I Should Be Voting Reform. Boris’s Old Gang is Why I’m Not

The danger for Reform is obvious. The more it fills up with yesterday’s Conservatives, the more it inherits the habits that made 2019 to 2024 Toryism so useless.

I nearly voted for Reform UK in 2024. On paper, I should probably be voting for them now.

A viral Elector quiz ranked Reform closest to my views on 27.8 per cent, with Advance UK on 22.0 per cent, Restore Britain on 21.7 per cent, and the Conservatives way back on 14.2 per cent. Labour was down on 2.2 per cent and the Greens on 0.4 per cent. If Reform cannot close the deal with a voter like me, then the problem is not a lack of political space on the right. It is what the party is becoming.

That is what makes this so frustrating. I remain furious about the Conservative record on immigration, public spending, taxation, defence, planning reform, NHS reform and the wider collapse of any serious centre-right ambition. After years of drift, cowardice and excuses, Reform looked like the one party on the right willing to say the obvious: Britain’s problems were not caused by bad messaging, but by bad decisions and weak leaders.

7th May 2025 could be a significant day in British political history

That was the appeal. Reform did not pretend the people who made the mess were also the people to fix it. When Zia Yusuf went after Priti Patel, Boris Johnson, Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick and Rishi Sunak, especially on immigration, it felt like a rare outbreak of honesty on the British right. At last, someone was naming the culprits rather than recycling them.

A genuine realignment is happening on the British right, and it can no longer be dismissed. That’s why I have repeatedly called for the London Conservatives and Reform UK London to unite behind Laila Cunningham as a centre-right mayoral candidate, and for accommodations between Reform and the Conservatives where that makes electoral sense.

However, I can’t help but feel Reform was better when Richard Tice, Nigel Farage, David Bull and Zia Yusuf were running the show without the latest batch of failed Tories barging in. Back then, it felt insurgent. Now it increasingly looks like a witness-protection scheme for politicians trying to escape the smell of their own record.

Reform deserves real credit for what it has built. It is set to do very well in the local elections today. Going from basically nowhere in early 2024 to a position where it could win the most council seats in England, while also emerging as the largest party of the right in both the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, is no easy feat. That is a serious political achievement, and they should be commended for it.

Local-election success, however, is not the same thing as winning a working majority at a general election. To do that, Reform needs more than protest votes and anti-establishment energy. They need to convince right-wing voters like me that they will not repeat the Boris era 2019-2024 mistakes, and that is where the defectors become a problem.

What exactly is the voter now meant to be excited about with Reform UK? Suella Braverman now poses as some embattled truth-teller, but her real record is one of failure in office, not dissent. She was Attorney General during Covid, when the government legalised the most sweeping restrictions on civil liberties seen in modern times, and then Home Secretary during the period that produced record net migration. She was not a rebel. Robert Jenrick, meanwhile, spent his time as immigration minister boasting in public about how many migrant hotels he had managed to open, only to reinvent himself later as though he had stumbled across the disaster by accident. Jenrick had the chance to reinvent himself as Reform’s economic spokesman but has instead offered the political equivalent of duty-free aftershave: a couple of retail duty tweaks, whilst sticking to the failed economic consensus of recent decades.

Braverman and Jenrick are not alone. Nadine Dorries, Nadhim Zahawi, Andrea Jenkyns, Jake Berry, Liz Truss and the rest of this travelling troupe of Tory has-beens seem to think that joining or cheerleading Reform wipes the slate clean. It does not. Their problem is not that they were misunderstood. Their problem is that they failed. They backed failure, enabled failure, defended failure and now want a rebrand.

The danger for Reform is obvious. The more it fills up with yesterday’s Conservatives, the more it inherits the habits that made 2019 to 2024 Toryism so useless in the first place: vanity, gimmicks, moral cowardice and a total inability to accept responsibility for anything.

Worse still is the culture growing up around Reform. Some of the people joining it, and some of the people cheering it on, no longer behave like serious political actors at all. They have become groupies, the political equivalent of a 16 year old girl obsessed with One Direction or a single gay man in his thirties who is a Lady Gaga stan. No scepticism, no judgement, no standards, just clapping like seals every time Nigel Farage breathes.

This is how parties rot, not just through bad ideas, but through fandom. The moment a political movement stops tolerating criticism and starts treating flattery as loyalty, it is already halfway to failure. We have seen where that ends. Boris Johnson built a court, not a government, and his courtiers were happy to debase themselves in his service. Loyalty to the man mattered more than competence, standards or the country. The result was talking right while governing left: taxes went up, immigration went up, regulation went up, welfare spending went up, and Brexit opportunities were squandered. Now the same people want to rerun the performance under a different banner and expect applause for it.

This is where Kemi Badenoch benefits. Every Boris-era defector Farage welcomes is one less ghost she has to carry herself. Every washed-up minister who wanders over to Reform makes it easier for her to say: that was them, this is me. Farage may think he is building momentum. In reality, he may be helping Badenoch shed the human baggage of the Johnson years.

A week is a long time in politics. Three years is a lifetime. Reform will have a triumphant local election, and fair enough, it has earned that moment. Council seats won on protest energy are not the same as a Commons majority, though, and to get that Farage has to win over voters like me. The more Boris-era wreckage he drags aboard, the harder that becomes.

On my own politics, I should probably already be with Reform. If Nigel Farage still cannot close the sale with voters like me, after all that Tory failure, all that Labour mediocrity and all that political space sitting open in front of him, then the problem is not the electorate. It is the company he is keeping.

Albie Amankona is a broadcaster, financial analyst and political activist. He is the co-founder of Conservatives Against Racism and a member of the Conservatives LGBT+ National Executive. He regularly appears across broadcast media and can be followed on X through @albieamankona.