There was one name on the lips of many Reform supporters before their party’s local election campaign launch in Birmingham last Friday night, but it wasn’t Nigel Farage.
Instead, conversation turned to Rupert Lowe, one of five Reform MPs elected last year, who was suspended this month when allegations of bullying emerged, the day after he had described Farage as a “messianic” leader of a protest party.
“One of the immediate issues he [Farage] has to deal with is the Rupert Lowe issue,” said Pat Elwick, a retired referee from Lincolnshire. He is campaigning for Andrea Jenkyns, the former Tory MP, to become Reform’s mayor of Greater Lincolnshire in the local elections on 1 May. Lowe comes up a lot when he’s “out footsoldiering” and is a popular figure, Elwick said.
Another activist, Ian from Worcestershire, laughed when asked how he thought things were going. “It was going quite well, wasn’t it?” he said. “He’s had a bad press with the Rupert Lowe thing, but one man doesn’t make a party I suppose, like the Tories with Boris. But I like his [Lowe’s] plain speaking to be fair.” He hesitated. “Nigel is plain speaking but he tends to go around the houses a lot.”
May’s local elections will be the first big test of whether Farage’s party has managed to maintain its momentum from the general election. The party was polling at 26% last month, a pip ahead of Labour, and is standing candidates in most of the 1,600 council seats being contested in 23 councils in England, and for six directly elected mayors.
Winning council seats is a way to increase its base of activists and potential candidates for the next general election, and Reform had billed the event at Birmingham’s Utilita Arena as the “biggest rally in modern political history”.
Outside, protesters from groups including Stand Up To Racism and National Rejoin March waved EU flags, while Led By Donkeys put up images of Farage and Vladimir Putin saying “Vladimir and Nigel welcome you to Birmingham”.
Inside, the Reform supporters – a mix of angular young men in sharp suits and pointy shoes, and older men wearing turqouise ties queuing for selfies with Lee Anderson – were buying “Make Britain Great Again” caps, rosettes and placards.
When the event got underway there were plenty of empty seats in upper tiers of the 10,000 capacity arena, and only the first 10 rows of premium seats in front of the stage were full. But Reform’s opponents will not sniff at the party’s ability to gather even 5,000 or 6,000 people to a political event on a Friday night – not many fewer than at Neil Kinnock’s Sheffield rally in 1992 or during Jeremy Corbyn’s 2016 leadership campaign.
Reform had decked out the arena with a vignette of how it sees modern Britain – a broken down pub, rubbish on the streets, a dilapidated bus stop and a road strewn with potholes. David Bull, the former Brexit party MEP who Richard Tice described to the crowd as a “modern day Larry Grayson” toured the set and interviewed some of the mayoral candidates, who include Arron Banks. The Leave.EU founder is standing for the West of England and described himself as being “as popular in Bristol as a pork pie at a Bar Mitzvah”.
Farage arrived on the footplate of a JCB digger, which turned out to be a “Pothole Pro”, he told the crowd. It had been lent to him by JCB’s founder, Anthony Bamford, a long-time Conservative donor who recently gave Farage a helicopter flight worth £8,000, and could apparently fix potholes for half the price of others. Councils could use them if they weren’t “tied in to five and 10 year contracts with inferior providers, but we’ll fix that, won’t we, when we control those county councils”.
A question for Farage’s party is whether or not he can broaden Reform’s appeal beyond a base that has different priorities and concerns than the rest of the country, and is closer to Donald Trump’s .
Like Trump, Farage has been holding a succession of events – Birmingham was just the latest and largest – and the MBGA caps and the razzmatazz production values were matched by some Trumpian policies. He pledged to create a “British form of Doge”, to pay for “the cuts that people deserve”, and said civil servants would be banned from working from home. He took aim at Net Zero policies, complained about inheritance tax, promised to end “unskilled migration” and got a standing ovation for the line: “Everyone who comes here illegally will be deported.”
He finished to another standing ovation, but there had been a brief moment of dissent during the two-and-a-half hour rally, when Rupert Lowe supporters shouted his name. It may be mentioned again over the next five weeks.
