Welcome to Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s crumbling care home for old Tories

As Farage struggles to throw off the feeling among voters that his party is simply becoming a dumping ground for has-beens, is a certain Gavin Williamson next on the the hiring line, asks Sean O’Grady

Last night on BBC Question Time a member of the audience asked: “How can anyone think Reform are a party of change when they only appear to be a care home for old Tories?” It wasn’t an especially new charge, but it was succinctly put, and the audience, in King’s Lynn, prime Farage territory, loved it. It’s had a wide circulation on social media.

It indeed highlights an obvious strategic problem for Farage – how can he stand for radical change if his party is stuffed full of deadbeats, has-been and never-weres? He says that’s true, but the one thing his party lacks is experience, and people who know how government works – “or doesn’t work” as he always adds with a snide grin.

But that little aside proves the point. These people couldn’t actually make their ministerial careers a success perhaps because they were incompetent or unethical, in the sense of breaking the ministerial code – or never good enough to be promoted even when there was little talent available?

Farage says they’ve all repented their sins, but that just makes him sound pitifully naive. If Farage means what he says about wanting to bring brilliant people with careers outside the party system in, then he shouldn’t be bothered about whether they have “right honourable” in front of their names. It is giving Reform an image problem, and confusing their supporters.

Which brings us to the Right Honourable Gavin Williamson. He is undoubtedly a Tory ex-minister, but he may be a little different. This is probably the nearest thing the Conservatives have had to Peter Mandelson – and I mean that in a nice way. Sir Gavin Williamson CBE MP – he lies a title just as much as Lord Mandelson, also has a deserved reputation as a practitioner of the “dark arts” of politics, but was, again like Mandelson, not such an effective official and ended up resigning from a couple of top jobs. He also has a knack for survival and making a comeback from the most unlikely of circumstances, something he displayed successively under Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, arguably making and breaking each one of their respective premierships.

So watch out, Nigel Farage! For Williamson is the latest former Tory cabinet minister to be “outed” as a possible defector to Reform UK, or “Reform? OK if they’ll give me a job” as they should more accurately be known. When confronted with the notion by Latika Bourke of Politics Home he said it is “news to me”. That, of course, is what the likes of Mandelson and Williamson casually chuck out there as a “non denial denial”, leaving their options perfectly open, playfully teasing the hack along the way.

The speculation comes from an interesting source, Michael Gove, a shrewd observer of the political scene, lover of gossip and a fine minister, as well as formidable journalist, but maybe less adept at the manipulating the machinery than Gavin. Thinking aloud on a podcast, like you do, Gove, presumably not a part of some complex Williamsonian plot, remarked: “The number one suspect for defection at the moment is... Gavin Williamson. Gavin, the former chief whip, has a fingertip feel for power, and he has a taste for the intrigue, obviously, but an aptitude for putting himself at the heart of events. And I think that the temptation to be at the heart of what Reform are doing will prove very great.”

Certainly sounds plausible, and Williamson deftly parried it: “Michael gets a lot of things wrong. He thought banning plastic straws was a good idea and replacing them with paper."

So it’s true, then.

I must say that Williamson would be much the most impressive asset that Farage would have received into his movement not just recently from the Tory party but anywhere. Like Nadhim Zahawi, Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman, Nadine Dorries and various others he is another ex-minister with a chequered record; but unlike them he is a serious political operator, and with an instinctive feel for politics unmatched in Reform outside of anyone but Farage himself.

He can “get things done” in the most mysterious of ways, and that’s something that the still painfully amateurish Reform gang are desperately short of. He would be, if you like, the “defector’s defector”, or would be had Gove not opened his big mouth.

Most recently, for example, in time for the July 2024 he managed to switch seat and then hold on in Staffordshire by somehow persuading the Reform UK candidate to step down at the last minute. And, as if he now cannot help himself from publicly showing off his political skills he posted on X that he had indeed made sure that Michael Gove, funnily enough, was kept off the ballot paper in the final round of the 2019 Tory leadership election.

Williamson, running Johnson’s campaign as he and for May before, was always accused of “lending” Jeremy Hunt enough of Johnson’s MPs to push Gove out of the way, and that was always strenuously denied. Now, though, he himself says that “in fairness he [Johnson] would have had a much higher percentage of the MP vote in the final round if I hadn’t had to lend a chunk of Boris’s votes to get Jeremy into the final 2.”

But he’s a gamble too – quite dangerous for anyone to know in his own vulpine way, and, from the point of view of the public, would be just another resident in the ex-Tory care home. He may not defect, of course, but with Farage setting that deadline of May 7th for Tories to experience their personal epiphanies, the coming weeks will be replete with refugees from the Cameron/May/Johnson/Truss/Sunak administrations being unveiled at boastful Reform UK events. It will give a sense of momentum, and add that mixed blessing of “experience”, and Farage will at last have a cabinet in waiting. But he shouldn’t expect the public to be convinced by the vaguely familiar faces he’ll be surrounded by. It looks and feels like the right wing of the Tory party want to have another go. Who’d vote for that?