There are few things more revealing of character than a man’s ability to resist joining a public stampede. Most people can’t. That’s the point of a stampede. It sweeps through a population like fire. It turns neighbours into informers, friends into cowards, and rulers into demagogues. In a stampede, the usual rules are suspended. You are either with the mob or under its feet.
This brings me—more than a decade after I last thought about his case—to Jimmy Savile. I will confess, I paid little attention to the case. I paid none to the man when he was alive. He looked vile, and may have been. What I will note, though, is how a man who died with a knighthood and public honours was retroactively declared the most energetic paedophile in British history. The evidence? Unevidenced claims, many decades old, few capable of verification, and none tested in court. Some of the claims I read about appeared to contradict each other. Some involved crimes in public places that were never noticed at the time. Some come from people who admitted to recovering memories long after the alleged event. Some were plainly made for money, others for attention. That did not matter. The BBC had spoken. The tabloids followed. The police opened “Operation Yewtree.” An inquiry was convened. Statues were pulled down. Gravestones were defaced. Programmes were pulled from the archive. The consensus was formed and hardened. As said, he looked vile, and may have been. Since he worked most of his life for the BBC, he probably was. He may even have committed some of the crimes alleged against him.
And this brings me, depressingly, to Reform UK. According to a BBC report, it has “withdrawn all support for [the] candidacy” of someone found to have expressed scepticism about the Savile narrative. Reform UK did not defend them. It did not say, “These are private opinions, and we do not police what our members say.” No, the party said—indeed, it wailed—that these individuals should never have been selected in the first place. They were “deeply sorry.” They promised tighter vetting. They promised reform. Of course they did. Reform UK now polices thoughts more efficiently than the Labour Party. It talks like Enoch Powell and acts like Nick Clegg.
We were told this party would be different. We were told it would break the consensus, speak for the ignored, and clear out the stinking corridors of Westminster. What we have instead is a holding pen for failed Tories, a halfway house for men and women so uninspiring, so drearily mediocre, that even the Conservative Party—the Conservative Party—could no longer find a use for them.
Let us look at the evidence. In the local elections this year, Reform UK has selected at least sixty former Conservative councillors to stand under its banner. That’s not a new movement. That’s a policy recycling depot. It’s like discovering a mouldy lasagne at the back of your fridge, scraping off the green bits, and serving it up as haute cuisine. These people are not rebels. They are not even particularly disaffected. They are the human filing cabinets who propped up the old regime until the voters gave it the hiding it deserved. They left not out of conscience, but out of convenience. The Conservative Party sank. They needed another ship. They climbed aboard Reform.
The result is a party filled with identikit Tories. Same faces. Same slogans. And the same moral cowardice. It’s all there in the case of Sarah Pochin, Reform’s parliamentary candidate for the Runcorn and Helsby by-election. A former Conservative councillor expelled in 2020, then again from the Independents, and then welcomed back into the Tories in 2022. Now she’s fronting Reform. A woman who opposes the death penalty, supports liberal sentencing, and gives every sign of fitting in nicely with the centre-left consensus. If elected, she could defect to Labour and no one would notice the difference. She has all the ideological thrill of last Monday’s Guardian.
And still the party’s supporters insist it is “the only alternative.” They say “Nigel’s back,” as though that were some kind of argument. Nigel Farage, who has now made more comebacks than the average professional wrestler. Nigel Farage, who always manages to talk a good game, collect a few donations, say something outrageous for the benefit of talk radio, and then vanish when the fight starts to get interesting. He is not our political saviour. He is a media personality with a side-hustle in defusing public anger. A man whose entire function is to take real dissent, bottle it, sell it to the electorate in a watered-down form, and then fold it quietly back into the system.
Reform UK is not a threat to the establishment. It is the establishment’s safety net. Its job is to catch the falling votes of angry people and stop them from hitting anything that might do real damage. It mimics the rhetoric of rebellion while preserving the structure of failure. It offers a new label for an old product—and hopes we shan’t notice the smell.
There may still be a path out of this decline. There may yet be parties, or individuals, who are willing to speak truthfully, act boldly, and smash the grip of the professional political class. But if so, they are not to be found in Reform UK. This party is a decoy. A trap. A bit of clever stagecraft designed to convince the masses that something is changing, when in truth everything stays the same.
We will not be saved by cowardice. We will not be saved by ex-Tories in new colours. We will not be saved by people who can’t even defend their own candidates from the BBC.
Look elsewhere. Reform is not the answer. It is the punchline to a long and bitter joke.
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Bravo!
I have unfortunately decided not to vote on May 1st. I’m not being taken in by Nigel’s grift. I personally do believe Jimmy Savile was a paedophile – he definitely looked the part, like someone not really trying to hide it – but I think the Rolf Harris thing a little bit dodgy. Harris was verifiably not in some of the locations that he would have had to be in to molest some of the accusers. And the part of Vanessa Feltz in the accusations also rings alarm bells: I mean, she claims Rolf Harris was touching her during a live broadcast while she was lying on a bed with him on camera. Reform is clearly vetting its candidates ludicrously tightly. It doesn’t even talk like Enoch Powell – more like Rishi Sunak. Having said that, I won’t be sad to see Reform destroy the Conservative Party, but we don’t yet have a proper populist force to take on the Establishment. I was a member of Reform for one year, during Richard Tice’s leadership, but haven’t renewed, and couldn’t join any party with Zia Yusuf’s involvement.
My stance on Jimmy Savile used to be that while it was likely he had a darker side to his persona and behaved in a seedy and inappropriate manner at times, the weak evidence for the criminal allegations being made against him could not justify the depth of condemnation directed at his memory and estate. And even if he did cross the line, it was likely to be fairly trivial, and in any event, it was wrong to monsterise him. Even if he did abuse his position and commit sex offences, it does not necessarily follow that he was a monster.
I recently realised that even this moderate position was wrong. It turns out that the unfortunate young woman who appeared on Top of the Pops and then committed suicide had not slept with Savile, but with a different presenter. The evidence for this is all published and in the open, as there was an inquiry into it at the time and extensive newspaper comment, and when you piece it together, it clears Savile of involvement.
Nevertheless, Savile was part of that same milieu and probably did sleep with underage girls but we have no way of knowing that for sure, and even if he did, we have no way of knowing whether he did so knowingly and intentionally or was just a man with fairly loose sexual morals – a fairly typical thing for that time and his generation. We will never know the truth due to the passage of time, the lack of credibility of the witnesses and complainants (most of whom are nakedly financially motivated), and the simple fact that we can’t question a dead person. Furthermore, to repeat: the hysterical monsterisation of the accused post mortem does nothing to instil confidence. It’s an old lawyer’s trick to shout and scream when you are availed of neither facts nor law.
For these reasons, my stance has evolved: I now realise that even my previous moderate stance was in error; in fact, I have no right to accuse Jimmy Savile of anything and prefer to rest on the presumption of innocence, and in the absence of an overwhelming preponderance of solid evidence for guilt, that will remain my stance.
I do think that part of all this hysteria about Savile is down to a curious inability to look at the whole human picture of people’s actions and a tendency to exaggerate fairly minor or trivial behaviour just because it involves sex. It is perhaps social taboo to say this, but most of the people Jimmy Savile supposedly abused must have gone into a relationship or interaction with him entirely voluntarily, and if he had a ‘reputation’, they should have kept away from him. I have doubts about it all anyway, but even if it were all true, in most cases (I accept not all) there has to be some personal responsibility for the victims to shoulder as well – and I assume that is why something called ‘sexual propriety’ once existed and was expected from both sexes. It is, again, curious that the very people who shout the loudest about Savile are often the ones who display the least sexual propriety in their own lives and often they seem not to appreciate the connection between the two things.
As for Reform UK, none of it is a surprise. I think that the best we can hope for from electoral politics is that it shifts the Overton window, which in fairness Brexit has done. The discussions that are now conducted in the media would have been unthinkable 10 or 15 years ago. Even just a little over 10 years ago, anyone calling for Brexit was dismissed as a loon and raving. I do fear, though, that if peaceful change cannot be achieved, JFK’s famous maxim (albeit taken out of context) will be vindicated once again with all the horrible realities that will bring for people. You could argue that is already the case on a small level.
With respect, I think the writer hasn’t noticed the elephant in the room. And that is the massive change that has overcome Nigel Farage since he went into a business partnership with Muhamad Ziauddin Yusuf to create Refrom 2025 Ltd.
If I didn’t know Nigel better, I would say he is being blackmailed.
Whatever the root cause, his behaviour is very odd, and, I believe, politically suicidal.
Why did Reform go out of their way to pick a fight with Tommy Robinson and to disparage so many of their own supporters as ‘That Lot’?
Why did Reform handle Rupert Lowe’s criticism in such a politically inept manner – to the extent of calling the police on him?
Why has the Party suddenly begun sucking up to Muslims as its main policy plank?
I find the whole thing quite inexplicable from a political perspective.
To address the current issue, regardless of whether Savile was guilty as charged (and I am quite certain that he was), any candidate who voices support for Savile is an electoral liability, so I don’t blame Reform for dumping him.
The other lady, who posted that Islam was a ‘false religion’, has also been de-selected. That is a better indicator of Reform’s direction of travel – “We mustn’t alienate the Muslim vote”.
I speak as one who was myself ‘de-selected’ back in the summer. My sin was to criticise the BLM rioters, and they asked me to stand down. Unfortunately for Reform, they left it too late (by a matter of hours) as the nominations had already closed. So I ignored them, and was very pleased to have cost the incumbent Conservative his seat, thus ending 150 years of Conservative rule in my constituency.
Hugo Miller
The treatment of Ben Habib is another issue – he is far better than Farage on the key issues – and I notice that Habib wants Northern Ireland to leave the EU and supported the TUV in Ulster. Whereas Farage wants to pretend that Brexit has already got done.
Yes indeed – Ben would have made the ideal chairman in my view – but he was elbowed aside to make way for Muhammad Yusuf. Not only that, Ben only learned about this from a press conference.
And then Nigel compounded the insult by crowing about Ben’s departure – instead of graciously thanking Ben for his contribution, Nigel publicly celebrated his departure, saying it was ‘time to crack open the champagne’.
This episode re-inforces my conviction that there is something very odd going on in Reform to bring about Nigel’s change in demeanour and the sudden swerve in Party policy.
The same goes for his treatment of Howard Cox – another Party stalwart given the bum’s rush.
The whole conduct of the Party these past few months has been inept and poltically suicidal.
Hugo, Have you ever thought of registering with the blog. You could then post without having to specify your identity each time
Thank you – as a technophobe, I don’t really speak this language 😉 A ‘blog’ I think is a ‘web-log’?
I wouldn’t even know how to register, but I’m sure I can figure it out.
I actually thought I WAS registered, as I get loads of e-mails landing in my inbox.
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