Nigel Farage could barely contain his glee on Monday when he unveiled former Tory chancellor Nadhim Zahawi as his latest high-profile recruit to Reform UK.
Things were not always so collegiate between the two men. Farage once described Zahawi as having no principles and only being interested “in climbing the greasy pole”. And, in a now-deleted series of tweets from 2015, Zahawi called Farage’s words “offensive and racist” and said he would be “frightened to live in a country run by” him. And, even as they buried their differences, the defection of yet another senior Tory to the Reform ranks (bringing the total to 22) “is not without risk” for the populist party, said BBC political correspondent Nick Eardley.
‘Creating Conservatives 2.0’
Lack of experience is one of Reform’s “biggest hurdles in looking like a credible party of government”, said The Guardian’s political editor, Pippa Crerar. Farage’s solution clearly is to enlist former Tory ministers but this presents the would-be PM with a quandary: “pack the ranks with too many former Tories and you end up creating Conservative party 2.0, not long after the original version was booted out of office”.
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“One of the key reasons people back Reform is because they consider them different to the other parties,” said Charlotte Henry in The Spectator. By welcoming figures so closely associated with the failed governments of the recent past, the “danger” is that Reform “increasingly risks” looking like “a receptacle of Tory rejects, not the upstart movement they try to portray themselves as”.
Tory party faithfuls “point out privately” that adding Zahawi to a list of defectors that includes Nadine Dorries and Jake Berry is making Reform “look awfully like Boris Johnson’s version of the Conservative Party”, said Sam Coates, political editor of Sky News. Or, as one former Tory cabinet minister put it: “same team, new badge”.
‘Outsider appeal’
Farage, in his many incarnations over the years, has carefully cultivated “a brand built on being outside the system”, said Loic Fremond in UnHerd. “But as he inches closer to power, it seems that he has become what he once denounced.” If Reform is to ride its anti-establishment credentials to No. 10, “it cannot rely on Tory defections” to fill its upper echelons or it will lose its “outsider appeal”.
Reform could resolve instead to fill ministerial posts from outside the Commons, forming a US-style Cabinet – an idea that Zia Yusuf, the party’s head of policy, has already suggested. That “would allow Reform to appoint figures from a much wider experience pool, but also provokes questions about parliamentary accountability and democratic norms”, said Ben Riley-Smith, The Telegraph’s political editor.
There are “obviously downsides to this approach”, said Fremond, but “to maintain any credibility as an alternative,” Reform “must demonstrate that it can stand apart from the same failures it claims to oppose”. If it cannot maintain that separation, Farage’s party “risks becoming little more than a repackaged version of the establishment it criticises”.
