Andrea Jenkyns’ £147k Inbox and the Vanishing of Reform’s Shiny New Toy
A party that promised to root out waste can’t even manage its own inbox.
Dame Andrea Jenkyns, ex-Tory minister now Reform Mayor of Lincolnshire (and occasionally dodgy sequinned singer that makes the whole country wince with cringe) put in a bit of a request this week - she needs £147k to help her answer emails.
I. Kid. You. Not.
The only appropriate response, in my mind at least, to Andrea is of course the one that millions of people in the UK were told for many years by her erstwhile party - she’ll just have to “do more with less.” Because while the rest of us have learned to get by on cut services, decimated budgets and a lack of any sort of meaningful investment, Andrea apparently needs a six-figure sum just to hit “reply all.”
And I’m very sorry, but unless Lincolnshire has suddenly reverted to quills, velum and wax seals for their correspondence or Andrea is dictating her inbox to a team of monks by candlelight, that number is completely absurd.
But, beyond the absurdity of this all, something struck me… isn’t this exactly the kind of thing that Reform’s big shiny initiative - the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE - was meant to deal with? You know, the bloated costs, inefficiencies and bureaucratic nonsense that Reform would not stop talking about? Surely Andrea’s magical £147k inbox would be Exhibit A?
And then I realised - DOGE has gone terribly quiet.
Back in May, after Reform had won over a couple of councils following the local elections, DOGE was rolled out with massive fanfare - it was the solution to everything from potholes to geopolitics. There was nothing this team could not do with their 20-something volunteers and pluckiness! Wast, fraud, inefficiency - all of it was supposed to be rooted out by this fearless new “department.” The promise was that billions would be saved. Billions I say!
And then, as with all Reform stunts… they appear to have simply, well, lost interest.
The last mention from Reform’s main account on X was in Mid-July. Tice has gone silent on the subject since then as well. Farage dropped hasn’t spoken about it since around June on X, presumably once he realised it didn’t have a US TV slot attached to it. 30p Lee Anderson gave it a passing nod in July, but that man says “waste” so often, it may as well have been a nervous tic. Pochin mentioned it once and then… nothing. For two months now, it’s been dead air.
And there’s a very good reason for this - DOGE was never actually really a thing. It was a gimmick. A novelty. Something shiny (stolen from the US) used as an excuse to generate headlines featuring VERY BIG NUMBERS!
Reform MPs, councillors and members of the DOGE team never had access or permission to audit anything - there was no access to secret Whitehall spreadsheets, no tranche of previously hidden documents, hell, there wasn’t even a data sharing agreement in place with the councils they were “investigating.” They just declared there were billions in waste and promised to find it with no actual plan on how they would go about doing so. It was a stunt, an acronym - a stick to wave at Labour and the Tories.
It is, of course, worth investigating what DOGE found in its brief existence, in that shining moment sweating in the spotlight?
Best you brace yourself for one of their biggest, most thunderous success stories - Kent County Council was found to have spent £1,113 on TV Licences for Asylum seekers… except of course, it turned out that this was for TV licences for shared Asylum Centres that housed children. I know. Revolutionary, isn’t it?
They also, through apparent sheer grit, that some councils were paying rather a lot for ergonomic chairs - £520k in Lincolnshire, which when considering that the council employs over 4,000 employees works out to £130 per employee.
Other earth shattering unveilings included £11,500 spent annually on diversity1 courses in Lincolnshire - or roughly what would be spent on tea and biscuits every few weeks by a council that, again, employs thousands of people. They also found a £44k spend for a Net Zero consultant which is incredibly reasonable, and considering Net Zero commitments, pretty important and the fact that this was across ten councils.
It does, however, get even more farcical. Nigel Farage, very proudly, announced on the BBC that DOGE had saved £1m in IT costs at West Northamptonshire, which the council, very shortly after, confirmed rather diplomatically was “hard to validate” - which is polite local government speak for “complete and utter bollocks.” The actual negotiations for this saving had started several months before Reform gained their seats and the real savings were £320k. Farage had just tripled the figure for the telly, presumably in the hope that no one would check.
Unfortunately for him,
did check.
Even better than this, Reform at one point claimed their crack team had “uncovered £2.8m in fraud” at Kent - except that the fraud had been identified months before they arrived, had already been documented to the audit committee in my this year and was brightly written in official reports.
DOGE’s contribution was literally reading the minutes of a meeting and taking credit for it - which is rather like arriving on a burglary scene after the police have arrested everyone and loudly claiming you had solved the case. Utterly laughable.
And very, very annoying if you know the actual work that goes into things like finding efficiencies in local services - and having an understanding of what the difference between a procurement framework and an actual contract is.
So, after months of investigation, overly excitable press-conferences and disrupted council meetings, DOGE’s actual achievements amounted to getting confused about procurement frameworks, spotting a few chairs, inflating someone else’s IT savings by 300% and taking credit for fraud detection that they didn’t actually do. If this were a university assignment, they would have been thrown out on their arses for plagiarism and piss-poor work.
The biggest reason why DOGE wasn’t going to survive contact with reality though?
It’s because there’s incredibly little efficiency to be realised in local authorities. Councils just are not hiding vaults and vaults full of cash - they’ve all been stripped bare. Most LAs now spend nearly three-quarters of their budgets on statutory service - things like social care and homelessness. Whatever is left pays for bins, libraries, potholes, the occasional streetlight, and more recently, the removal of flags from lampposts.
You cannot “efficiency” your way out of a £71m deficit when you’ve already had £288m cut out of your budget over the past decade. There just is no magic pot of savings. The cupboards are completely bare, the fridge is hollow and Reform can insist as hard as they want that there’s a fillet mignon hiding behind the ketchup, but the fact is that it’s just more deficit.
And while Reform has been waving their arms around to get as much attention on impossible savings, their very own councillors have proven to be completely inadequate.
Daniel Taylor, Cliftonville councillor for reform, managed to get himself charged with allegedly threatening to kill his wife on the back of controlling behaviour for more than a decade.
Sam Journet, a Basildon Councillor, was arrested and put in handcuffs inside council offices after repeatedly harassing staff and trespassing in restricted areas2.
John Allen from Northumberland was suspended for making threats to shoot the Prime Minister.
Wayne Titley managed to resign from Staffordshire County Council after just two weeks3 when his Facebook posts about a “volley of gunfire” to sink migrant boats.
There are also a number of councillors still in post despite being expelled from the party itself - like Mark Broadhurst from Doncaster who took to sharing Hitler memes, specifically one suggesting that Hitler would have been “a legend” if he had targeted Muslims instead of Jews.
He is still a councillor. Still making decisions about local services. Still drawing his allowance. Reform can expel him from the party, but they can’t expel him from office.
Most hilariously though is the fact that Reform handed massive responsibilities to what are basically teenagers who had barely finished their A-levels.
Joseph Boam, all of the ripe old age of 22, was made Deputy Leader and Adult Social Care Lead4 at Leicestershire County Council - before being removed after three months for literally having no clue what he was doing.
George Finch, 19 years old, was made the Warwickshire County Council leader - and promptly asked for £150k on political advisors, because, surprise, surprise, someone who has only recently finished high-school may not actually have any idea what they’re doing.
And none of this is happening in a vacuum - because while Reform is pushing shiny marketing ploys and putting teenagers in charge of services they’ve never even been exposed to, these councils have real, genuine problems.
Durham County, with its massive budget shortfalls, was taken over by Reform who promptly removed LGBTQ+ and Ukrainian flags, scrapped net-zero targets and banned staff from working from home, leading to not a single penny saved. Austerity had already damaged this council to beyond repair, and Reform just added petty symbolism on top of it.
In England’s largest LA, Kent, spent months in paralysis once Reform took control. Committees couldn’t function because new councillors hadn’t done mandatory training while planning applications and necessary work piled up unattended. The council was a ghost ship while the much-hyped DOGE imploded in rows over asylum budgets that the council itself doesn’t control and staff flooded into unions, desperate for protection from chaos.
I would laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all, but all of this has incredibly damaging impacts. Because Reform isn’t just plain incompetent, they’re also actively busy dismantling the exact services that the communities they’re supposed to represent need to survive after nearly a decade and half of cuts and losses of local support. If this is any sort of indication of what we can look forward to with a possible Reform government in 2029 then we are in big, big trouble.
All of this brings me back to DOGE. A department loudly trumpeted, exhuberantly celebrated, now gone.
Why?
Because it couldn’t survive even the mildest scrutiny. Because it turns out that the councils that Reform now control are turning into the least efficient of them all, drowning in self-made chaos. DOGE died a quiet death because the only waste it could expose was Reform itself.
And yet, the culture wars will trundle on - flags will come down, Net Zero policies will be ripped up, LGBTQ+ initiatives will be binned and migrants will be scapegoated. This is all that Reform has. They have proven that they cannot run councils, cannot manage budgets and cannot govern.
The only thing they can do is perform by waving culture war red rags and hope nobody notices that the cupboards are bare.
Andrea Jenkyn’s £147k email request is the perfect parable for this - here is a mayor, elected under a Reform banner, already asking for more money to do less. If DOGE were real, it would have already been investigating her. If Reform were a serious party, they’d be rooting out her inbox excess. Instead, they’re all silent, because the only standard Reform holds anyone to is pretty much non-existent.
I am grateful to DOGE though. In the end it didn't expose government waste - it exposed Reform's. So here's to Andrea and her £147k inbox - the perfect symbol of a party that talks endlessly about efficiency while practising none of it.
Diversity: a word that sends any good Reform member straight into an uncontrollable fannywoblle.
To note, the council had already implemented safety measures to keep staff safe from the man, but Journet kept turning up anyway.
This triggered a by-election that cost the council £27k - the sort of waste that DOGE should have been investigating, but it was too busy not actually existing.
A sidenote here - I work very closely with multiple local authorities on Adult Social Care. I have decades of experience working in healthcare and community services, and even I find this incredibly complex. There was no chance this was going to fly, and I’m personally pissed off that so much time was lost on this particular portfolio because it would have had direct, measurable impact on people that need the most support.
God forbid that Farage and his cronies get anywhere near Downing Street.
A dose of verbosity which exposes Reform fantasies, gives us the reality and entertains with big dollops of feline humour ( a saucer of milk for table 2 perhaps) is soothing medicine for this household. Thank you Bear