Farage’s Reform UK: Pints for Votes, Champagne for Cash
Champagne Populism at its Finest: Spectacle for the Base, Access for the Wealthy, Normalisation of Extremism for Everyone Else
I get called a Champagne Socialist pretty regularly. At least once a week, a random Twitterer will pop up under a post of mine where I’ve said something. It doesn’t matter what really – I could be commenting on how full the tube was that day, or saying just how much I’ve enjoyed the summer, and up they’ll pop:
“You’re just a lefty Champagne Socialist!”
It’s inevitable, and it’s highly amusing1.
Very amusing, partly because my idea of a big night out includes whatever is at least 20% off on Deliveroo and avoiding socialising at all cost and partly because the insult has become this weird reflex from some commentators - the idea that if you’re nominally on the left and not literally eating gruel under a bridge, you’re a flaming hypocrite.
And yet in Birmingham this weekend, we got to see exactly what Champagne Populism looks like from none other than Nigel Farage - the supposed scourge of the elites, pint-clutcher-in-chief - presiding over Reform UK’s conference at the NEC, where access came in tiers that would honestly make Goldman-Sachs blush.
Corporate sponsorship packages went stratospheric to £250k, with the promise of personal assistants and “intimate2” access to the man who has for years nattered endlessly about the corrupting influence of the “elite” in politics.
Reform, regardless of what their particular gritty social media posts for the day may want to tell you, are not the down-to-earth movement they’re pretending to be - they’re blatantly a bankers Christmas party with more and more MAGA’esque aesthetics. It’s Farage railing noisily against the “establishment” before slipping away discreetly to clink glasses of Dom Perignon with the exact corporate elites that Reform claims to stand against.
The brazenness of it is actually quite impressive - but what it truly does is expose the central contradiction of Reform:
The claim of being a party for “ordinary people”, built on pub wisdom and kitchen table economics3 while in the very same breath flogging access like a Soho member’s club with dodgier wallpaper.
Which raises the topic we’ll explore today - if this is truly a “people’s movement”, why does it look, smell and price itself like a hedge fund gala?
The Cringeworthy Spectacle of Populism
Before getting into the detail of this all, I think it’s worth painting a picture of what the event actually looked like, because walking into the NEC this weekend, you would be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled into a low-rent Vegas knock-off rather than a political party conference in Birmingham.
It had indoor fireworks and lighting effects that wouldn’t look out of place at Eurovision with everything surrounded by rows of stalls flogging “Farage Number 10” football shirts4 - honestly, it was one key change away from me expecting Graham Norton to start providing live commentary.
There was Jeremy Kyle as a “roving reporter” - once the king of daytime television who made his name by exploiting other people’s misery now striding around the conference floor like a Temu version of Tucker Carlson. His promotional video made promises of the conference being “great fun”, which tells you absolutely everything you need to know about where policy came in on the agenda.
But the insane, absurd, utterly baffling pièce de résistance?
Andrea Jenkyns, that former Tory minister and sign-language enthusiast now turned Reform Mayor for Lincolnshire with a rather narrow grasp on what EDI means, deciding that the one thing that the United Kingdom really needed was her very own self-written power ballad belted out full throatedly while bedecked in so many sequins that I could hear the tinkling as Liberace started spinning in his grave. Honestly, the whole performance was so toe curlingly cringe that I nearly fell off my sofa in sheer second-hand embarrassment when it came onto my feed.
And now you get to see it too.
This just was not a party conference, it was a pantomime to bad taste, complete with villains, cheap tat and audience participation, and that, is exactly the point. Reform aren’t trying to look like a traditional British political party - they’re trying to look like an American one. Spectacle first (and foremost), policy later (if ever). They’re doing their very best to emulate the strategy of the Geriatric Orange Gameshow Host that is currently in charge of the United States.
Get the crowd hyped. Distract the cameras. Make sure no one spends too long asking any awkward questions about legality, feasibility or the fact that you’ve just given a platform to a conspiracy theorist who’s trying to convince people that vaccines cause cancer and a woman who was only recently released from prison for… checks notes… inciting racial hatred5.
The bright lights, shiny sequins and singing mayor are all cover. The fireworks are only there for camouflage. The show itself is a distraction and they’re hoping that the dangerous bits slip through unnoticed.
Cash for Access
Which brings us back to the truly eyebrow raising issue - or the one that should be anyway.
The £250k corporate sponsorship packages giving access to the man of the hour himself is… worrying. This went well beyond cash for access by the backdoor and went straight into full on advertising in the damned brochure. Even the Tories with their own long history of donor sleaze used to at least try to pretend. You’d be invited to a “business leaders’ dinner” that just coincidentally cost you £10k a ticket. Reform have dispensed with that fig-leaf completely - here it is, naked and unashamed, printed in the conference catalogue:
If you have money, Nigel will make time.
The supposed “Man of the People”, who would apparently sooner talk to you over a fag break and a room temperature ale than around a boardroom table, except it turns out that the real access for that chat happens in full when you can cover the cost for an Aston Martin. While Operation Restoring Justice is about deporting 600,000 migrants, Operation Restoring Access is strictly reserved for Amex Platinum card holders.
And while most CEOs are still rightfully a bit sceptical, there were indeed some big hitters present, like JCB, TikTok and Airbnb and hundreds of others. On top of this, the attendance by public affairs professionals doubled from last year’s ten percent to up to twenty percent this year - that’s a whole fifth of the lobbying industry taking time out of their presumably very full diaries to stand under the indoor fireworks and listen to Farage making promises (he can’t keep) about mass deportations and sending female refugees fleeing from the Taliban… back to the Taliban.
There would be no fuss made about the fact that they were there of course - it’ll be junior staffers sent with the plausible deniability of “just keeping an eye on things”, except the effect is the same - the mere presence of corporate Britain joining in at the NEC gave this movement a veneer of legitimacy that no amount of Jeremy Kyle or sequins (or Jeremy Kyle in sequins) could.
Just Monitoring, or Legitimising?
And I think it’s safe to say that they’re not necessarily there because they’re true believers in the cause - no one can reasonably think that Operation Restoring Justice is going to survive its first brush up against the realities of international (and domestic) law, but because Reform have been polling well and the business of business is hedging bets. With even a glimmer of a chance that Farage’s party could end up the party of government, lobbyists and CEOs want to make sure that the right hands have been shaken (and greased) well in advance.
And here’s the ethical dilemma - at what point does “just monitoring” or “keeping close just in case” morph into “legitimising”?
Because you can’t just sit in the audience nodding politely while Lee Anderson is made the Welfare Spokesperson6 for Reform and then later on claim you were only there to “observe”. The presence of major corporations and businesses send a signal to Reform members, to the press, to voters, that this isn’t just a fringe movement anymore. That it’s worth TikTok’s time, and by extension, yours. When Big Business and the Banks are in the room, then it gives the impression of seriousness.
But seriousness about what, exactly?
About mass deportations so ambitious they would make Pinochet say “woah, now!”? About platforming a conspiracy theorist who claims that vaccines are a likely cause behind two members of the Royal Family having cancer? About scrapping the Climate Change Act while the planet, quite literally, burns? Serious about dismantling human rights just to create a Bill of Rights that would create the exact “two-tier” justice that Reform constantly shouts about?
Do you really, honestly, want to be nodding along to these things?
Because there’s a contradiction that should make every lobbyist squirm - Reform claim they’ll stand up to the supposed “elites”, yet their policies line up with the exact wish list of these great and good they supposedly despise.
Fossil fuel donors who want climate commitments shredded.
Deregulation-friendly financiers who see opportunity in chaos.
Business owners who would love to see nothing more than worker’s rights diluted7.
Which is where the rubber really hits the road for me, and what professionalisation actually means in the strategy of the populist, because it’s not about governing better (look at any council that Reform UK is currently running for proof of that pudding) - it’s about turning hate and division into a business model. It’s about packaging extremism into a nice, shiny, corporatised wrapper and selling it back to us as if it’s just another totally normal option on the political menu.
Because once the lobbyists and the CEOs are in the room, the danger isn’t that Reform’s policies will suddenly make sense (they don’t), it’s that they won’t need to - because respectability will do the work for them.
The Heart of the Hypocrisy
Which brings us back to the heart of the hypocrisy. Reform (and the Brexit party before them), built its brand on unbridled fury at the “elites - the “globalists”, the “out-of-touch Westminster bubble,” the “Davos-set”, yet at their conference this weekend has further revealed them as fully embedded in the same elite cash circuits they promise so sincerely they despise.
It’s a party that rails against politicians who “don’t understand ordinary people” while flogging £250k corporate sponsorships. They relentlessly attack Labour and the Tories for being “bought and sold” while literally selling access to Farage with a menu of price options that would make Trump sit up and take notice.
They heartily wave away “American influence” while mimicking the just mentioned Authoritarian’s strategy to gaining power8, beat for beat - fireworks, celebrity hosts, conspiracy theorists on stage and a merchandising stall that looked like it had been flown in from the Florida panhandle.
This leaves us with the central question: Is Reform’s anger and rage real, or is it just yet another product line? A bit of merch here, a splash of champagne there, a sprinkling of corporate influence on top - and presto - suddenly the “people’s voice” looks a helluva lot like the hedge-fund gala it pretends to despise.
Which could be true revelation of Birmingham - not a party preparing for power, but a party perfecting the art of packaging outrage for sale.
And this is why the conference in Birmingham matters.
Spectacle plus money = staying power, and unfortunately for the sane few of us looking from the outside in, Reform is busy mastering both. Fireworks and Farage on stage grab the headlines, they always do, but it’s the slightly more quiet arrival of the lobbyists and corporate sponsors that should really worry us. Outrage is fleeting, money endures, and when you weld those two factors together, you get a political force that, however shambolic, can’t be waved away as a passing sideshow.
Just look at what’s happening in the United States. That should be what guides our decision making.
Reform’s deportation fantasies are almost certain to collapse under the weight of logistics, law and basic reality, but the normalisation that comes from suited executives sitting in the audience and journalists breathlessly covering the whole spectacle as if it were a credible alternative government means that Reform does unfortunately have the potential to go further than anyone expects.
If this is what the revolution looks like, the first step will be champagne, the second press releases and the third will be expecting voters to foot the bill for the clean up.
Further Reading:
And also not very accurate - as much as I enjoy a good glass of bubbly as a welcoming drink, I’m much more inclined to a good Sancerre or Pouilly-Fumé - which I guess would more accurately make me a Loire Valley Leninist, no?
Having to write the word “intimate” in a sentence that refers to Farage has left me deeply, deeply scarred.
I am being very kind with that description - their economics in no way or form add up - back of a napkin doesn’t even get close to describing the lack of foundation to their budget.
Truly, nothing screams “Statesmanlike Gravitas” quite like turning your party leader into the back of a Wetherspoons pool team kit.
To which she pled guilty, I will remind you.
A move that had Victorian Workhouses cheer from their graves.
This is a good point to remind you that Reform made their position clear on abolishing “fire-and-rehire” (they’re not fans) and seem allergic to anything that would give workers actual protections.
On top of which Farage seems very keen all of a sudden on unelected ministers in the American style - in direct contradiction to his life’s work of fighting against unelected bureaucrats.
Au contraire mon petit! The faux outrage is there for the masses and TV ratings. The real deal is in the boardroom.
Having lived in the US at the time of POTUS45 aka Trump1 and now seeing the encore show in action, it is blatantly obvious that REFUK is playing the same songs from the (near) same hymn sheet.
What they are really doing is deploying weapons of mass distraction in the run up to creating a form of state capitalism that sits somewhere between Putin’s kleptocracy and Trump2’s grift.
Attention needs putting onto the real agenda - IM(Not)HO because that is where the real damage occurs.
Their real weakness is that without MAGA, they have no grounding at all but seem determined to follow the playbook almost word for word.
This is very good news because if you know the script, you can also write an alternative ending.
Farage has consistently denied climate change as an issue and talked about taxing renewables.
The cynic might point out that there just might be a link between that and the circa. £2.3 million the fossil fuel industry has donated to Reform.
Farage is a whore. An expensive one at that. Cash for access and policy change. Advertising gold. He doesn't have a moral compass, rather a nose for the main chance to enrich himself, however bent the opportunity.