Nige and Honest Bob. Honest Bob and Nige. Reform’s answer to the Chuckle Brothers. Robert Jenrick is just about the only other member of Reform UK that Nige will be seen dead with now. Apart from Richard Tice, everyone’s favourite fake-tanned beta male.
Almost everyone else in Reform is dead to Nigel Farage. Zia Yusuf barely gets a look in now. Nadhim Zahawi and Suella Braverman? Buyer’s remorse. Andrea Jenkyns and Sarah Pochin? Who?
So, Nige and Honest Bob it is. The double act that’s guaranteed to raise a laugh. If you’re very lucky. The pair who want to turn politics into a downmarket reality gameshow on their own YouTube channel. Last week it was your turn to win the cheapest petrol in the country. Though it turned out not even to be the cheapest petrol within a 20-mile radius. Details, details.
This week, it was your chance to get a home visit from Farage, who would hand over an oversized cardboard cheque to pay the energy bills of everyone on your street for a year. Just log on to nigelcutmybills.com to enter. Not reformcutmybills.com, please note. Nige isn’t even trying to pretend that Reform is anything more than his own personality cult these days. The heavily grease-painted entertainer in need of ever more attention.
The possibilities are endless. Be more like Nige and jump at the chance to buy shares in Kwasi Kwarteng’s crypto scheme. Or maybe you want the opportunity to buy some gold at the top of the market. If so, Nige knows just the firm for you. He’s paid £400k a year by Direct Bullion to lure you in. Just watch the gold price fall.
Then there’s Richard Tice’s bespoke tax services. See if you can pay what you want by offshoring your spare cash (but only if you have millions to stash away). Reform has got a Get Rich Quick scheme for everyone. Though it’s mainly Nadhim, Nige and Dicky doing the getting rich. There again, someone’s got to. So it might as well be them.
Looking around Glaziers Hall in central London, the venue for the latest stunt, it was hard to escape the feeling that Reform may be hitting the law of diminishing returns. A press conference too far. Bread and circuses.
There were 50 or so Reform supporters sitting behind the podium, most of whom didn’t look too thrilled to have been invited. In front of the lectern, just two rows of seats for the media and a couple of Reform MPs who had nothing better to do. The Chuckle Brothers were going to have their work cut out.
Honest Bob appeared first. Desperate for someone to take him seriously as Reform’s point man on the economy (or shadow chancellor, as Farage insists on calling him). Only he’s expecting us all to have a collective outbreak of amnesia.
Because when Jenrick goes on about the madness of net zero, the first thing that comes to mind is that Jenrick was part of a Tory government that had supported it for years. And he never said a word.
No one had been keener to hug a husky when Honest Bob was first elected. These days he opens his mouth and all you can hear are the words “fraud” and “opportunist”.
“The cost of petrol and energy are going up,” said Honest Bob, sadly. Not immune to amnesia himself, he seemed to have forgotten that his leader had been one of the most enthusiastic supporters of British involvement in the Iran war only a couple of weeks ago. Maybe he just hadn’t thought through the consequences.
So here was what he was going to do. Cancel VAT on energy bills and cut green levies. All to be paid for – as laid out by that well-known synapse vacuum, Danny Kruger – by sacking everyone in a couple of quangos. Genius. And don’t forget to sign up for the competition. Reform need your details to harvest your data.
Then the special guest. Dicky Tice. The energy levels in the room became critical. Dicky has the absence of personality of a shopping channel presenter on a graveyard shift. The man with the charisma bypass. There’s even less to him than meets the eye.
He had nothing of any note to say except to insist the country was ready for fracking, even though the geology is all wrong and no one wants it. His job was to be so shit that everyone would go mad for Nige.
That just left the Chuckle Brother in chief. Looking rather tetchier than usual. Farage wasn’t feeling enough love in the room. He needs people to feel grateful for his existence. He began with a spot of revisionism.
He had never been in favour of joining the American offensive on Iran. Just for helping them to do whatever they wanted. Though it was all academic because our navy was apparently nonexistent. One day it might be useful for Reform to have a defence spokesperson. That way they might be able to come up with a story that was half plausible.
After a brief recap of fracking for nonexistent gas, Farage took questions from the media. “I may get Rob and Richard up here to help out,” he said. But of course, he didn’t. This was all about him. His answers extended into speeches. This was the politics he loved. The politics of glib easy answers. The politics of no consequences. Just leave him a bit of time at the end to make some Cameo videos for the punters. It stuck in the throat that he was doing this gig for free.
There was some more nonsense. Though Donald Trump was not a man to be taken seriously, he was a man to be taken seriously. He had only gone to war to destroy the nuclear facilities he said he had already destroyed.
And that was that. Nige had got his fix for the next few hours. Back to finding new ways to make money and keep his dream alive.
