Kemi Badenoch, sadly with another lacklustre week of leading His Majesty’s official Opposition behind her, has had an unexpected boost – Nadine Dorries has defected from the Conservatives to Reform UK.
Whatever limited gifts she brought to high office, Dorries has long outlived her usefulness to her party and the nation, and Badenoch can be forgiven for thinking that Farage is welcome to her.
For the voting public, post-Boris, Dorries is no more than a reminder of a past record of sleaze, self-indulgence and incompetence that the Conservatives desperately need to leave behind. The defenestration of Angela Rayner may hurt Labour, but it won’t necessarily bring much of a boost to the Tories. For that, they need to purge the worst elements of their past. That includes Nadine.
Anyone – and I carry the mental scars – who has subjected themselves to the paranoid fantasies contained in her curious semi-dramatised, semi-anonymised memoir The Plot will know that her view of the world is, shall we say, somewhat distorted.
The book, which has failed to make any impact on the real world, is an artefact of her fixation on Boris Johnson and the supposed conspiracy to destroy him by characters given lurid pseudonyms, presumably for legal reasons, such as “Dr No”, “The Wolf” and “The Dark Lord”. It never occurs to her that Johnson was perfectly capable of destroying himself, and, indeed, his party, with his final act being a successful attempt to ensure that Liz Truss succeeded him, and thus made him look good.
A sorry saga all round, then, and one that Dorries herself played a role in, enjoying Johnson’s patronage and being promoted beyond her abilities. She was, and is, a better author of historical “clogs and shawls” romantic fiction than of cabinet ministerial work. She was never more than the ultimate Johnson groupie.
Farage would therefore do well to bear in mind that her devotion to Johnson is that of a Mother Superior in the Order of the Perpetual Adoration of Boris. Mad Nad’s loyalty to her new leader and Reform UK will, by contrast, be secondary, shallow and mercenary, and solely contingent on the delivery to her of the peerage to which she feels so entitled, and, ironically, was botched and undelivered by Boris Johnson (she blames Rishi Sunak and his bleached teeth, of course).
Hence, I guess, Farage’s open appeal to Keir Starmer a couple of weeks ago to be allowed to nominate Reform UK peers. (That and Farage’s bizarre wish to appoint a Reform cabinet heavily comprised of figures from outside politics as members of the Lords , with no democratic accountability to the Commons. So much for democratic renewal).
Almost certainly Dorries has made this move with the acquiescence of Johnson, and it looks as if he agrees with her that the Conservative Party is “dead”. (He won’t be dwelling for long on an honest assessment of who precisely may have been principally responsible for its demise).
It feels very much as though Dorries is motivated by a burning desire to become a Lady, and she must be unbothered by the fact that her greatest political achievement, the Online Safety Act, is something that Farage recently went all the way to Washington DC to denounce. Dorries wants to protect kids; Farage wants to abolish the law that does so – an immediate, oven-made split right there.
Farage also needs to be wary of his supposedly radical new anti-Establishment party descending into a care home for deadbeat Tory politicians – and specifically those Johnsonites and Trussites who inflicted so much damage on their former party and the country in the recent past.
Many of Reform UK’s MPs, councillors and mayors, such as Andrea Jenkyns, are Tory defectors, people who have lost their previous seats or judge that they will do so shortly, and want to preserve or rebuild their undistinguished but incomplete political careers.
They can’t get a job elsewhere, frankly, apart from a gig on GB News. There’s also Sir Jake Berry, former Tory party chair, David Jones, ex-minister, and former Conservative backbenchers Adam Holloway, Anne Marie Morris and Marco Longhi. More to follow, no doubt.
Let us put it this way. If Nadine Dorries, and those like her, are the answer, then Farage and Reform UK are asking the wrong questions.
Farage should apply the following tests to his wannabe defectors. Will their defection to Reform persuade a single extra voter to switch loyalties? Do they bring fresh ideas and new thinking to Reform? Do they bring useful ministerial experience? If so, does that outweigh their track record of being members and supporters of a failed Conservative administration that the electorate loudly rejected at the last general election ?
Many in Reform UK, notably Aaron Banks, avowedly want to see the utter destruction of the Tories, yet here they are steadily metamorphosing into a Conservative Party mark 2, with policies and personnel increasingly indistinguishable from those that populated the Johnson and Truss administrations.
With the languid presence of Jacob Rees-Mogg around their conference, there’ll be much talk of “uniting the right” and deals with the Tories, maybe even a great rapprochement between Farage and Johnson.
That would be fatal to Reform’s ambitions, especially as they don’t actually need the Tories to win, if they ever did. What they do need is some sensible policies.
Pointedly, even Richard Tice has had to acknowledge that Reform cannot possibly go into the next election with such an absurd, incredible “cakeist” economic plan as the one they put forward last year. They need some better people around, for sure, and better thinking, but they won’t recruit them from the remains of what most of them left behind.
