Party through her recent books, The Plot and Downfall. However, this doesn’t justify everything else. I really have no idea what they’re doing here. God forbid this opens the door to a Boris Johnson defection. Fortunately, Farage’s own dislike of competitors within the party probably closes off this possibility.

Reform UK Party Conference: preview

I am finally to be released from the basement in which I reside, and I’ll be visiting Reform UK’s 2025 Party Conference. This puts Pimlico Journal firmly ahead of the FT, whose Political Editor couldn’t be bothered going. Unfortunately, my freedom will be short-lived. The conference is in Birmingham, easily the most awful major city in this entire country. I have to say, I don’t understand Reform’s insistence on doing all of their big events somewhere so objectively unsafe and unsanitary.

This conference is set to be very different from the previous one in several key ways. I refer all our readers who will be attending to this handy guide made by Guido. While I was not personally there last year, I am told there were no relevant corporate sponsors, and that the main attraction was the lineup of party-approved keynote speakers. They had maybe one fringe event and three tables set up outside.

The party is in a very different place right now than they were at the time of their 2024 conference. Their previous effort was mostly a victory lap to celebrate Reform achieving 14.3% of the vote and five MPs, two of whom are now sitting as independents (Rupert Lowe on charges of independent thought and alleged insubordination, and James McMurdock on charges of various dodgy — and possibly criminal — things). Last year, all five MPs had their thirty minutes, as well as some of the prominent Reform-adjacent ‘influencers’. The most notable of these were Professor Matt Goodwin (who must have still been a bit salty that his plans to launch a new party were completely overshadowed by Reform) and Ant Middleton (formerly of SAS: Who Dares Wins).

The speakers lineup this year is substantially beefier, and there are several main-stage ‘panels’ featuring curious characters such as Reform’s handful of barely-pubescent councillors. Alex Wilson, the party’s scarcely-acknowledged member of the London Assembly, is giving a keynote speech. There is a ‘special guest’ joining Farage on the stage on Friday, and I’m very curious who this will be. I very much hope it is not yet another C-list celebrity/former Tory MP/literal grifter.