The Radio 4 interview just now with Richard Tice should be bottled and sold as a diagnostic tool for political evasiveness. Within thirty seconds he managed to tie himself in a knot so tight it could have moored a tanker.
Pressed about Nigel Farage’s schoolboy antisemitic comments, Tice opened with the classic minimisation routine. It was “playground banter,” he said, as if racism somehow becomes charming when delivered in short trousers. That line only works if the story is true, which of course he realised a heartbeat too late. Cornered, he lurched into the opposite argument entirely. Suddenly the accusers were lying. The interviewer, to their credit, skewered him on the contradiction and let him flounder in it.
This is the Reform method in miniature. Start by brushing it off, then pivot to denial, then attack the messenger. It is the same tired routine whenever Farage’s past pops up. If any Labour MP had this hanging over them, Tice would already be marching up and down College Green screaming about moral decay. But for his own leader, the standards evaporate on contact.
The telling moment was the panic in his voice when he realised what he’d said. You could almost hear the gears grinding as he tried to reverse course without admitting he’d just confirmed the allegation. He couldn’t. So he lashed out instead. That is not a defence. It is a flustered man trying to keep the cult intact.
And that is the deeper truth here. The entire Reform brand relies on Farage being the great untouchable. Question him and the edifice cracks, so they twist themselves into ever smaller shapes to protect him. But a movement that demands this level of contortion from its lieutenants cannot be taken seriously. If they cannot hold a consistent line on a schoolyard slur, they are hardly fit to run a parish council, never mind a country.
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