CRUSH THE SABOTEURS!

Tim! You're trapped!

Reform’s decision sack Tim Montgomerie means that there is now a political vehicle which will not consent to be governed according to the whims of the Westminster lobby, which has a vested commercial interest in causing chaos to create scoops and drive subscriptions for their employers by taking advantage of personal rivalries and cattiness between politicians and special advisers.

One which will simply sack employees and members for passing on damaging private information to the media instead of meeting these breaches with a wan indulgence because ‘that’s just the game we are in’. Montgomerie is a creature of that fading world, one where the stakes seemed much lower and it was a given that ‘critical friends’ would be accommodated within the broad tent of mainstream political parties. His mistake was to believe that Reform could become a political ‘tradition’ in the sense that the Conservatives are, with space for people to navel gaze and pontificate about what the ‘future of Labour’ really is. Endless vacuous discussions. Are we orange-book Lib Dems? Watermelon Greens? Grey UKIP?

But for the people inside Reform, including Nigel, it is a movement with unshakeable convictions on specific issues, particularly immigration. ‘Policy debates’, such as they exist, are refracted through the lens of electability (if we cut welfare for pensioners too much will they fail to turn out - and will this jeopardise our plan to shut down the asylum hotels?) There is no space for litigating these debates in public and inviting the accusation that Reform is undergoing a ‘civil war’ which can be breathed into existence by ideologically hostile journalists who want to discourage potential donors and hires from putting their name to the project by suggesting it about to blow up, while talking up the non-existent Badenoch bounce.

This has been the media environment for Reform since the latter end of 2025. Given how relentlessly these narratives have been pushed, it is remarkable how little impact they have had, given that Reform are still alternatively polling ahead of Burnham’s revitalised Labour Party. A public signal that this grinding disloyalty will not be tolerated is of course a step in the right direction. There are also rumours hinted at in the press which suggest a ‘chatty rat’ may be operating within the organisation proper, which will require very thorough investigation.

Further internal purging may be necessary to hammer the message home. It is much better to have this problem now, during opposition, than it is to have it when Reform is in the process of leaving the ECHR, or there are riots outside of migrant hotels. Backstabbing in that environment would be fatal, and since and derailment of the train once it is running would delegitimise effective anti-illegal migration measures for a decade, the stakes are very high – and so hard measures on staff and MPs (phone checks, diary checks etc) are justified.

Dominic Cummings wrote a meandering attack on both the Tories and Reform in his last Substack which concluded, uselessly, that there was no point for useful people to try and work with either organisation, or to start their own party. The old Hitchens fugue. His gripe with the staffers inside Reform is that they will not share their power with anyone (e.g with him and Lawrence Newport), which is an eminently reasonable position to hold given that Cummings is of the same vintage as Montgomerie and also leaks like a sieve, hence the absurd over-egging of his input into the 2016 Referendum (did you know that UKIP used ‘take back control’ for years before Benedict Cumberbatch invented it?) and the destruction of Boris Johnson over a slice of cake via Pippa Crerar.

Reform’s response to this should not be disheartened by these attacks. Instead they should look to demonstrate how they can prove Cummings wrong by running a more effective government than Vote Leave was able to in 2019. Sacking Montgomerie is the first step along this path. If they keep this firm line on party loyalty together they will not be beset with briefings and meltdowns as Boris was between 2019 and 2022, where every radical policy move be it social care or planning reform is immediately submerged by threats to rebel and irreverent remarks about the PM made over boozy lunches.

For a radical government which wants to upend the social order set down in 1945, strict loyalty, refreshed from time to time with a public scalping is not a nice to have. It is an absolute must.