
WARNING: The foxes are in the henhouse. That’s how Nigel Farage put it as he and four other newly elected Reform UK MPs arrived at Westminster for their first day in Parliament on Tuesday.
There may only be five of them, but this is the ‘bridgehead’ the Reform UK leadership wanted to establish in the Houses of Parliament. From here, they believe they can build something much, much bigger. The party is delighted by the result, not least because it was entirely possible they would get no MPs at all.
Seven times a loser in previous parliamentary elections, Farage and his team were taking absolutely nothing for granted. Indeed, I can reveal that around two weeks before the election, there was a brief panic that the polls might be wrong about the strength of his lead in Clacton – and he might not win. The worry was that the Left was running a tactical voting campaign against him, which might just succeed.
The stakes could scarcely have been higher. Had he failed in Clacton, it is hard to imagine how Reform UK could have recovered. And so the party rightly threw everything at ensuring he made it over the line.
In the end he was home and dry with a huge margin, having secured almost half (46.2%) of all votes cast in the seat. After overturning a Tory majority of almost 25,000, he now has an 8,000 majority: a stunning victory for someone whose chances of ever getting into Parliament had been widely dismissed.
In Boston and Skegness, my partner Richard Tice won with a narrower majority – but had an even higher electoral mountain to climb than Farage. As Leader of the Party, he could have stood anywhere he wanted – so his decision to select the second safest Tory seat in the country took some by surprise.
On paper, it looked mad: the sitting MP had a majority of almost 26,000, a figure that looked almost impossible to overcome. Adding to the pressure, when Sunak called the election, Tice had only just decided to run in that particular seat. Having stood in Hartlepool in 2019, he felt a strong connection with the town and always planned to give it another go there. (Such was his commitment to Hartlepool that he actually bought a large property by a roundabout in the town and painted the whole building in the party colours, with his name in huge letters on the front. Quite what to do with these offices when he decided to run in Boston and Skegness instead was something of a conundrum. Suffice to say that once he’d made up his mind, his name was swiftly erased from the Hartlepool offices, though he remains the proud owner of a random property on a roundabout in the north east.)
Why Boston and Skegness?
Immigration
Immigration
Immigration
There were other factors of course, including the record and priorities of the incumbent, Matt Warman, who had held the seat since 2015. This is a staunchly Eurosceptic part of the country, which voted overwhelmingly for Brexit in 2016. Suffice to say that the sitting MP did not appear to feel as strongly about this issue and the scourge of mass immigration – for which his government was of course responsible – as the good people of Boston and Skegness who elected him.
In the end, he pulled it off with about 2,000 votes to spare, not a single one of which was taken for granted. This victory was never remotely a ‘given’. Indeed, it wasn’t until about 40 minutes before the official declaration of the result that his campaign team were quietly confident that he had pulled it off.
His margin is significantly more comfortable than that of Reform UK’s newest political figure, James McMurdock, who won in South Basildon and East Thurrock by just 98 votes after a series of nail biting recounts. The question everyone was asking, in the early hours of last Friday morning? In the nicest possible way: “Who is he?”
The truth, as he himself told the Telegraph, is that the 38-year-old father-of-four only joined Reform UK in May – and only decided to stand for the party at the very last minute. He was considered (including, initially by himself) as a “paper candidate” – meaning there was no expectation that he would win. He did not have a professional election agent; nor a formal campaign team. At the count, his mum, dad and two sisters were his official representatives. He paid for his own leaflets, and was so inexperienced he forgot to include Reform UK’s name on the flyer, a legal requirement. Apparently, he and his wife corrected the mistake by hand, spending hours every evening stamping all 20,000 flyers with the party brand.
After weeks of controversy about candidates, a fleeting fear at Reform UK HQ was that McMurdock – poised for sudden fame – might not be the perfect advert for the party. Thankfully, he has all the right credentials. Having grown up in a council house, he is giving up a brilliant career in finance – and taking a massive pay cut – to become an MP.
Now they’re in Parliament, what can the “Famous Five” actually do? Vastly outnumbered by Labour, Tory and Lib Dem MPs, critics will question whether the “foxes in the henhouse” will actually have any teeth.
That’s a subject for another day. Suffice to say, I believe they will do a lot more than just scare the birds…
A shame that Ben Habib didn't make it too. I can understand the move to have Richard as deputy leader as Nigel will need a deputy in the Commons, I just hope that Ben can still have a major role to play in the party.