Performative Hypocrisy

Nadhim Zahawi has decided that Britain is “sick”. This is an astonishing late discovery from a man who spent years inside the government that administered the disease. Apparently the country declined spontaneously while he was in Cabinet, like damp appearing in a house after the builders have left.

He now performs outrage as if he were an innocent witness. Low growth. Hollowed services. Broken councils. Cultural decay. A nation in peril. All diagnosed with theatrical urgency, none connected to the people who caused them. This is not analysis. It is historical amnesia, delivered at volume. The move to Reform UK completes the transformation. Reform is the perfect refuge for failed Conservative ministers. No governing record to defend, no causal chains to explain, no awkward questions about who voted for what and when. Just a stage, a microphone, and a promise never to mention the past. 

Take education. Zahawi now mutters about children needing to be taught “facts, not harmful fictions”. This from a former Education Secretary who launched no crusade against imaginary indoctrination, introduced no major curriculum reform, and left behind no distinctive educational legacy whatsoever. If schools were riddled with “fictions”, he was not the whistleblower. He was the man in charge. And one is entitled to ask what these “fictions” are, coming from a party that treats facts like Dracula treats garlic.

Then there are vaccines, where the hypocrisy becomes almost impressive. Zahawi’s one defensible achievement was running the vaccine rollout. It worked because evidence mattered, expertise mattered, and public trust mattered. It saved lives. He knows this. He traded on it.

And yet he now joins a party happy to give a platform to vaccine denial. When a journalist asks how this squares with his record, he does not answer. He sneers. “That’s a very stupid question.”

That response is not accidental. It is straight from the Donald Trump playbook. Do not explain. Do not reconcile contradictions. Attack the questioner. Assert dominance. Move on. Truth becomes a nuisance, not a standard.

This is the real sickness on display. Not national decline, but evasion. A political class that breaks things, then reinvents itself as a furious outsider shouting at the wreckage. Reform is not a remedy for this behaviour. It is a business model built around it.

When a former Chancellor denounces economic failure he helped create, a former Education Secretary scolds schools he once ran, and a former vaccine minister shrugs at vaccine denial, the message is unmistakable.

This is not about facts.
It is not about reform.
It is about power without memory, and responsibility without consequences.

Britain is not sick because people ask difficult questions. It is sick because too many of the people who caused the damage now demand applause for noticing it.

The man who lectured the country about soaring energy bills while citing the electricity costs of a horse stable now denounces Britain as “sick” and demands to be taken seriously as a tribune of the dispossessed. Zahawi has not changed his instincts, only his stage. Reform allows him to shout about decline without acknowledging authorship, to sneer at questions rather than answer them, and to pose as an outsider to failures he helped engineer.

It is not reform.
It is escape, dressed up as rage.

And it tells you everything you need to know about Reform and ex-Tory MPs. Kemi Badenoch may as well speed things up and rename the once-glorious Conservative Party as Reform Ltd – Antechamber.