Mountebanks of Reform

Crashing out is becoming a habit for the leader of the Mountebanks

Back in January, the then Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, refused to allow Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester,  to stand in the Gorton and Denton by-election that was subsequently won by the Greens. He claimed it was to avoid an expensive and time-consuming by-election for the Mayor of Greater Manchester if Andy Burnham won the by-election. Six months later, the said by-election took place. By this time, the Reform Party had become the dominant party in Greater Manchester. At the local elections in May, the Reform Party took 30.7% of the votes in the 10 local authorities that make up the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. Labour received 23.6% of the vote and the Greens 19.1%. Keir Starmer had signed his own dismissal notice.

At the next by-election in Makersfield, Andy Burnham was allowed to stand, and subsequently won in a seat that had been expected to be won by the Reform Party after the results of the May local elections. Within days, Starmer had resigned. Andy Burnham had become the new PM and was cooking up a storm of new initiatives and zealously dominating social media. He was generating some hope after the moribund days of decline under Johnson, Truss, Sunak and Starmer. 

Starmer had not been wrong about the cost, or the slow pace of the election count as we waited up until 11pm on the day after the poll to get the result. His handling of calling by-elections characterised his period in office: mindful of cost, devoid of imagination and always cautious. His demise was his failure to inspire or provide a glimpse of hope that the UK needs in these troubled times. The Reform Party had become the gathering post for the Mountebanks who amplified the problems with all the deceit to be expected from their leaders, who are hard-core members of the very establishment that they mock.

Like so much else in the UK, the pace of the count was diabolical. The technology is there to do this count electronically; we piloted the technology for the Electoral Commission in 2002 for a ward by-election in Stirling. It led to the use of the technology in the 2007 combined Council Multi-Member Ward Election System and Scottish Parliament Additional Member Voting System. Both of these are much more complex than the Supplementary Voting System used in Greater Manchester. We had the results for both elections completed and the counters released from the count by 3am, just 5 hours later than the close of polls, not 25 hours later.

The Labour candidate, Bev Craig, won the Greater Manchester Mayor with 66.3% of the share of the vote, including the second preferences. Reform took 33.7%. The respective figures for first preferences were 47% to 21%, with 12% for the Greens. Yet at the Council elections in May the results were the other way round. Labour had 23.6% and Reform 30.7%; these should be most realistically compared with the first preference votes.

Once again, the Grand Old Duke of the Mountebanks, Nigel Farage, had marched his latest wheeze, the Reform Party, to the top of the hill, to see them have a great fall. He has lost his fabled ability to popularise the zeitgeist of despair, and even the sympathetic right-wing media and senior Reform members are distancing themselves from him.  Can all Nige's crypto and all Nige's friends ever put Reform together again? Well, there is plenty of evidence that this is unlikely, especially if Count Binface chips away at his votes in the Clacton by-election that he has brought upon himself. His previous incarnations as leader of the UKIP party died away in 2019, and the Brexit Party was killed off in 2021. It would appear that each of his regenerations to cheat death gets darker as he ages. Expect him to emerge from a TARDIS with a new gang of Mountebanks sometime soon. 

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