The warning to one of her fellow councillors by Linden Kemkaran, Reform’s leader on Kent County Council (KCC), may well be one which voters will have to get used to if Nigel Farage becomes prime minister.
“I’m afraid if you don’t like it you are just going to have to f***ing suck it up,” she said in a rather chaotic Zoom meeting.
During the tape of the video conference, first published by The Guardian, Cllr Kemkaran also made a very pertinent point and one which should worry Mr Farage and other senior figures in Reform.
“Let’s not forget, we are the shop window in KCC. People are looking at us, they are judging us every single minute of every single day. Nigel knows that. He is super aware that we are the flagship council.”
The problem the party has is, if the party was a shop, it is increasingly looking like one of those “everything for £1” shops in a run-down high street where the once great flagship stores (the Tories and Labour) are now mostly boarded-up.
Reform are still massively ahead in the polls (32 per cent to the Tories’ 17 per cent and Labour’s 15 per cent according Find Out Now) but cracks are beginning to show which could throw some doubt on whether its big lead is sustainable.
This rather shambolic video from Kent has coincided with new issues regarding people close to Mr Farage and the arrival of a very right-wing, anti-abortion, Christian nationalist adviser for the Reform leader.
Crack 1: Proving themselves in government
Let us start with Kent, where Reform took over last May promising to bring down council tax with their new Elon Musk-inspired Doge units.
It said a lot about those Doge units, run by former party chair Zia Yusuf, that they were recruiting video experts for online more than accountants.
But Kent was the first council they took over with serious hopes they would slash spending.
Now on the video, Cllr Kemkaran is admitting that she is struggling to find £2.5bn of cuts and is still going to have to raise council tax.
Her one hope is that they raise it less than the 5 per cent maximum which she told her fellow councillors was the main aim. Not quite reducing people’s council tax bills.
It was reminiscent of the pledge to sack diversity officers by Lincolnshire’s new mayor Andrea Jenkyns, who was met with the news after her election that the county council did not employ any.
Reform took control of 10 councils last May, one of which they have had to appoint an 18-year-old to lead. With low turnouts expected, they could be in charge in Wales after the next elections and win many other councils.
But the experience so far is that governing and running things is hard work. Easy political slogans and simple solutions are much more difficult to implement than say.
By 2029 Reform will have a record of governing which voters will be able to see. So far it is not looking good.
Crack 2: The dependence on Nigel Farage
At Reform’s conference in September Mr Farage publicly mocked the idea that the party is “a one-man team”. At the time he pointed to a row of football shirts with other prominent party names on the back such as Zia Yusuf, Dame Andrea Jenkyns and Richard Tice.
But at the shop only one shirt was for sale – the one with Mr Farage’s name on the back.
The fact is that Reform is the Nigel Farage party.
Political opponents from the 2024 general election and last year’s local elections report how at the doorstep voters would tell them: “I’m voting for Nigel.”
It was never voting for Reform. His abundant skills and personality have elevated him and his party on a path to national power.
But while Mr Farage is a strength, he is also the weakness. A microscope is now being applied to those closest to him and surrounding him. The picture is less than pretty.
This weekend it was revealed that Mr Farage’s French partner Laure Ferrari is at the heart of a fraud investigation in Brussels.
The investigation is related to her former role as executive director of the Institute for Direct Democracy in Europe (IDDE), a think tank based in the Belgian capital, which auditors refused to sign off spending of hundreds of thousands of euros of public funds in 2016.
But it is not only her. Reform’s former Welsh leader Nathan Gill, a longtime friend and ally of Mr Farage, has just been found guilty of taking Russia-linked bribes. Gill, from Llangefni, Anglesey, pleaded guilty last month to eight counts of bribery between 6 December 2018 and 18 July 2019.
While some, including the pollster and commentator Matthew Goodwin, believe that this is just an attempt to throw mud at Farage, eventually, if there is enough of it, the mud begins to stick.
Politicians embroiled in scandals tend to struggle to get the mass support they need to win. Ask Marine Le Pen in France. But without Mr Farage, Reform’s support is likely to nosedive.
Crack 3: The policy vacuum
At their conference in Birmingham in September, corporate advisers visiting Reform’s get-together were impressed by their enthusiasm and energy, but all of them were concerned by the policy vacuum.
Now we are seeing this vacuum being filled and in a way which has already raised eyebrows.
Within in a matter of weeks, right-wing MP Danny Kruger, an anti-abortion, Christian nationalist, has joined Reform and been given the role of working up Reform’s policies for the next election.
This weekend the theologian James Orr – a similarly anti-abortion, Christian nationalist – has formally joined the party and become Mr Farage’s adviser.
The two highly intelligent men have seen the vacuum and perhaps an opportunity to shape a party with the sort of extreme social conservatism they believe in and is seen with Viktor Orban in Hungary.
Not surprisingly, Orr considers asylum seekers arriving in the UK to be “invaders”.
No surprises that both are close to the Maga movement in the US and in particular vice-president JD Vance who shares their views.
While there is certainly a space for this sort of party in the UK, the question is whether it is a winning formula.
The narrow perspective is unlikely to get the sort of broad appeal needed to win in the UK.
Crack 4: An unsustainable coalition
Reform is popular at the moment, largely because the two traditional main parties, Labour and the Tories, are at historic low levels of support.
But that 32 per cent or so that they are consistently polling is made up of a very diverse group of voters whose views often clash.
In addition to that, about 10 per cent are people who either rarely or never vote, so cannot be relied on to go to the polls.
The experience at the Reform conference was enough to suggest that one set or other on the right and left of politics will be disappointed.
At the conference, The Independent spoke to a former Tory donor in the network of super-rich donors who once bankrolled the Conservatives.
He hailed Reform as a breath of fresh air and a party that would finally deregulate Britain to a sort of very low tax, zero employment rights, Singapore-style economy.
Soon after, The Independent had a conversation with a Reform member who is a Tube train driver in London. Unlike the millionaire businessman, he was looking forward to Reform nationalising everything and raising taxes. In fact, he was a member of the RMT union and planned to go on strike the following day.
UK politics is used to broad churches in its main parties, but the gulf between these positions is unbridgeable.
While Mr Farage can nod to the left and right and hope to unite them on issues like immigration and culture war politics, this will only go so far and could spell problems at the next general election.
