If Tolstoy had written about British politics, he might have noted: “Happy parties are all alike; every unhappy party is unhappy in its own way.” Reform UK is beginning to resemble a laboratory test for the idea that every party run by Nigel Farage is unhappy in the same way. Just as in UKIP and the Brexit party, a highly dominant leader exists at the center of a court, with extreme tensions between loyalist long-marchers and arrivistes, between insurgency and respectability, between campaigning and preparing for government.

A new round of bloodletting erupted on August 17, when the founder of ConservativeHome, Tim Montgomerie, who defected to Reform two years ago, was suspended following public criticism of Farage and the party’s home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf. This decision came between the recording and broadcast of an interview Montgomerie gave to The Spectator expressing his concern about tone, tactical voting and party structures.

The infighting, the rows and the questions about the court structure are all off-putting to serious people

The infighting, the rows and the questions about the court structure are all off-putting to serious people

Montgomerie was stating what many say in private. But for those at the top of the party, the most significant thing to happen was not the Montgomerie affair. “For the first time since Easter, we held a press conference and no one asked about Nigel’s finances or the £5 million,” says one Reform source, referring to the simmering row about Farage’s acceptance of a £5 million “gift” from the crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne and donations from his close associate “Posh George” Cottrell.

Instead, for the first time in months, the lead item on the main TV news bulletins was a Reform policy announcement – from Robert Jenrick and Richard Tice – to slash welfare spending by £50 billion by barring foreign nationals from claiming almost all benefits, restricting disability payments to the most afflicted and reinstituting the two-child benefit cap.

Farage was away on August 17, and did not know that Tom Waterhouse, the general secretary, and Lee Anderson, the party chairman, were going to suspend Montgomerie. But it was Farage, in the spring, who had ordered a benefits-cuts plan be drawn up, following taunts from the Tories that he was “soft on welfare” because his party’s voters live in places where it is rife.

This, Reform staffers say, is missing the point. “Yes, Reform constituencies have very high numbers of people who are claiming, but our voters aren’t those people,” says one. “They’re those people’s neighbors.”

A recent Reform focus group with Labour voters in the northwest who are considering switching to Reform found outspoken backing for welfare cuts. Polling shows that 65 percent of all voters (and three out of four Reform voters) think people should have to work for their benefits after six months.

Once Farage resigned his seat to fight a by-election in Clacton,........

© The Spectator