And now Reform needs reform....

Pete North nails it. The early promise of Reform is in great danger of being fumbled by less than competent management.  The Labour Party has left an open goal, but all the right wing strikers are on the bench without a seasoned manager, or a plan to convert the Starmergddon Shambles into a solid Reform political mission.

It is a depressingly accurate assessment. While Labour is busy suicide bombing our culture and economy with a litany of ideology and incompetence, pushed along by ever more outrageous lies, the polls are showing that the public is eager for something credible to replace Starmer and stop the rot. Remember Starmer's so-called landslide is thanks to just 20% of the electorate and a flawed electoral system that is in desperate need of reform.
The lack of a coherent opposition able to exploit the opportunity is another indictment of the failure of UK education to nurture a "thinking citizens" political class.
The woeful quality of public intelligence represented by game show contestants is just beyond belief. Today's ITV The Chase marked a particularly low point when a serving Air Vice Marshal (really!) failed to get past round one. 

Over to you Pete...

The departure of Zia Yusuf is probably a bit of a nothing-burger as far as the polls go. If anything, it makes the party slightly more appealing, but it lends weight to the view that Reform is never going to overcome its inherent dysfunctionality. What little talent the party does attract it cannot retain. The party basically never stopped being Ukip. Arrogant, disorganised, paranoid, tribal and a little bit thick. 

As such, it's never going to be more than it is. It will simply stumble from one crisis to the next, learning nothing at as it goes. One might even say this latest episode is hardly newsworthy. It's just what happens in that party. Yusuf, who should never have been appointed in the first place, was always destined to leave. It was either going to be a shove from Farage or a weary resignation. Either way, it doesn't matter at all. His replacement will be as bad or worse. It may as well be Arron Banks - obnoxious, politically talentless and too arrogant to understand his own limitations. He'd be the perfect fit. 

I think, though, today was something of a watershed. A pattern is now firmly established. We've all got their number. I was outspoken this time last year but now I see most pundits saying more or less the same thing: Reform is a policy vacuum, and a party that doesn't really stand for anything. A personality cult, and one with no discernible point. It can win seats by way of broad disaffection, but to no useful purpose. No veteran of British politics sees Reform as an answer to anything.

You might say that Reform couldn't possibly be worse than the incumbents, but that's a conceit. They could be worse and very probably will be worse through lack of preparation, inexperience and naivety. Rupert Lowe is absolutely right. Reform shouldn't be allowed anywhere near power. It would be like handing a loaded revolve with a light trigger to a hyperactive four year old. 

That said, I now think whatever chance of forming a government Reform might've had has already evaporated. Mid-term polls are an illusion. Many who might have had a punt on Reform are now just as likely to stay at home, probably gifting Labour a second term, albeit it with a smaller majority. Reform might scratch two dozen seats where they came in second last time around, but by then Farage will be looking to offload Reform to whoever will take it. A merger with the rump Tory party now seems the most plausible end to this experiment because Farage simply cannot close the deal with the electorate - and without Farage (the party's last remaining asset) there's nothing much going for it. The party is incapable of nurturing talent from within, and we will not see a viable alternative to Farage.

As to where that leaves the right, it's all contingent on whether Jenrick can pull of a coup without the wets sabotaging him. Many of us have taken it for granted that Jenrick will be Badenoch's replacement, but it's telling that Badenoch won't explicitly commit to leaving the ECHR. She knows her party won't let her. Jenrick would be a leader without a party while Reform would be a party without a leader (to speak of). The next course of action (a merger) seems entirely logical, but depressingly, the kind of dross on the Reform back benches could  be every bit as bad as your average Tory wet. This whole enterprise is a dead end. 

That then leaves many grasping for any kind of credible alternative, but the raw material doesn't exist anywhere on the right. I do like Rupert Lowe. His heart is in the right place, but he is naive, and ultimately he is cut from the same cloth as Reform. None of them ever lost their Ukippy tinge. They couldn't come up with a serious policy platform between them because they simply do not have the mental architecture for it. As such, we are stuck with whatever mediocrity we can salvage. And that's not enough. 

I've been saying for a long time now that we're going nowhere until there's an intellectual renaissance on the right, but there are no obvious thinkers waiting in the wings. Jenrick is as good as it gets but his party is a write-off. We're going to be treading water for the foreseeable future. We might even be better off putting up with Labour for as long as it takes for the right to get its act together. Better that than to squander the last opportunity to make real and lasting change. Handing power to another set of dysfunctional wastrels will kill off any hope of truning things around.