The Uncut Fringe

As a Health Minister at the time, does Nadine Dorries agree that it was “highly likely that the Covid vaccines have been a factor, a significant factor, in the cancer of members of the Royal Family”? Was the man whom David Lammy knew to have grown a cervix an earlier identity of the woman whose breasts Zack Polanksi hypnotised to grow larger? But look, politicians are an odd lot. Now deceased, a long-serving Conservative MP really and truly believed that the Government of this country was controlled by a witches’ coven in Gloucestershire. A distinguished Labour Councillor repeatedly tried to convince me that Jesus had been an extraterrestrial.

The Blair court featured Carole Caplin and her clairvoyant mother, the Temazcal of Nancy Aguilar and the stone circle of the wonderfully monikered Jack Temple, Cherie’s BioElectric Shield that had been given to her by Hillary Clinton, and much else besides. Temple was also a homeopath, and Jeremy Hunt promoted homeopathy (is the King using it to treat his cancer?) while he was Health Secretary. From 2017 to 2019, the Government’s majority was provided by Young Earth creationists. And so on, as you read Tim Stanley:

This has to be the most right-wing government of my lifetime. Reshuffled, re-set Labour intends to deport asylum seekers, cut welfare and raise defence, while Yvette Cooper, next Thursday at Hampstead registry office, will enter into a civil union with a flag. The “centre” is dead. We’re all nationalists now.

As I’m in a hyperbolic mood, let me claim last week as the most significant since Labour came to power. Arguably, Reform was done a favour. Had Angela Rayner not gone, forcing journalists to hot-foot back to Westminster, more people might’ve noticed that its conference was near-identical to the previous year’s, that fresh policies are lacking, philosophy is light, and Andrea Jenkyns’s singing made Peter Lilley sound like Caruso (I’m still having nightmares about “Insomnia”).

As she murdered God Save the King on the final night, some on the stage looked unfamiliar with the words; a few resisted the temptation to raise their right arm. It was hoped that “Reform: the Next Step” would stage a maturation of theme, perhaps a senior defection from Labour. Instead the unveiling of Nadine Dorries cemented this as the continuation of Red Wall conservatism, Farage doubling-down on the Trumpish vibe of Lucy Connolly and vaccine denial.

Why bother to play the moderate? One hundred miles away, the PM was relaunching His Majesty’s government as a Reform Party tribute act.

Keir Starmer’s career is built on treasons. He advanced through the shadow cabinet as a Remainer under Corbyn – a “friend” he said – and won the leadership as a socialist. All that was jettisoned; Angela Rayner remained as a rare sop to the Left. She was his John Prescott in that she embodied forces the party had rejected - working-class, trades-union – but so long as she was in cabinet, the party looked like a progressive coalition rather than a path to power for drippy Oxbridge graduates.

Her loss rips off the mask, the reshuffle moving almost every major office to the Right bar Ed Miliband (who cares?) and Rachel Reeves (already emasculated by Darren Jones’ relocation to No 10). Even Reeves’ sister, Ellie, got the chop. Labour might be nepotistic but it’s also fratricidal.

It is significant that joining Rayner in the motability queue is Justin Madders, former employment rights minister and an architect of the workers rights bill. The legislation is likely to be watered down by in-coming business secretary Peter Kyle, arch-Blairite MP for the posh town Ange bought her flat in, its value now reduced by the graffiti outside (I’m afraid Hove is going to the dogs).

Online thickos immediately launched a tirade of racist abuse at new home secretary Shabana Mahmood, apparently unaware that she’s socially conservative – favours castration for nonces – and was brought in to speed up deportations, not set them in reverse. Groundwork has been laid by Cooper, who signed off a returns agreement with France, closure of hotels, fast-tracked deportations and restrictions on family renewals, including limitations based upon wealth and fluency in English (the terrified wife of an Afghan peasant need not apply).

Labour wants us to know that it will stick asylum seekers into army barracks, a tacit acknowledgement that Britain has run out of soldiers to house. Our transformation from imperial power to migrant processing centre is arguably the reason our politics is in this mess.

Today, Labour, Reform and the Tories are offering variations on Make Britain Great Again. What I grew up thinking was the centre-ground, of economic and social liberalism, is gone – thought this is both natural and overdue. The blessed centre is not, as its high priests insist, a fixed point of pragmatism and decency. It is something that repositions and reconstitutes itself across generations, from the Gold Standard to Keynes, from neo-liberalism to populism, each time rooting its authority in a dubious claim to “common sense” that is entirely contingent upon circumstance and fashion.

Neo-liberalism had to end because it no longer reflects human desire for stability, order, identity, and its death was presaged by Ukip and Brexit. If you find Reform astonishing, if you cannot comprehend why TV pundits keep being elected mayor of Hiccup, then you’ve not been watching: each Euro election told us Brexit would happen, the Leave victory told us politics would turn nationalist, and if Farage wins the next general election, it will be in keeping with the direction of travel.

Hence, Labour chasing public opinion is an intelligent survival strategy. The problem is that its evolution looks cynical and it always gets to where the voters are several months too late. A third challenge is that it will inevitably leave part of its old coalition behind. A poll in August found that 64 per cent of party members believe Starmer is heading the wrong way, his personal rating at minus nine.

Will a left-wing candidate run for deputy leader? Rosena Allin-Khan is rumoured – but she needs the endorsement of 80 MPs, and Starmer did such a good job of driving Corbynites out that I’m not sure she has the numbers. Louise Haigh, who led the welfare rebellion, is said to be interested; a fraud allegation stands against her. Emily Thornberry, well-known and superb at media, arguably has the best chance.

No matter. A new force is growing outside the party. Last week – I told you it was eventful – I also attended the election of the Green Party’s leadership collective, which is the very antithesis of Reform. It comprises a gay, Jewish hypnotist, a posh lady who could’ve stepped off the catwalk, and a Muslim activist, his wife modelling a full-length niqab.

Hardly anyone mentioned the climate (if the Greens are over it, can the rest of us move on, too?) Rather this was about picking up the strays abandoned by Labour – wealth tax, trans, pro-Gaza, British history is “problematic” – and coalescing into a resistance that, for all its contradictions, might amount to a serious force at the polls.

Journalistic attention has been focused on Reform because the Tory crack-up happened first, but now that Labour is hurtling towards its own civil war, I am convinced that the next election will be not four-way but five-way. Modern politics, like Greta Thunberg after her controversial make-over, is all fringe.

And as Nigel Farage prepares to enter the Palace of Westminster a week late having been to the United States to call on it to sanction the United Kingdom, and as Reform UK threatens to split over the Boris Question while apparently unaware that probably no free speech clause in the world, and certainly not the American First Amendment, would have protected Lucy Connolly, Robert Hutton writes:

It was the very late morning after the night before. One of the many ways in which Reform’s conference differs from those of other political parties is that it doesn’t schedule 9 am events in the pretence that everyone wasn’t up all night drinking. Indeed the conference makes a virtue of its after-hours events. The performers at the previous evening’s event had been the surviving members of the Jackson Five. That had led to an awkward moment as the crowd found itself cheering a large photo of much-missed entertainer Michael Jackson.

But you can’t stay in bed all day when you have a country to save, so it was time to get on with hearing about the ideas that will turn Britain around. “The Reform Party knows how to party!” declared James Taylor, the president of the US Heartland Institute, in the awed tones of an American who had just encountered British drinking, “and knows how to get to work in the morning.” It was eight minutes after eleven.

Some of his colleagues had been at work earlier. Lois Perry, the director of his group’s British arm, revealed that Nigel Farage had given her three glasses of champagne for breakfast. He’d also advised her not to speak after drinking, but she’d decided to ignore that.

She had some views about why successive governments were trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. “Why are they doing it?” she asked. “It’s nothing to do whatsoever with the environment. It’s to control us. It’s to tax us. It’s to take our money and to take our liberty.” Take our what now? “Electric cars can be remotely controlled!” That sounds a bit … “Not a conspiracy theory!” Oh, OK.

If the Friday of Reform’s conference was about telling the world that this was Britain’s next government, the Saturday was a reassurance that the party’s lunatic element is still in good health. Rival parties that were watching — and they all were — will have found their cups running over with examples of good old-fashioned crankiness. Taylor had opened by explaining that climate change was being boosted by “globalists”. Perry expanded on this: “There’s someone sitting in a white cage somewhere, stroking a white cat and laughing at us,” she said.

The host of the event where Perry was explaining her not-conspiracy theories was Christopher Monckton, who conclusively proved two decades ago that climate change isn’t real. He has also conclusively proved that the ejection of hereditary peers from the House of Lords wasn’t legal and didn’t happen, and it seems likely that he’s got conclusive proofs of quite a few other things, should you find yourself cornered at a party by him.

It tells you something about Reform that the role of centrist on the panel was taken by a man from the Institute for Economic Affairs. “You do need to keep sensible green opinion onside,” he said, though that car may already have departed, under remote control from the globalists.

One of the interesting tensions at the conference has been between the Reform speakers making big promises about the future and those who after this year’s local elections actually find themselves running local government, and realising that actual politics involves hard realities. There was a version of that on Saturday morning, as the man from the IEA explained that even if, by some incredible chance, Monckton was wrong and everyone else was right, climate change would be good because we’d be able to grow lemons and oranges in Yorkshire. Fifty feet away the National Farmers Union was holding its own event. For its members, climate change is already affecting crops in much less helpful ways.

But perhaps British wheat is just suffering from false consciousness. Monckton blames our education system for that, but you won’t be surprised to learn he has a plan to fix it: “Getting rid of the BBC!” At this, the woman behind me screamed, actually screamed: “Yes! YES! YEEEESSSS!” I determined to on no account have what she was having.

An audience member gave a tale of woe and Monckton sympathised. “I too came from a poorish family,” explained the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, eldest son of Major-General Gilbert Monckton, 2nd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley.

He is sure that kids are being fed woke nonsense in the education system. Fortunately, he has a solution for that, too, to record all lessons in primary and secondary schools, and film all university lectures. “That would stop the communist propaganda dead.”

An audience member warned that this wouldn’t be enough. He’d looked up climate change on the internet and been told it was real. “This is what we’re up against, the entire Google search engine thing.”

This was, in fairness to Reform, a fringe event, so it’s not necessarily the case that Monckton speaks for the party. He told us there was “a sporting chance” that Farage would put him in his Cabinet with the energy brief. But then he told us a lot of things.

The inevitability of Prime Minister Farage isn’t the only thing the conference is certain of. I lost count of the number of people who told me the government is on the brink of going to the IMF for a bail-out. And then there’s Covid. 

Aseem Malhotra, a doctor with some distinctive views on the pandemic, is definitely an approved voice, invited to speak in the main hall. “Covid jabs have likely killed or seriously harmed millions of people across the world,” he said to a room full of people who, and I’m not judging here, fitted into quite a few of the risk profiles for Covid-19. “Not a single person should have been injected,” he went on, to applause.

Not that Malhotra is a conspiracy theorist or an anti-vaxxer! Perish the thought! “Have you heard anything anti-vax or conspiracy theory here?” said a man who also claimed the vaccines were pushed by Big Pharma and made Bill Gates half a billion dollars.

There was more: “It’s highly likely that the Covid vaccines have been a factor, a significant factor, in the cancer of members of the royal family.” It will be interesting to see which of the Reform-backing papers splash on that astonishing revelation on Sunday.

What do Reform members think of all this? They gave Malhotra a big ovation, but it’s hard to know. There’s one thing they’re sure about, though, and that’s immigration. Sarah Pochin, Reform’s newest MP, explained that the rise in reported rapes over recent decades coincided with the rise in immigrants living in the country.

And yet there was something that the crowd wasn’t quite getting. When were they going to hear from someone with the courage to say that we should just kill all the asylum seekers? It wouldn’t be long. The afternoon’s big attraction was Reform’s own Nelson Mandela, “Britain’s favourite political prisoner,” Lucy Connolly.

She was introduced by Allison Pearson, who did a decent job of making her look quite reasonable, if only by comparison. Pearson at one stage accused the police of having “tampered” with the evidence against Connolly. Her co-host Liam Halligan swiftly corrected that: “There was a distortion.”

Connolly said she wanted to work with Reform “and overhaul the prison system”, arguing that people needed mental health provision rather than jail. That’s not the Reform line: Pochin had earlier promised to build more prisons, as well as deporting foreign prisoners. And inviting domestic ones to conference.

Elsewhere, the party’s leader was signing Reform football shirts. They usually cost £40, but a signed one was £100. That seems like a lot, but it comes with a big saving to the NHS. Every signed shirt has been touched by the very hand of Nigel, which means it can cure leprosy and scrofula. Where we’re going, we won’t need vaccines.