Asking The Right Questions

Yesterday, Ian Murray said that he was looking forward to spending more time with his family. Today, he has clearly seen enough of them. There was a backlash, capable of moving the Prime Minister on the composition of his Government, against the dismissal of a man who had been due to be a founder member of Change UK before pulling out at the last moment. Though it was not strong enough to secure him anything more than the demotion that he has shamelessly accepted. Some people will do anything for a certain social life.

That brings us to Nadine Dorries. This week, she went to Zac Goldsmith’s wedding with Boris and Carrie, then she announced the death of the Conservative Party to the Reform UK Conference, and now, to the broad coalition that is the combined audiences of Sarah Vine and Peter Hitchens, she calls on Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage to unite. Dorries objects to the Online Safety Act because it does not go far enough. In acquiring its third Privy Counsellor, all of whom are former Conservative Ministers and two of whom sat in recent Cabinets, Reform UK welcomes a legendarily neglectful parliamentarian who left the Conservative Party because it had not given her a peerage.

As if one Andrea Jenkyns were not one too many, the accession of Dorries establishes Reform beyond doubt as a Johnson fan club, complete with Tim Montgomerie and Jake Berry. Based on his reception on the Conference floor, where he was pretending to be a mere Gentleman of the Press, they will soon be joined by Jacob Rees-Mogg. Jenkyns followed up her X Factor performance yesterday by today closing the proceedings with the words, “God save the Queen.” On either occasion, she would have done better with this.

Johnson was the Prime Minister of Net Zero. He was a very big spender long before Covid-19. He even lifted the requirement that jobs in Britain be advertised first in Britain, making him the most pro-immigration Prime Minister ever, since Liz Truss never got into her stride. Johnson was closer to Stonewall than any Prime Minister before or since. The lockdowns were Johnson’s. The Northern Ireland Protocol was Johnson’s. The war in Ukraine was Johnson’s. They are all now Reform’s. Along with the Online Safety Bill that Dorries would have introduced, before it was “watered down”.

Reform has been better than Labour on cutting the benefits of the sick and disabled as if that would cure them or find them jobs, on the Winter Fuel Payment, on increasing workers’ bus fares by 50 per cent, on increasing employers’ National Insurance contributions so as to destroy charities and small businesses while making it impossible for big businesses to take on staff or to increase wages, and on forcing working farmers of many decades’ standing who formally inherited their parents’ farms to sell them to giant American agribusinesses.

Reform has been better than both Labour and the Conservatives on the two-child benefit cap that Jenkyns, Berry, Dorries and Rees-Mogg had voted to impose. But for how much longer? And for how much longer will it hold to Nigel Farage’s articulation of the obvious answer when even the Government had recognised that Britain’s six remaining steel companies, four of which were already being kept going with public money, ought to be merged and sold to a single buyer?

Indeed, Reform now has rather a lot of questions to answer. As the party ahead in the polls, its Leader should be asked whether he would press the nuclear button, and if so, then under what circumstances. If the Left has terrorist connections, then when has it ever given a rapturous Conference reception to anyone who had advocated arson against hotels and the people in them, arson that had been attempted? Is it “highly likely that the Covid vaccines have been a factor, a significant factor, in the cancer of members of the Royal Family”?

With its 19-year-old Leader of Warwickshire County Council, 18 when he landed the gig, as well as a slew of other very young Councillors, several with positions of considerable responsibility, what has the Right to say now about youthful participants in political movements of which it disapproved? Although that 12-year-old, younger than was anyone who had ever taken to the airwaves in support of Jeremy Corbyn, could not have been a Reform member, since he was under 16. It is the Conservative Party that has no minimum age for membership. None. That party was recently, if briefly, led by someone who claimed to have been taught about racism and sexism but not how to read. Under Margaret Thatcher. Reform now attracts children who claim to have been taught LGBTQ but not Maths. The present primary school curriculum goes back to Michael Gove. Answer that.