The trouble with a populist insurgency is that, at some point, it has to become an organisation. It is one thing to ride the waves of grievance, another to channel them into something resembling governance. Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s latest vehicle, has never had to bother with such pedestrian concerns. It has won no mayoralties, run no councils, governed no town halls. The entire operation is a spectre haunting the British right: always looming, never materialising. That the party is now tearing itself apart should come as no surprise. The history of the far right is one of constant schism, of miniature Heaths or Thatchers forever being denounced by even tinier Powells.
Faragism is, in many ways, a cut-price British knock-off of Trumpism: a personality cult draped in political rhetoric, fuelled by resentment and nostalgia, and built on the promise of dismantling institutions it neither understands nor wishes to replace. As with Trumpism, the contradictions between movement and leader are never far from the surface. Farage thrives on insurgency but cannot tolerate insubordination. He preaches democracy but rules like a tinpot despot. He rails against the political class but has spent a career circling its edges, forever a guest in the television studios, never in government.
The latest bout of infighting has seen Rupert Lowe, the former Southampton FC chairman turned Reform MP, suspended amid accusations of bullying and making threats against party chairman Zia Yusuf. Lowe, for his part, claims Farage has a “messianic” grip on the party, with dissenters swiftly dealt with. Richard Tice, once the nominal leader of Reform, was cast aside before the last election in a coronation that saw Farage reclaim the throne without so much as a token vote. Tice’s recent visit to Scotland underscored the party’s disarray; when pressed by the Daily Mail to name recent defections to Reform UK, he stumbled, unable to provide specifics. The Daily Mail reported, “Tice appeared flustered when asked to list the new defectors, highlighting the party’s internal communication issues.” The party, such as it is, cannot exist without Farage, an edifice of empty slogans held together by his television appearances and the sheer absence of an alternative.
Lowe has not gone quietly. “There is no democracy in this party,” he thundered, casting himself as the lone truth-teller in an organisation increasingly run by diktat. Farage, never one to tolerate a challenge to his authority, dismissed Lowe’s complaints as “sour grapes,” insisting Reform must remain disciplined. The irony of a party named Reform rejecting even the mildest internal debate is lost on no one. Meanwhile, Yusuf, now warring with half the party, warned that these disputes were “playing into the hands of our enemies.” It is unclear which enemies he meant, given that the party seems to be consuming itself without any external intervention. Reform does not need opponents, it is its own greatest adversary.
If Reform UK’s MPs are the vanguard of a new political order, it is one built on scandal, incompetence, and barely concealed resentment. Rupert Lowe, now suspended. Lee Anderson, once a Tory attack dog, now finds himself in a party even less concerned with governance, his tenure marked by Islamophobic outbursts and a parliamentary censure for harassing a security guard. Richard Tice, briefly the figurehead of Reform, was unceremoniously shunted aside, now reduced to floundering when asked to name his own party’s defectors. Then there’s James McMurdock, the MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock, whose greatest political achievement appears to be remaining utterly forgettable. A party built on grievance rather than governance will always struggle to find candidates who can do more than rage at the system. Reform’s parliamentary delegation is a perfect reflection of the movement itself, loud, fractious, and fundamentally unserious.
Perhaps the only surprising thing is how long it took. Reform UK was always a party in search of an identity, beyond its hostility to immigrants and nostalgic yearning for an imagined past. The old UKIP base, radicalised by Brexit and hardened by years of culture war rhetoric, has never been comfortable with the quiet realities of parliamentary arithmetic. Compromise, strategy, administration, these things are for others. It’s why the party exists in permanent opposition, even when there is no obvious enemy to oppose.
Farage himself, never one to stay in one place too long, now finds himself at odds with his supposed allies. Elon Musk, now embedded in government alongside Trump and running the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as though it were another chaotic start-up, has apparently soured on the Reform project. His tenure so far has been an exercise in ideological vandalism, applying his ‘move fast and break things’ Silicon Valley ethos to the machinery of the state with predictably disastrous results. Musk’s new obsession is gutting federal institutions, decentralising everything to blockchain governance, and attempting to introduce Grok as the state worker of the future. He is said to favour Lowe over Farage, an absurd footnote in an already ridiculous saga. What he once saw in Reform was likely what he sees in every institution: a hollowed-out husk, ripe for disruption. The fact that Reform never had anything to disrupt in the first place makes the whole affair even more ludicrous.
A party with no experience of power, no mechanisms for internal stability, and no institutional roots beyond Farage’s media profile is not a party poised for government. It is a pressure group that occasionally finds itself with MPs. It is the latest in a long line of British right-wing projects that mistake noise for substance, headlines for infrastructure. What Reform UK wants is the moral authority of an insurgency and the credibility of an establishment party, but it can have only one. It is one thing to rage against the system, quite another to operate it.
It all has the air of a low-rent Eighteenth Brumaire, without the historical weight. Where Louis Bonaparte at least attempted to fashion a new political order, Farage and his circle are merely reenacting old failures on a smaller scale. Marx’s maxim that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, has rarely felt more appropriate. Reform UK will collapse. The only question is whether it will simply vanish or, like all bad sequels, return with an even worse script and a cheaper cast.
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