The outlandish conspiracy theories of Reform UK’s policy chief

Bad news for Reform UK in the week of its party conference.

HOPE not hate can reveal that Simon Marcus, the party’s head of policy, is a conspiracy theorist, who has depicted society as being manipulated and brainwashed by an ill-defined set of shadowy global elites into accepting the Covid vaccine, believing in the climate crisis, and supporting Ukraine.

Marcus — who started working for Reform in January 2023 — voiced his outlandish theories in posts on a Substack blog, Sense in Strange Times, in 2023 and in articles for The Conservative Woman website in 2022 and 2023.

In a Conservative Woman article in November 2022, for instance, Marcus confidently wrote: “Whether they know it or not, our politicians have become permanent civil servants for a global government.”

Real power, Marcus suggested, was held by a small “group of wealthy and powerful individuals” who “dominated and influenced” the “opinion-forming classes”.

According to Marcus, Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt — at the time, prime minister and chancellor respectively — were “half-competent useful idiots for Davos”, surrounded by “indoctrinated civil servants”. As such, they would inevitably legislate for “Net Zero, more tax, more state control, [and] cultural Marxism” (the latter a conspiracy theory heavily linked to antisemitism).

In another article, in August 2023, Marcus developed this theory further, claiming that MPs have been manipulated into becoming “globalist, authoritarian technocrat[s]” whose “thoughts have been reordered” and “loyalties now lie elsewhere”.

Given this, he mounted a keen defence of the far-right politician Andrew Bridgen, who was kicked out of the Conservative party in April 2023 after comparing the Covid vaccine rollout to the Holocaust. Marcus argued:

“Watching the Andrew Bridgen saga, it seems we have reached Biblical levels of sin. One man out of 650 in parliament is now able to speak the truth and he is shunned for it.”

It was on his Substack, however, that Marcus most thoroughly explicated his bizarre worldview.

In March 2023, he uploaded a series of three blog posts under the title: “How would a Global Conspiracy Work?”

In the second post, published on 20 March, he detailed that fear “is the most powerful emotion” by which people are manipulated, claiming that this is “why the climate crisis is favoured as the open-ended successor to Covid”.

The same week, Marcus published his third post of the series. In it, he declared that “a century of behavioural control and brainwashing expertise was deployed” when “the ‘Covid crisis’ struck”.

“Government, media and opinion forming institutions were already infiltrated, influenced and manipulated,” Marcus wrote. “Doctors called for a dangerous, experimental vaccine to be forced on children. Policeman [sic] assaulted people for not wearing masks. They were all immunised against fact and reason. The classic symptom of brainwashing.”

Marcus reassured readers that not all was lost, however, as “people are waking up” and “once awakened people become immune to the manipulation”.

He also instructed them to “sympathise with those still under the spell” as “there’s a crisis to hook everyone”, explaining: “Many Brexiteers stood firm against BBC propaganda. Yet they swallowed the Covid narrative whole. And many who saw through the Covid lies were waving the Ukrainian flag a few months later.”

This is just the latest example of a Reform employee propagating extreme views online. Yesterday, HOPE not hate revealed that the party’s ‘donor manager’ James Catton has a shocking history of promoting racist and far-right content on social media.

This Friday and Saturday Reform will be holding its party conference in Birmingham, the theme for which is “The Next Step”. Perhaps the party’s “next step” should be to stop hiring cranks and conspiracy theorists.