Almost one in ten Reform councillors have quit

Reform had hoped that all the politicians they elected last May would be a “shop window” for their party. 

One of Reform’s board members said voters would hopefully see their 800 new councillors getting things done and think “we get elected, we do what we say”. First your local council, then Downing Street, or so the thinking goes.

But it now seems that 8% of Reform’s new councillors – almost one in ten — have now quit. By our count, 67 of the party’s councillors elected last year have either defected to other parties, resigned, or been sacked.

The latest to leave are two women from West Northamptonshire council, who quit amid complaints against the leader, fears about child safeguarding, and suggestions of misogyny from colleagues.

This is embarrassing. Reform’s leaders are fond of boasting about their “talent pool”. These would include the now-sacked councillors like Mark Broadhurst (shared a Hitler meme), Ian Cooper (racially abused a black woman) and John Allen (threatened to murder the prime minister).

In two months, there are going to be local and devolved elections, with as many as 5,000 Reform candidates standing in more than 100 authorities in England, plus the Scottish parliament and Senedd. This May, make your vote count.

And in other news…

🍰 The Great British Bonk Off

Nigel Farage has said in the past that he has a “women problem”. Women are about 7% less likely to vote for Reform, and Farage is trying to do something about it. Appointing the Tory defector Danny Kruger as head of Reform’s unit preparing for government seems like a weird way to go about it.

Kruger is an evangelical Christian and gave a bizarre interview last week. He spoke about wanting to make divorces harder to get and reversing the sexual revolution of the 1960s. “Marriage traditionally was the means by which sexual relations between men and women were regulated, and I think we are suffering from having a totally unregulated sexual economy,” he said.

Where do Kruger’s oddball views come from? Maybe there’s a clue in his family. His mum is the Bake Off judge Prue Leith, whose autobiography Relish is a rollicking delight. In it, she describes her enthusiastic participation in, er, the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Meetings with her first boyfriend, she writes, were “conducted in his house, my house, his college rooms, the backs of cars at the drive-in cinema, in my mother’s big Chevrolet parked on Observatory Hill with the lights of Johannesburg below us, and of course, outdoors”.

She was at it with “beefy” South African rugby players, poets in Paris, and of course, the married man who would go on to become young Danny’s father. Could Kruger be so mortified at reading all about his mum’s boinking that he now wants to crack down on premarital sex?

🤮 Frack and ruin

Dame Andrea Jenkyns wants to preserve the Lincolnshire countryside from being “desecrated” by solar panels. But she is happy for American fracking companies to wreck the county by blasting it with chemicals in search of shale gas. Fracking is not allowed in the UK, but Dame Andrea — who thinks climate change isn’t real — has been meeting with Heyco, a giant US corporation, that wants to overturn the ban and drill Lincolnshire. According to a Guardian report, Jenkyns has met with fracking companies four times and said in a message that she is “very supportive of fracking”. In the US, fracking has devastated rural areas, caused an increase in earthquakes, reduced air quality, and contaminated nearby drinking water supplies. And now Dame Andrea wants to bring it to the UK! 

😬 We’ve become elected councillors by mistake

If you want to know what Reform politicians are like when they get elected, here’s an informative video. Craig Ward, the leader of Reform in Doncaster, stumbles, hesitates, and looks around desperately as if for help during four excruciating minutes. Interviewed by a local democracy reporter, he is asked why his party lied about council tax increases under previous administrations. His reply? “It is what it is.”

Watch if you dare: