As an old VW lies clamped outside Tory HQ, Reform UK is on its by-election bandwagon

Next week voters go to the polls in twin elections at Kingswood and Wellingborough, of which the latter is the one to watch. The Kingswood constituency will vanish at the general election in a puff of boundary review. Wellingborough is a more stubborn, working-class seat set in the flooded fields of Northamptonshire, the kind Labour needs to win and the Tories must hold. Here is where landslides are dreamt of.

As by-elections are like juggling knives (one misstep and you’re kaput), most parties are reluctant to talk to day-tripping hacks, especially in the pouring rain. The Tories went mum; Labour did agree to let me attend a canvas, but the candidate fell ill on the same day Keir Starmer dropped his green investment pledge (a cruel coincidence because I probably would have inundated her with questions about it). Thankfully, Reform UK was happy to meet me at the train station and, of course, its PR man, the legendary Gawain Towler, was in a flat cap, and of course he drove a Mini Convertible. Like Tucker Carlson in the Kremlin, I felt instantly at home.

Reform UK has rented an office in the town centre opposite Labour’s, and both are bustling. The Tory HQ, by contrast, was locked up and dark (an old Volkswagen has sat outside for days, clamped and gathering crisp packets). In a sign of the times, Kingswood was triggered by a lefty Tory flouncing off over the Government being insufficiently green, whereas Wellingborough’s Peter Bone, a true-blue Thatcherite, was recalled from Parliament following allegations of bullying and sexual misconduct.

Had Bone run as an independent, he might have won. Many locals love him; some feel the investigation was unfair. The Conservative Association chose to run Helen Harrison in his place, a councillor and physiotherapist – and the woman for whom Bone left his wife in a blaze of publicity. At a hustings, Ms Harrison was asked for an “interesting fact” about herself, and said there isn’t much the press hasn’t already printed.

Labour’s Gen Kitchen represented the county at gymnastics but had to withdraw from the Olympics after breaking her back. The Lib Dems’ Ana Savage Gunn provided protection for the late Queen Mother. Reform’s Ben Habib boxed for Cambridge. Habib, Towler and I had coffee and the conversation turned quickly to the collapse of Western civilisation. “We are literally standing on the precipice of an economic, political, constitutional, social collapse in the United Kingdom,” said Habib; driven by debt, net zero and mass migration. Even the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” has gone, as shown by Coutts’ de-banking of Nigel Farage.

Habib is immaculate and intense, a businessman who regards himself as a champion of the working man. One Labour activist described him as “a millionaire from London”. By-elections are typically about potholes, but Habib is using it as a platform to raise bigger, philosophical issues, arguing “the potholes and the fly tipping and the knife crime and the weed smell every 20 yards as you walk through the town centre… these are all micro-examples of a failing national position”. It doesn’t help that the Conservative Party is “no longer Conservative”. We were joined by Reform UK leader Richard Tice – good-looking, softly spoken – who summed up his cheery campaign thus: “The Tories have broken Britain, Labour will bankrupt it.”

I popped over the road to the Labour building, which is staffed by the tomorrow people: young, keen, just nice kids. I asked if there was anything to see beyond the politics, and it seems Wellingborough once had a zoo that an unreconstructed conservative could endorse: there was a parrot that swore, a chimp that smoked a pipe, and regulations so light that animals were forever escaping (it wasn’t unheard of to find a penguin in your back garden). Alas, it closed in 1970, after a man was mauled by a leopard, and the creatures have been replaced by sculptures that pose no threat to health and safety.

Wellingborough was, I pointed out to anyone who’d listen, a swinging place in the 17th century, with a large community of Diggers who wanted to farm the land in common. So who, today, are the real radicals?

No one wants to admit they are Establishment. Even the Tories, who have been squatting in No 10 for 14 years, insist they are fighting the blob that secretly runs Britain – and pasted to the sad window of Helen Harrison’s HQ was a leaflet warning that a vote for Habib will put the socialists in power. Habib has no time for Starmer either, the “embodiment of the existential threat we face .... He thinks 1 per cent of women have a willy!”

Labour’s victory next Thursday is a foregone conclusion. The question is, will Reform do well enough for the media to say they cost the Tories the seat, as they did in two by-elections last year? “We are managing expectations,” Tice cautions, but he also feels Reform is on the brink of hitting 14 per cent in national polls.

Presumably, this sets it up not just to destroy the Conservatives at the general election but to inherit their voters at the election after that. If Nigel Farage’s Ukip were essentially vandals, tearing down the old system, Tice’s Reform would like to be perceived as builders offering a sober alternative.

Alarmed by the recent anti-Israel marches, Habib and Towler concurred that the risk of a failing technocracy is its replacement by extremists. “Have you seen the film Cabaret?” asks Towler. Seen it? I could sing it. He refers to the scene where the Nazis are rallying, on the brink of power, and a decadent aristocrat says, “Don’t worry about them. We can control them.”

“Yes!” I said, “But that lot” – meaning Labour – probably “think you’re the neo-Nazis”, that Reform are the dangerous extremists the Tories have encouraged and Starmer must rescue us from. To which Gawain noted that of all the major candidates in this damp spot of Albion, only one was born in Pakistan – and that is Mr Ben Habib.

‘The potholes and fly tipping and knife crime… these are all examples of a failing national position’