Nigel and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Week

From racist MPs to phantom audits, Reform UK’s revolution is starting to look less “take back control” and more “lost the password again.”

This is Bearly Politics - an independent publication about power, policy, and the British tendency to elect people we’d never actually trust to fix a printer. Today, we’re talking Reform UK: the party that promised to cut waste, tackle chaos, and ended up embodying both - all while Brexit’s bill finally lands on the doormat.

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Happy Time Change Sunday, everyone!

The clocks went back - and so did Reform UK’s prospects / Photo by Ocean Ng on Unsplash

If, like me, this is a day that is particularly confusing, welcome! Having grown up in a country that had no need for this time shifting nonsense, the two time change periods in the year are a bit of a baffling period for me, and I end up with an instantly confused sleep pattern that leaves me blinking confusedly at the clock while gauging the day outside. Which is exactly what happened this morning.

So what is there to do when you’re up at sparrow’s fart (maybe, I’m not sure) with not much else to do? Naturally, you doom scroll the news - and end up finding that some of the news out there isn’t all that doomy.

Specifically the news around Reform this week which was… not great for them, I’ll be honest, because as an insurgent party, there comes a time when the thrill of shrieking loudly from the sidelines collides rather violently with the tedium of governing inside.

There is a small feeling for me that the headlines that used to read like a steady drumline are now sounding much more like a cutlery drawer during an earthquake: clatter, clatter, whooops.

As it turns out, and as Reform has found out this week, performative rage isn’t the same as performance management, that promising to set fire to red tape does not, as a rule, produce a functioning firebrigade and that when the entirety of your public proposition is “we tell it like it is”, you shouldn’t repeatedly show said public that you don’t have the foggiest of what “it” is.

There has been a vibe shift this week - Reform’s promise has always been kinetic - energy, authenticity with a bar-stool certainty that if “common sense” people with “common sense” brains were in charge, the country would obviously run better - and this works an absolute treat when your job is to heckle, but the treat turns sour when your job is to deliver.

Caerphilly largely crystallised this.

Reform had the wind, the noise and the “here we go!” graphics at the ready, along with a neat little narrative of “Labour’s finished, Reform’s ascendant, tectonic plates are moving beneath our feet.” Except when the votes were counted, Plaid smiled politely at them and carried on with their day.

Now it wasn’t just that Reform lost the by-election - it’s that they had positioned this as their definite breakthrough and still couldn’t cross the line.

Why is that?

Well, it’s largely down to the fact that protest politics loves and thrives on inevitability, while ballot boxes are stubbornly literal.

To make matters worse for Reform, their managerial myth is not so slowly disintegrating around them in real time with DOGE. This little project was designed to be Reform’s case study in what it looks like when you give them power - it was supposed to say “we don’t just moan, we fix.” Their plan was that they would arrive at council offices with high-viz moral clarity, audit your waste, bulldoze every bit of inefficiency you have, save you MILLIONS before lunch and call it a day.

Except - they didn’t do that. Not once. Not a single, real, honest-to-god completed audit has been performed in the six months since they launched this Musk-tribute act - that despite the multiple photo-ops, breathless press releases and insta-boomerangs of stern men looking at spreadsheets that were actually just test pages that the printer threw out.

Councils refused data access (rightly), legal teams pointed out that words like “audit” mean things (obviously) and the supposed “task force” behaved less like seasoned professionals and more like the best real-life example of the Dunning-Kruger effect you could possibly ask for.

And that was just the practical failure of DOGE - the political failure runs far, far deeper than that. Because DOGE was the thesis statement when it comes to the governing formula of Reform UK - they loudly said “we’re the adults, we’ll do the hard, boring, technical bits while everyone else plays culture war.”

You don’t get to keep that particular narrative when your flagship programme vanishes into a cloud of excuses and LinkedIn self-congratulation, and it exposes the complete hollowness at the centre of the pitch.

Anyone can say “we’ll run a tighter ship”, but the reality is that far fewer people can actually navigate the tides, charts, cargo, crew, storms and insurance it actually needs to happen.

Doge has to show some sort of saving, signed off findings or any measurable piece of delivery - the camera itself simply cannot be the whole of your product offering.

And while said camera is rolling, the sound is absolutely dreadful. KCC - Reform’s “shop window” as they’ve been flattering themselves it would be - has gone from flagship council to cautionary tale in what feels like record time. Footage was leaked recently of Linden Kemkaran berating fellow councillors and barking “suck it up” at them. Formal complaints have been lodged, whips have been suspended and talk of splinter groups now abound. This goes beyond just being a bad look and is becoming a branding catastrophe for our dear insurgents.

If you promise high and low to tame Westminster’s chaos, but can’t even keep your own caucus together at county level, voters are going to infer the obvious - you are not the solution to dysfunction - you’re its purveyor.

None of this, of course, happens in isolation - because political parties are stories, and every plot point influences how we as the viewing audience receives the next installment. So when you add racism scandals (and yes, saying that “it drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people” like there’s an infestation is racist, not “politically incorrect”, not “just saying what other people think”, just plain racist) you aren’t dealing with that notorious single bad apple that gets the finger pointed at it so often, you’re confirming that your vetting and culture are fully aligned with ugliness.

The line between “speaking plainly” and punching down at people who are different to you isn’t that blurry, and there are plenty of voters who want to hear hard truths about housing, wages, health and borders, but very few are keen on being drafted into an eternal grievance about who is and isn’t allowed to appear in the next John Lewis christmas ad.

The mantle of “common sense” and the subtext of “why are there so many brown people on the telly” subtext do not cohabit comfortably.

Throw the ever-growing Russia hangover on top of all this and things start to curdle even further. Farage himself remains the gravity well of the party, whether he’s technically the leader on Tuesday, the patron saint of pub banter on Friday or GB News’s main presenter the rest of the time - his proximity to figures who have been found to be very Kremlin-adjacent isn’t just a niche concern concentrated in Westminster, it speaks to trust and trustworthiness.

Reform’s supposed super-power is the pose they strike of incorruptibility - but if your circle includes people like Nathan Gill who has turned out to be… how shall we put this… very much corruptible and your own media record includes years and years of Putin “strong leadership” flattery, you cannot be shocked when the public’s eyebrows remain raised at halfmast.

And when it comes to policy, which should be coming to the rescue, there’s a smear of lipstick and vague gestures towards white papers that never seem to materialise, which was writ large with Nadine Dorries’ appearance on Question Time this week, which was brutal.

Not because the audience laughed (though that they did), but because the laughter arrived as a rational response to something that wasn’t there - which was even the most basic understanding of how Reform would actually deal with migration. If your own chosen frontline communicators cannot explain your migration policy beyond loud sputtering, that’s not just a comms issue, that’s a clear and complete lack of policy.

The thing that ties all these disparate strands together is not “bad luck” or “the MSM” - it’s the conversion rate problem that sideswipes almost every populist project the moment it meets the civil service, courts, procurement law, budgets, HR and calendars. Anger and heckling does not convert very well into scheduling and logistics and identity politics struggles to turn into something as simple as invoicing and understanding what a procurement framework is.

Reform’s week from hell has simply made that conversion rate visible to the naked eye - from the hype around polling to an actual Welsh seat, from DOGE press conferences to legally compliant audit reports and from “say the quiet part out loud” to a functioning non-bigoted candidate base and from the “we’ll show you how we run things to”… running things and them falling apart.

The final, and potentially biggest, hurdle that now stands before Reform came right on cue this week as well in the form of the wider weather - the government has finally stopped pretending that Brexit was a completely neutral gear change and has begun to articulate what businesses, ports, scientists, farmers and any person who’s tried to move a box of anything across the channel already knew:

There are costs attached to Brexit and they are expensive.

Not theoretical, forecast or abstract costs - real, compounding, baked-in-by-design frictions that have dampened trade, investment and productivity.

This will of course be painted as a “remainer relapse” of sorts by the usual peanut gallery, but it turns out that we are moving, if somewhat slowly, toward a mood of fiscal arithmetic and more importantly, the politics of permission.

By acknowledging the actual harm caused by Brexit, the government has given itself permission to mitigate it - and that is absolutely lethal to Reform’s emotional monopoly on “telling the truth.” If the actual grown-ups are now saying, calmly and with proof that Brexit has carried a bill, the need for shitposters in suits diminishes rather dramatically.

This move to truth also yanks a foundational plank straight from Reform’s platform, because Farage’s central myth has been that he alone pressed the big red button that made the UK “Great” and “Independent” and “Real”Again” - but once the official line of the state shifts from hagiography to triage by routinely attributing the country’s economic underperformance to Brexit, then Farage’s baby starts to look a bit colicky.

He can rage, of course - he can accuse Labour of betrayal, timidity or treason by acronym - but if the electorate hears, week after week that their grocery bills, mortgage rates, business paperwork and their kid’s missing their Erasmus semester are all at least partially linked to the choice that he very passionately championed, his shtick curdles into a litany of excuses.

Now, of course, we have to be realistic - Reform will not evaporate overnight. Discontent does not disappear because Rachel Reeves put a coherent sentence together about customs forms and there is very obviously a contingent of voters who call for “burn it down, salt the earth, deport the wind!”, and the Conservative right has spent years feeding delicious red meat to this cohort.

But - and this is a big but - durability is not destiny, and anger on its own doesn’t scale. If you staple managerial cosplaying to constant moral panic to the residue of one very large national gamble that increasingly looks like it’ll fall apart on first contact with reality you get… well, this week. You get a party that looks important to the polls but completely unserious everywhere else.

I’m also not naive, and fully realise that the British press will keep generously giving Reform a platform, because conflict pays and boredom doesn’t. The government absolutely will falter on delivery - because they almost invariably always do. But, beneath the performative outrage, something has shifted.

The public is, with some hope, slowly shifting back to questions with answers and not feelings with hashtags. The parties that do decide to meet them there - with drafts, details, diagrams and dates - will eventually prosper, while the ones that prefer performance and ring-lights to reports and accountability will continue to trend for an afternoon before realising that it will all translate to nothing.

Anyway - I am now officially, rambling. The point of this all is that if Reform wants to avoid the plateau and fracture - the twin fates of movements that love to mistake noise for heft - it has to do the thing it least knows how to: grow up.

They would need to cut the shtick, cancel the press conferences, publish the work, sack the bigots as soon as they bigot and deliver one boring incontrovertible success after another - all of which they seem completely incapable of.

Otherwise the arc of this story is already written - they’ll remain a mood with a logo while the country, exasperated and poorer than it should be, wanders off in search of actual adults.

And if that sounds harsh - good. Because remember - this is the standard that Reform themselves have set for everyone else - “Do it properly or get out of the way.”

Quite. Now do it properly.

Or. Get. Out. Of. The. Way.

And on that note - let me excused myself to reset the oven clock for the third time while pretending I know what time it is. If this country is able to muddle through a botched divorce and an honesty binge about the bill, I should surely be able to work out whether I’m early or late for lunch.

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