One of the great political mistakes is to suppose that every new party is necessarily a new force. Some parties are formed because some real interest in society has become conscious of itself and wants expression. Others are put together from whatever human material the older parties have discarded. They are not movements in the strict sense, but scrapheaps. Reform UK, it is increasingly plain, is a party the second sort. This is not because everything it says is false. Much of what it says about immigration, taxation, censorship and administrative decay is true enough. That is not the point. In politics, truth in slogans is common. The question is who is speaking, and to what end.

Take Alan Amos. He has been Conservative, Labour, Independent and now Reform. There may be other stopping points in between. I do not know. It is hard to keep count. A man may change his opinions. It happens. But there is a point at which changing opinions becomes indistinguishable from having none.

Mr Amos has managed, through these migrations, to keep himself in place. This appears to be his chief accomplishment. One is tempted to say it is his only fixed principle. He is now leader of a Reform administration in Worcestershire, though not by any popular enthusiasm, merely by an internal vote among councillors. It is a fitting arrangement. A party that speaks in the language of popular revolt installs one of its notable figures through a committee manoeuvre. That tells one something.

So does his record. There have been the usual controversies. Offensive remarks, bizarre outbursts, old scandals – none of these much interests me in itself. Public life is full of bores and cranks. What matters is that a party claiming to be the remedy for national decline finds such a man acceptable as a representative specimen. This is not an accident. It is a clue.

There is a tendency among desperate people to believe that anything hostile to the established parties must be a genuine alternative. It does not follow. A counterfeit note may be unlike the genuine article and still worthless. Reform has attracted a curious collection. Failed Conservatives. Ex-ministers who supported every betrayal they now denounce. Political drifters. Men who discover principle only when denied promotion. The old rubbish has been repainted and put back in the shop window. A Party that makes room for Nadine Dorries and Nadhim Zahawi has no reason for excluding Alan Amos.

It is often said that all parties must take imperfect people. Certainly. But there is a difference between tolerating imperfection and being built from political residue. Alan Amos is not embarrassing to Reform because he is exceptional. He is embarrassing because he is typical. That is the point too often missed. The trouble with parties of this kind is not simply that they contain rogues. The trouble is that they lack any standard by which rogues can be recognised as disqualifying. This is usually called having no quality control.

The phrase sounds comic. It is in fact serious. For politics, in the end, is largely about personnel. Programmes are easy. Every pamphlet promises lower taxes and cleaner streets. What matters is the kind of men who will operate the machine. And here Reform begins to look just like the Conservative Party in a different blazer. That is why the hope invested in it is probably misplaced.

I do not believe a Reform Government would reform much. I doubt there will be a Reform Government at all. It is fashionable to speak of the party as if it were on the edge of power. This seems improbable. Polling strength is often a measure not of confidence but of irritation. Irritation is unstable. A few years remain before an election. That is enough time for vanity and mediocrity to do their work. Indeed they are already doing it. The more likely outcome is that Reform divides the anti-Labour vote with the Conservatives and helps return Labour with another large majority.

This alarms many people. I am not sure it should. The British political system has an impressive capacity to correct itself just enough to continue. Governments overreach. Then they retreat a little. New ministers arrive and repair what their predecessors have broken too visibly. It is less dramatic than revolutionaries suppose. Starmer will go. Another set of clerks will replace him. Their job will be to clean up those parts of the present mess most inconvenient to the ruling class. This is not inspiring. But politics seldom is.

This being said, what is more interesting is what the rise of Reform says about the electoral right as a whole. It has become, to a degree undeniable, a theatre of compromised grifters. That phrase sounds violent. It is only descriptive. Many of the loudest men on the right were accomplices in the things they now deplore. Others have turned opposition into a livelihood. There is a trade in resentment. It has its entrepreneurs as surely as any market. You see people who supported censorship posing as defenders of liberty. You see people who helped produce demographic upheaval talking of national survival. You see online patriots collecting donations while offering the same slogans in endless rotation. It is not exactly fraud. But it has something of fraud’s smell.

The ordinary voter senses this, which is why movements of this sort rise quickly and often collapse just as quickly. They feed on disappointment and then add to it. Perhaps the right response is not to keep transferring hope from one improvised vehicle to another. Perhaps it is to stop believing salvation will come in that form. There are times when refusing to vote is not apathy but judgement. This may be one.

For what are we offered? On one side a managerial class that governs badly but knows how to govern. On the other, too often, a collection of malcontents, ex-officeholders and provincial grotesques pretending to be a revolution. You need not romanticise the first to decline the second.

Something better may come. It usually does, though often later than people expect. Real political movements do sometimes arise. But they do not generally begin as refuges for political drifters. That is why Alan Amos matters. He is not singularly wicked or singularly absurd. He is merely revealing. He shows, more plainly than manifestoes do, what sort of thing Reform really is. He shows what much of the electoral right in this county is and has long been: not a remedy, just a symptom.

Related posts:

Zahawi and the Managed Collapse of Reform The Pension as Pretext: How the Blairite Clerisy Proposes to Loot the Old and Call It Reform

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