Jumping the Sinking Ship

So, Rupert Matthews has jumped ship. After 40 years in the Tory party – that’s four decades of nodding sagely while the country slid into potholes, debt and cultural flatulence – he's scuttled over to Reform UK, the political equivalent of a lock-in at the Angry Gammon Arms. According to Farage, Matthews’ defection is a "major coup." I suppose if you define “major” as “mildly embarrassing but still breathing,” he might have a point.

Who is Rupert Matthews? Well, aside from being Leicestershire’s Police and Crime Commissioner – a title which now appears to require nothing more than a hi-vis gilet and a press release – he's best known for churning out over 170 books about ghosts, UFOs, and other things that only appear in the minds of the easily impressed. He’s basically Britain's answer to Dan Brown, if Dan Brown had flunked geography and thought the Treaty of Lisbon was a coded plot to turn Birmingham into Bavaria.

But don’t scoff – this is a man who believes he’s been chosen to tackle “wokeness” in the criminal justice system. That’s right. Apparently the rot set in when constables were encouraged to use people’s preferred pronouns, instead of just tasering them and asking questions later. Matthews wants us to model our prisons on American supermaxes – presumably because nothing says “efficient justice” like a society that jails more people per capita than China and still can’t stop school shootings.

And then there’s his big idea: deport all foreign criminals immediately upon conviction. No appeal, no delay – just herd them onto the first Ryanair to Nowherestan and hope the paperwork catches up. It’s not clear whether this includes second-generation Brits who had the temerity to be born brown, but let’s not get bogged down in detail. This is Reform UK, where nuance goes to die.

You might wonder why he’s defecting now, having stood for the Tories in the last PCC election and won. Couldn’t possibly be that Reform just swept the local elections in Leicestershire, could it? Perish the thought. No, I’m sure it’s ideological. A sudden, blinding revelation – like Saint Paul on the road to Market Harborough – that the real enemies of Britain are drag queens, solar panels, and the metric system.

Rupert, whose previous highlight in Brussels was once warning that the EU might "invade" Britain via administrative treaty, has now taken on a new foe: feelings. He wants Britain to toughen up, crack down, man up – though one suspects his own idea of a strongman is a retired Territorial with a Labrador and a copy of The Daily Express wedged under one arm.

Reform’s delighted, of course. Farage stood beaming next to him like a man who’s just bought a second-hand car that still has the ashtray intact. This is the new political elite, apparently – ghost-hunting author turned crime czar, whose grasp of policy lies somewhere between an Enid Blyton plot and a Donald Trump rally.

So here we are. Rupert Matthews – the ghostwriter who’s now ghosted the Tories – has flounced over to Reform to crack down on the woke, deport the bad guys, and generally perform 1980s cosplay with fewer facts and more volume. Somewhere, a copy of The Road to Serfdom is weeping quietly into its tweed binding.

I’d say you couldn’t make it up. But Rupert probably already has – in book 147: Ghosts of Common Sense: The Day Britain Forgot How to Think.