𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

At last year’s Conservative conference, it felt like many of the members I chatted to were wavering. They’d endured years of party turmoil, a historic election loss and then the seemingly unstoppable rise of Nigel Farage and his party Reform. This year, things really couldn’t feel more different. There’s an excitement back in the air, a buoyant energy and – perhaps most importantly – it feels like we’re a party united behind Kemi Badenoch.

But what do Tory party members make of the party that just a year ago had so many in its ranks tempted? I decided to conduct a not-very-scientific experiment to ask them to describe Reform using just one word. Some were raring to go with immediate answers – others found it hard to stick to the wordcount… I put the question to Ian Daly, 64, who is now retired but had a career running and selling businesses, and his friend Nicola Bell, 61. Ian, who is from Worcestershire, didn’t skip a beat.

SLEAZY

“At the moment? Sleazy,” he said.

Nicola, who is retired but works in the not-for-profit sector, was even quicker with her reply.

CHANCERS

“Chancers,” she said.

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE

Joe, 28, is from Ferryhill, County Durham, and works in political communications. He felt using one word was just too tricky.

“One word is difficult! I think I want to say something along the lines of…too good to be true. Clearly we’re in the age where we need to make tough political choices. The public finances aren’t in a good enough place to be able to give everyone everything. Something has got to give. And I think that some of those choices, it’s probably better to make them now than once you’ve won the election, right?”

SCAM

Joey Gwinn, 23, works for MP Desmond Swayne in Northamptonshire and he currently lives in London.

“With all good internet scams you look at it and think ‘that’s brilliant’. They’re offering exactly what I want. That’s the hair growth I want, that’s the snake oil I want. The reality is they say one thing and they do another.

“I look at what they’ve done in local government – the first thing they did in Lincolnshire was scrap the flooding commission. Lincolnshire is the most at risk county in the country for flooding.

“They rail about Tory sleaze and they have all of our sleaziest MPs! They’re promising one thing and giving another.”

He added: “I don’t think there’s really any meat to their bones. Anyone can come up with a nice slogan. On the face of it I think most Conservatives would agree with the flavour of what they’re saying – but they don’t bring anything at all to the kitchen.”

UNTRUSTWORTHY

Maureen Levy, 60, lives in Blyth and is a long-time Conservative party member. She is also the deputy chair of the Conservative Women’s Organisation in the North East.

She said: “Untrustworthy.”

Elaborating, Maureen says she’s seen the damage that Reform has inflicted in her local area.

“I think we’ve seen [it] locally. They got in on the promise of stopping the boats but as town and county councillors that is complete rubbish. The leaflet that they put out was all about ‘stop the boats’ but what can a councillor do to stop the boats?

“We’ve seen issues with them. They don’t turn up for meetings, they’re happy to take the money but don’t answer emails – some are better than others. There are some better ones and are some who I think genuinely are trying.

“But they don’t know what to do, they don’t know how to do it, don’t know how to make the changes that need to be made. I go into the town centre and it’s filthy.”

Maureen said that in Cramlington, where the authority is Conservative-run, it’s quite a different story, where even the flower beds look “immaculate.”

She is very concerned about how that may be replicated if Reform ever took the keys to Number 10.

CORRUPT

Oliver Morgan, 21, is a politics student at the University of Lincolnshire and is from Worksop.

“In the middle of their own conference they’re having all these scandals. Their finances are clearly dodgy at best. I’m just saying – you suddenly start accepting cryptocurrency as donations after you accept a huge amount of money from crypto billionaires…”

He added: “Nigel Farage is not for the country – he’s for his own legacy rather than actually wanting to fix things with the country. Look at the people he surrounds himself with – Robert Jenrick and Nadhim Zahawi: they’re backtracking on everything they have said for the past few years. How many times did Jenrick say Farage is someone you’d like to go for a pint with but not someone running the country? I was actually at a dinner when he said this – not two months later he joined Reform. It’s all the constant backpeddling. They’re not united, they don’t know what they stand for as they’re a populist party and none of them have principles.”

FAKE

Will Hunter, 20, is from Grimsby and studies international relations and politics.

“They are fake in their words. They don’t actually believe in anything they say. They flip-flop from side to side and they say ‘14 years Conservative rule, every Tory is awful’ yet at the same time they brought Suella Braverman, from the previous government which they rant so much about, Robert Jenrick, Nadim Zahawi. But now two of them are literally part of their so-called shadow cabinet.

“On a local level – they don’t actually care about the local issues. I remember all the times in Lincolnshire thinking ‘oh what’s on the Reform leaflet’ and [it would say] ‘stop the boats’. Oh yeah! Cos they’re coming up the Humber! Just ingenuine.”

So are Reform still turning Tory heads? Judging by my experiment, there is, as it happens, a very neat one-word answer: no.