Nigel Farage is leading Reform UK but can he control its maverick members?

One week in and the “turquoise tsunami” of new Reform UK councillors is already making some less welcome waves. A couple have already relinquished their party allegiance, while there are embarrassing, at best, allegations about the views expressed or endorsed by others in the past on social media.

After taking majority control of 10 councils plus two mayoralties, there will now be unprecedented scrutiny on the party’s personalities, policies and performance…

Many are very new to politics, let alone running a local authority, so they will have much to learn. As things stand, two individuals formally elected as Reform councillors are no longer Reform councillors. Donna Edmunds, elected to represent Hodnet Ward in Shropshire, has quit Reform UK, having already been suspended by the party because she’d asked the voters to “lend” their votes to Reform only for the short term. She has described the party as a “cult” and accused the party’s leader, Nigel Farage, of treating its members with contempt.

The other early, less willing defector is Luke Shingler. Elected as a candidate for the Galley Common ward in Warwickshire, his employment by the Royal Air Force has created complications, as, to be clear, he explained during the campaign: “On Thursday 1 May, I will still appear on the ballot paper under the Reform UK Party, I can not change this. If elected, I cannot stand as a Reform councillor, I will have to be an independent councillor representing YOU until I leave my employment.”

Other now successfully elected Reform candidates have suffered adverse accusations about their past social media postings, which have endorsed (or at least reposted) extremist, particularly Islamophobic material, support for Tommy Robinson, or memes involving Adolf Hitler. One such is Joel Tetlow in Lancashire. Two Labour MPs have called for Reform to suspend him after a photo of Hitler was shared on his official Facebook page with a “joke” about small boat crossings in the English Channel.

Yes indeed. Throughout the previous incarnations of Reform UK – the Brexit Party and Ukip – various councillors and members of the European parliament would attract the wrong sort of publicity for inadvisable comments or actions. There was also, it’s fair to say, more than the usual amount of internecine quarrelling, including a fight in the parliament building which left one Ukip MEP hospitalised. As Farage remarked at the time: “It never looks good... you see third world parliaments where this sort of thing happens...”

Less violent but no less serious disagreements, factionalism and splits have long plagued the hard right and damaged Farage’s ambitions to create a more respectable and disciplined party as an alternative government. Recent internal feuds with Rupert Lowe MP and Ben Habib, the former deputy leader, suggest old habits on the far right die hard.

After some notably unsuitable Reform candidates had to be disowned before the general election last year, Farage promised in March that this time round “we’ve been vetting, I bet, to a standard that no other party has ever done before for local council elections”. Perhaps, but it hasn’t been 100 per cent successful. Part of the problem may be that the sheer unexpected success the party has enjoyed means that many “paper” candidates, ie not expected to win, are now elected councillors with a job that they didn’t particularly want to do.

A more fundamental reason is that the party still hasn’t really made up its mind about some of the issues Lowe, for example, has been championing – whether to back Robinson, endorse mass deportations, and to publish a proper manifesto with policies and plans. When there is no such document or clarity on policy and values, then Reform candidates, and now MPs, mayors and councillors, are bound to stray far from the party line, or basic decency. (Though it is only fair to add that Farage has taken a hard line against Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.) Farage apparently wants approval on all Reform council leaders, but that may not be sufficient to ensure control.

The usual lines: it’s a “new” party (albeit one with a continuity of Farage leadership and broad anti-immigration, anti-EU pitch for decades); all political parties have rogue elements; and that Reform UK is unfairly held to a higher standard than others.

It could get messy. The one council that Ukip ever held, Thanet, was lost when half the party’s councillors defected to form an independent group in opposition to their former colleagues (in a row about redeveloping a former airfield). Because so many Reform councillors have been elected to “send a message to Westminster” and on national slogans, and their plans for their counties are vague or non-existent, there is plenty of scope for rows, division and bitter defections. Indeed, that was one of the abiding features of Ukip in the European parliament, and with Ukip’s modest presence at Westminster, where their maverick MP, ex-Tory Douglas Carswell, continually clashed with Farage.

Is Reform UK the Tory Party Mk 2, or a radical-right alternative, or a precursor to merger and collation with, say, a Jenrick-led Conservative Party? Is it a party happy to accept the likes of Liz Truss or Suella Braverman? Or is it a break with a “failed uniparty past”? Pro-Putin, pro-Trump, pro-both or pro-neither? NHS or not? Workers’ rights or not? Do they even know?

The unusually fractious, cranky and generally argumentative people that Farage’s various political vehicles have tended to attract may well mean that he’ll find this latest lot no easier to lead, though recent stunning successes have placed him in a dominant position. A party of 230,000 members but an underdeveloped system of internal democracy and culture of unity will be inherently unstable. Better than anyone, after more than a quarter of a century in politics, Farage understands that farce is never a promising prelude to power.