Is This The Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy?

These days, anyone who was not all over social media is assumed not to exist at all. But the thing about the business with Reform UK's supposedly phantom candidates is that people believed it.

Before a health scare forced me to withdraw, I submitted my paperwork, and no one asked me for ID any more than they ever had. Yes, they knew me anyway at County Hall. But they knew me anyway, and better, at the polling station. One does hope that voter suppression will not now lead to candidate suppression, "to close the loophole."

Pity poor James McMurdock. He has not been given a policy brief, since someone has to be a backbencher in order to give Lee Anderson something to do as Reform's Chief Whip. Can you be a Chief Whip if you are the only Whip? Apparently so. Meanwhile, Anderson's wife, Sinead, remains on Mansfield District Council. As a Conservative.

The new Government Whips' Office includes two people who were first elected last week, two twentysomethings who won by-elections in the last year, a by-election winner from 2022, someone who was elected to the last Parliament as a Conservative, and someone who lost her seat to a Conservative that same day. Feel the authority.

To return to Reform, well, Richard Tice was elected and Ben Habib was not, so it is Tice who gets to be Deputy Leader now, while Zia Yusuf gave more money, so he now gets to provide the cover, if you catch my drift. That's politics. Habib is running the risk of blowing his peerage. Ann Widdecombe, on the other hand, is an old pro.

Still, Habib's behaviour is positively seemly compared to that of Thangam Debbonaire or Jonathan Ashworth. Why are they being interviewed, rather than the elected MPs who defeated them? Unless I am very much mistaken, Carla Denyer is the first ever Chadsperson MP. And having known Jonathan since we were freshers (I am not aware that he was ever called Jon in those days), I implore him to consider that he was now a Privy Counsellor. Show some dignity.

After all, Jonathan remains more than capable of politics the old-fashioned way, what with the hit on Majid Freeman to try to link him to Shockat Adam. Not that Conservatives are in any position to gloat. Well into living memory, they were the party of Church against Chapel and of Protestants against Catholics. Toryism's roots were explicitly sectarian, and its vehicle's only gain last week was at Leicester East, while the Chairmanship of the 1922 Committee has been fixed for Bob Blackman, massively re-elected at Harrow East.

Nor should those who had accrued to Reform be reaching for the popcorn. They will come for you next, as the same people did after they had taken down Jeremy Corbyn. We tried to warn you. They are convinced that they are on "the centre ground" and that everyone else is a dangerous extremist, so in their own terms they cannot not do this. And they are the Government now. Take the warning this time.