Reform’s Fatal Contradiction

Reform UK cannot plausibly present itself as a revolt against lockdowns, mass immigration, censorship and technocratic rule while actively recruiting the people who designed and enforced it all.

Reform UK cannot plausibly present itself as a revolt against lockdowns, mass immigration, censorship and technocratic rule while actively recruiting the people who designed and enforced it all during the Boris–Truss–Sunak era.

Reform sells itself as a clean break from a political class that expanded the state, suspended civil liberties and refused to take responsibility for the consequences. Lockdowns were the breaking point. Mass immigration: the enduring scandal. Censorship: the final insult. Reform exists because millions of voters believe Britain was not misgoverned by accident between 2019 and 2024, but by choice.

Which makes its recruitment strategy so puzzling.

This is not a handful of minor figures drifting over out of frustration. It is a roll-call of senior office-holders from the very departments that Reform and Nigel Farage now denounce most loudly. These were not spectators in the last Parliament. They were its authors.

Suella Braverman, as Attorney General under Boris Johnson, provided the legal basis for Covid lockdowns, the most sweeping suspension of civil liberties in modern British history. As Home Secretary under Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, she then presided over the highest annual levels of immigration ever recorded. Lockdowns and mass immigration are not peripheral issues for Reform. They are its raison d’être.

Nadine Dorries, as Culture Secretary, championed the Online Safety Act, a censorship regime that hands sweeping powers to the state to police speech. Nadhim Zahawi, as Vaccines Minister, oversaw the rollout and publicly championed vaccine passports, now treated by Reform as a moral red line. Later, during his brief stint as Chancellor under Johnson, Zahawi helped lay the groundwork for the Energy Price Guarantee, a vast, unfunded technocratic intervention that distorted markets and contributed to the instability surrounding the Truss mini-budget. This was state expansion dressed up as emergency management, precisely the governing style Reform claims to reject.

Robert Jenrick oversaw years of paralysis as Housing Secretary before resigning as Immigration Minister under Rishi Sunak, despite presiding over outcomes scarcely distinguishable from those he now condemns. Add Danny Kruger, Andrea Jenkyns, Jake Berry, Maria Caulfield, Adam Holloway and Lord Offord, and the pattern becomes unmistakable. These are not rebels forced out of an unrecognisable party. They are the political class that Reform claims to be overthrowing. Reform’s problem is not infiltration, but continuity.

Then there is Matt Goodwin, Reform’s candidate in Gorton and Denton, a development that suggests something more corrosive may be taking hold. With Goodwin, Reform is not only absorbing the governing failures of the Boris–Truss–Sunak era, but flirting openly with a politics of ethno-nationalism, whether sincerely held or opportunistically deployed. Until now, this was a line Nigel Farage had largely avoided crossing.

Goodwin’s transformation has been striking. Once a centrist, Europhile academic who warned against populism and Islamophobia, and who supported Labour’s Sadiq Khan after arguing that Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith’s 2016 London mayoral campaign was Islamophobic, he now speaks of Britain being “invaded” and treats Britishness as something narrowly defined and easily withdrawn. When asked directly in Denton whether he still stood by his views on Britishness, he declined to answer. As recently as the late 2010s and early 2020s, he was making the opposite case, praising migrants’ contribution to the NHS and cautioning that inflaming public anger over immigration risked destabilising the political system.

People are entitled to change their minds. But when that shift is rapid, moves from restraint to provocation, and aligns neatly with the incentives of online outrage politics, it is reasonable to ask whether this reflects conviction or calculation.

The strategic question follows naturally. Is Reform testing whether it can grow by intensity rather than breadth, by grievance rather than coalition, by provocation rather than persuasion?

Senior Conservatives, including Jacob Rees-Mogg, have suggested that the party should stand aside in Gorton and Denton to give Goodwin a clearer run. Given Goodwin’s record, including mocking references to Kemi Badenoch’s African name, this would represent a striking contradiction for those claiming to support her leadership. Badenoch has been clear that someone with Goodwin’s views would not be welcome in the Conservative Party.

Gorton and Denton is one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse constituencies in Greater Manchester. Forty-four per cent of residents identify as coming from a minority ethnic background. Standing a candidate whose politics now trades so heavily in exclusion and racial grievance here is not an accident. It is a decision.

That decision sits uneasily alongside Reform’s recruitment of Laila Cunningham, its self-described patriotic British Muslim mayoral candidate in London. Cunningham has explicitly rejected Robert Jenrick’s comments about seeing “no white faces” in Birmingham, telling The Times that “it’s not about the colour of your skin. Ever. It’s about what’s in your heart.” The inconsistency is not cosmetic. It cuts to the heart of Reform’s contradictions.

At this point, the question shifts. Not what Reform might become, but whether the Conservative Party is capable of exploiting the contrast Reform itself is creating.

Under Badenoch, that opportunity exists in theory, but it is not automatic. Reform’s contradictions do not resolve themselves, and they do not benefit the Conservatives unless they are actively framed. That would require a willingness to attribute the failures of the last Parliament to identifiable decisions taken by identifiable figures, and to treat the migration of those figures to Reform, or their marginalisation within the Conservative Party, as politically meaningful rather than incidental.

Drawing a line under the Boris, Truss and Sunak era does not require public purges. But it does require judgement about who genuinely represents renewal and who remains anchored to the record of 2019-2024. Figures such as Priti Patel, former Home Secretary and now Shadow Foreign Secretary, whose tenure helped entrench the post-Brexit points-based immigration system, inevitably complicate that distinction, however sincerely their views may have evolved.

If Badenoch is willing to accept the political and internal risks that clarity entails, Reform’s current trajectory begins to resemble less an insurgency and more a sorting mechanism, an informal audit of responsibility for lockdown Britain, mass-migration Britain, out-of-control public spending and the turn towards grievance politics.

Reform was founded to challenge the political class of the last Parliament. If it continues down this path, it may instead consolidate it. Whether voters are encouraged to draw that conclusion will depend less on Reform’s rhetoric than on whether the Conservative leadership chooses to make the contrast noticeable.

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.