𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Reform is bringing out the big guns ahead of the local elections, as Nigel Farage descended on southeast London taking Bexley and Bromley by storm. Where better to kick off the barrage than Welling, home to a magnificent cannon that last saw service in the Crimean War?
On a bright spring afternoon, the high street was doing its normal business: locals with shopping bags, teenagers colonising the McDonald’s. Then the star arrived. Farage emerged already at full strut, the walk of a man who never once has needed to ask where the nearest pub is. As it turned out, he didn’t need to.

At the bus stop, one woman did a full theatrical double-take. Whoever she was expecting to share a pavement with, it wasn’t him.

She got a selfie, the first Farage took of the day. The Number 51 would have to wait.

Word moved through the street at pace. “He’s a legend, mate,” confirmed one teenager to no one in particular.

Two builders approached for a photograph, shuffling forward like boys asking the headmaster if they could get the footballs out – the headmaster, in this case, being someone who would absolutely prefer a cool beer.

“Good group of lads,” Nigel declared, which is what he says everywhere and which is always, somehow, exactly right.

Then into the Plough and Harrow. A pint of real ale. The smoking area commandeered for press interviews. A salt beef bagel and chips materialised, then a second beer. I eyed the chips with something of a hollow longing. My lunch had been a packet of crisps.

Failing to summon the nerve to pilfer a single fry from the most popular politician in the country, I watched instead.

How does he keep up this pace? “Well, we just keep going,” he tells me, finding the question faintly puzzling.
Next, the motorcade swept on to Bromley – once part of Kent before London swallowed it whole. Another pub, the Bird in Hand. Another crowd of delighted supporters. The landlord, a Reform sticker on his chest like a badge of honour, pressed a gin and tonic into Farage’s hand. “Pubs need all the help they can get, mate.” On the house, naturally.
The corked up Crimean cannon may have fired its last shot, but Reforms big guns are just getting started.