Reform Watch 11: The homophobic aristocrat on Reform’s main stage

The homophobic aristocrat on Reform’s main stage

Nigel Farage isn’t exactly a champion of LGBT rights. Still, back when he was the leader of UKIP, he set out his position firmly in favour. Farage was “delighted”, as he wrote in 2014, at the growth of his party’s LGBT wing and the presence of openly gay politicians on his team. He even said he was pleased that he had sacked Viscount Monckton, a senior figure who had made homophobic comments.

Monckton, who was once UKIP’s deputy leader, had ludicrously claimed that some gay men have “as many as 20,000 partners” in their “short, miserable lives”.

Farage rightly condemned these comments as “disruptive, crass and insensitive” and said people like Monckton “should get no support” from his party.

How worrying, then, that Viscount Monckton has been invited back into the fold. He addressed Reform’s party conference last weekend.

Monckton’s views have only hardened in the decade since was last in with Team Farage. In 2021, Monckton spoke to the Traditional Britain Group — a gathering of far-right activists — on the subject of woke culture. In his speech, he described homosexuality as “a bad idea”, claiming: “It’s not some abstract theological reason, it kills you and it might kill a lot of other people as well.”

In addition to saying homosexuality was “medically dangerous”, Monckton called for being gay to be treated like cigarette smoking, complete with medical warnings. He added: “Homosexuality is so wrong that it is regarded as one of the four sins crying out to heaven for vengeance in traditional theology.”

So what on earth was he doing at the Reform conference? (And what does David Bull, Reform’s openly gay chairman, think about this?)

Monckton was addressing a panel on climate change “realism”, another term for climate change denial, in which Monckton has a side hustle. In his oddball appearance, he said the shale gas under Blackpool should be fracked, saying “at last we have found a use for Blackpool”. He also, bizarrely, called for school and university lessons to be recorded in order to stop “communist teachers”. 

Also speaking at the conference: Aseem Malhotra, popular among coronavirus conspiracists, who said that Covid jabs may have given cancer to King Charles and the Princess of Wales.

In an interview last week, Reform’s head of policy Zia Yusuf pledged that his government would have a cabinet staffed with talent at a “galactic-level”. So far, it doesn’t look like there’s any intelligent life out there…

🙃 Speaking of talent

Simon Marcus is Reform’s head policy advisor. He is also a conspiracy theorist. Our colleagues at HOPE not hate have looked at Marcus’s blog and social media, and found some weird and worrying stuff. He has painted society as being hoodwinked and brainwashed by an ill-defined set of shadowy global elites into accepting the Covid vaccine, believing in the climate crisis, and supporting Ukraine. He claimed that MPs have been manipulated into becoming “globalist, authoritarian technocrat[s]” whose “thoughts have been reordered” and “loyalties now lie elsewhere”. Marcus was in charge of producing Reform’s election manifesto. Now it makes much more sense that the manifesto included wacky details about Covid lockdowns being apparently “based on shoddy evidence and lies” and a pledge to “reject the influence of the World Economic Forum”, a common bugbear of conspiracists. 

🚮 A load of rubbish

How often do your bins get collected? Not enough, according to Zia Yusuf. Earlier this year, he said voters had noticed — quite reasonably — that “their taxes keep going up, their bin collections keep getting less frequent, potholes remain unfixed and their local services keep getting cut”. Now that Reform has ten councils under its control, they must be doing a lot about the bins, right? Wrong! In Lancashire, the Reform politicians in charge of the council are recommending that households get moved down from a collection every two weeks to every three. A letter from the chief exec, which we have seen, says: “We understand that any changes to collection services may be disruptive and sensitive but sharing the associated savings would help to strengthen the business case for doing so.” The gags about voting for Reform and getting rubbish write themselves.

🎶 No-hit wonder

Andrea Jenkyns, Reform’s mayor of Lincolnshire, came on stage to Reform’s conference singing a pop song she wrote in 2006. Perhaps the politest way of describing the quality of this tune is in letting you know that it was not made with a record label but in fact self-released. Here is a line from the second verse: “I know I must / Get into a routine / And go early to bed / A thousand books I must have read.” Masochists can listen here.