Self-Implosion

Reform’s greatest mistake was thinking power would prove their point. It hasn’t – it’s destroyng it. They were never built for governing, only for grievance. Running councils has exposed what many already suspected: they can’t translate fury into function. They’ve gone from thundering revolutionaries to floundering administrators in six short months.

Had they stayed out of local government, they could still be riding high in the polls, safely sneering from the sidelines about “waste” and “wokeness”. Instead, the public has been treated to leaked videos of councillors shouting “suck it up” at their own colleagues, five expulsions in Kent alone, and a “Department of Government Efficiency” that cannot even get access to the data it says it needs. It is beyond irony - it is parody. And now, on top of the local government clown show, along comes Nathan Gill.

Reform’s former leader in Wales, long presented as one of the “honest, decent” patriots around Farage, has pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to eight counts of bribery for taking Kremlin-linked money to pump out pro Russian lines in the European Parliament. Scripts supplied via a Ukrainian politician tied to Medvedchuk, one of Putin’s circle. The self styled party of sovereignty and British pride had one of its own effectively on the Kremlin payroll.

Farage’s response, of course, is that he barely knew the man. Which is curious, given Gill led Reform in Wales and moved in Farage’s inner orbit according to people who actually worked with them. You can almost hear the scratching of the tippex on the Reform family photo as they quietly erase another “patriot” who turned out to be very keen on Moscow’s interests.

So we now have a party that cannot run a council budget without imploding, and whose ex Welsh leader has admitted taking Russian money to push Putin friendly talking points. These are the people who want you to hand them the nuclear codes and the security services. What could possibly go wrong. Their big experiment - the so called DOGE unit - was supposed to root out corruption and excess. 

In reality it has identified little more than cancelled office moves, axed net zero schemes and a handful of “savings” so small the Institute for Government politely described them as “minuscule”. Penny cuts dressed up as revolutions. All the while, the party that set up the watchdog for waste could not spot a Kremlin cash pipeline running straight through one of its own former leaders.

And here is the beauty of it: Labour and the Conservatives do not need to lift a finger. They do not even have to run attack campaigns. All they need to do is point at the chaos in Reform run councils and then at the Nathan Gill sentencing remarks, and ask Nigel Farage two questions he cannot answer. First, what would you actually do. Second, why do the strong-on-sovereignty patriots keep ending up on the wrong side of Moscow. 

Those questions alone will sink them, because they do not have the faintest idea how to govern and they have even less idea how to vet their own “stars”. Farage thrives on noise, not numbers. Governance is about detail, trade offs and law - none of which suits a populist built for the pub, not the parliament. His “pirate ship” may terrify the establishment in rhetoric, but it is sinking under its own incompetence in practice, with a faint smell of Russian diesel wafting from the bilges.

The lesson is obvious. Opposition populism can promise the earth; governing populism cannot even empty the bins or check whether its own front men are on the take from a hostile state. Reform should have stayed mysterious, angry and unelected - because the moment they were tested, the illusion shattered and the funding trails lit up in court.

Now, as council budgets crumble, councillors are suspended in batches, Gill goes down for Russian bribes, and the DOGE “crack squad” turns out to be a press office in search of a saving, Farage’s revolution looks like a pantomime. Labour and the Tories can just stand back, smile politely, and let Reform’s own chaos write their campaign posters for them.

By 2027, this so called uprising will not have been crushed by the establishment. It will have fizzled out in a cloud of angry Facebook posts, broken promises, unpaid invoices and one very awkward entry in the Old Bailey records. In the end, nobody needed to stop Reform. Reform stopped itself.