From the railway station, you take the emergency stairs down to the perimeter road. Walk half a mile round the back of the vast hangars of the Birmingham NEC. Get to a fork. To the right, the Bear Grylls Adventure. To the left, the Reform party conference. Decisions, decisions. A day out being macho and talking the Alpha course with Russell Brand. Or having reality twisted with Nigel Farage and his crew. Come to think of it, there’s not much difference.
The queue for Reform snakes back 100 yards from the entrance more than an hour before the start. Fair to say neither Labour nor the Tories will get a crowd this big for their conferences over the next 10 days or so. Inside, the merchandise stall is doing brisk business in Reform coffee mugs. No one seems that interested in the Richard Tice turquoise ties. Strange. Looking like the sales rep for a sunbed company is very much on brand for the upper echelons of the party.
Near the entrance to the auditorium are two stalls. One for the TaxPayers’ Alliance. The other for the Free Speech Union. Even the Institute of Economic Affairs has stayed away. I speak to a delegate. He explains how he used to be a member of the Revolutionary Communist party before he realised there were too many immigrants. What he really wants to talk to me about, though, is that John Lennon was killed by an assassin acting on the direct orders of George HW Bush.
Inside the hall, the 4,000 members get to their feet as Nige takes his place in the front row, surrounded by minders and snappers. A chant of “Nigel, Nigel” bounces off the walls. It’s a curious mix of a Billy Graham revivalist meeting and a Nuremberg rally. This is a party that has come to party. It may have been playing the same tunes for the last 10 years as it has morphed from Ukip to the Brexit party to Reform, but its supporters are ever hopeful. They believe their time is coming.
The suspiciously tanned David Bull gets proceedings under way. No one knows exactly what Dave does but he acts like one of the chosen ones. The inner circle. He runs through a few old favourites. Immigrants. Loud boos from the audience. Keir Starmer taking freebies. More loud boos. Just wait till they all find out how many freebies Nige has taken in his career. This is rapidly turning into a pantomime act. Brexit has been stolen from them. No one here is taking any responsibility for the Brexit they campaigned for.
Then James McMurdock. The Reform MP who only got elected because he signed the wrong papers. He thought he was joining the party when in reality he was applying to become a candidate. He had been in the party less than two months when he became an MP.
“I guess I should introduce myself,” he says. Good. Maybe he was about to reveal how he was imprisoned for domestic violence. On second thoughts, maybe not. The truth is mutable for Reform. Bewilderingly, he concludes by saying that if you vote Reform, then you get honest and skilled MPs. He is exhibit No 1, I guess.
Next we were promised one of the most famous people in the country. Instead we got Ann Widdecombe. A woman too unpleasant even for the Tory party. Imagine. She doesn’t even try to keep her hatred of immigrants in check. Sink the boats. Do whatever you like. They aren’t real people to her. Imprison them in rat-infested squalor. Send them to any old country. As long as they aren’t here. She has no idea how to achieve any of this. Nor any interest in international law. Then neither has the audience. They all believe that foreigners belong anywhere but here. She gets a standing ovation.
Believe it or not, Ann was comparatively sane compared with Ant Middleton, who followed her. The kindest thing to say about him is that he’s not very bright. Only capable of a stream of unconsciousness. Since being thrown off SAS: Who Dares Wins for being a total dick, Ant has come to believe he’s the Messiah. He specialises in confessional, motivational speeches which are complete and utter bollocks. Maybe he thought he was at the Bear Grylls centre.
“They are out to get you,” he confided from the front of the stage. We never got to find out who the “they” were. But it sounded like the establishment. In which case, beware of Nige and Dicky Tice. They are more establishment than most of the government. And beware all foreigners. He loved his country and it was being stolen from him. British culture was Christianity. Any unbelievers had to be eradicated. This was too much even for some of the audience. Imagine being too out there for Reform.
During the lunch break, the professionally grumpy became even grumpier as half the food concessions were closed and some of the queues were 200 or so punters deep. Then we settled in for the afternoon. Basically a long list of grumpiness. Everything was broken and everything was someone else’s fault. No ideas how to fix it, other than Nige would come up with something sooner or later.
MP Rupert Lowe sounded like a golf-club bore as he listed his pet hates. Rainbow lanyards, Covid vaccinations, the OBR, the BBC, taxes that affected wealthy people like himself. He even confessed to hating democracy. Lee Anderson continued along the same theme. Vegans, net zero, Sadiq Khan, Black Lives Matter. All evil. The only person he did like was Jim Davidson. He got a standing ovation for ripping up his TV licence reminder. Free the 30p Lee.
It was all getting a bit tedious. Repetitive. Worse was to follow with the personality-free Dicky Tice. A man desperate to be loved but so hard to trust. He took the afternoon by storm by insisting Britain was dominated by the three cults. At least he meant to say three cults. He actually said something much more Anglo-Saxon. It’s a view, I suppose. Zia Yusuf came and went in a sea of indifference. He didn’t seem to realise that the Battle of Arnhem had been a historic disaster.
Finally – to a soundtrack of Eminem and fireworks – the man himself. Big Nige. The rock’n’roll politician. Allegedly. Only for much of the time it felt as though he was just phoning it in. A greatest hits compilation of reality-bending dishonesty. Everyone to blame for Brexit but himself. He was exempt from changing the country for the worse.
Farage went on about the need to democratise and professionalise the party. But he felt distracted. As if his heart wasn’t in it. He tried to sound engaged, but it was as though he was bored. He’d made this speech hundreds of times before and even he had had enough of it. Imagine. Maybe he had reached peak narcissism and could take no more. Can see through his own bullshit even if others can’t.
After half of an hour of mindless talking, he checked the time and wound it up after going through his pet grievances. NatWest. The Tories useless. Labour useless. Nothing positive to add. No vision to add. Just him at the centre of the universe. Cue more fireworks and some balloons. Just to remind people they had been in the presence of greatness. Apparently.