On Sunday, Deputy Conservative chairman Lee Anderson claimed he was offered money if he was to defect from the Conservative party and join the right-wing party Reform UK. If he wasn’t re-elected in the 2024 election as a Reform candidate, he was also offered a job with the equivalent of five years of an MP’s salary. A current MP’s base salary is £86,584. That’s the money I would get if I became an MP tomorrow. If I took pretty much any cabinet, shadow cabinet or spokesperson role. That number would rise to around £100,000. Meaning if Anderson wasn’t re-elected. He’d earn north of £432,920. It will take me twenty years to make the same amount with my current salary.
Reform could come under a lot of names. We could call them the Brexit Party, the group’s previous iteration pre-2019. Or UKIP, where its president and many of the group's senior staff came from pre-2016. Or the BNP. Where a large number of the group's early-paid members will have come from pre-2010. I personally prefer to call them some kind of four-letter expletive, like scum or shit. Feel free to make up your own.
A man called Dave once referred to the sort of people who stood for these groups as fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists. For once, I’ll agree with him.
Reform is doing something different from the iterations of the hard right wing before it, though. Rather than trying to let the foghorn of idiocy blare out as loud as it possibly can, they’re trying to dress the far right or British society up in a suit, tape its mouth shut, make it look presentable, and then sell it to you as a new product, A competent far-right candidate to be a member of parliament.
In 2019, the group, under its previous alias of the Brexit Party and the leadership of everyone's favourite jungle explorer, Nigel Farage, the group hashed together a deal with Boris Johnson's Conservative government, which would mean the Brexit Party stood aside against Conservative candidates and avoid splitting the vote. The move destroyed the chances of any Brexit party success while also throwing Boris’ government over the finish line. Both sides have since agreed never to make such a partnership deal again.
So, Reform needed a new strategy. From 2020 till now, they have tried winning the same way as other political parties. Make a campaign, get support and be elected. And while they haven’t had a proper election to test this out, the results of the last few years have shown very little proof that the majority of Britons want the hard right, anti-woke headbanging freak show anywhere near power. But on Sunday, we saw a final change of tact. “If we can’t win the people over, we’ll buy power instead.”
This point brings me to the title question: how do you buy an MP?
For Anderson, nearly half a million pounds wasn’t enough. Though I think he’s in the minority. I believe many other MPs from all sides of the political aisle could be bought over relatively quickly and for less money.
But don’t just take my word for it; watch the four-part series by the political campaign group Led By Donkeys. The group invented a fake scenario in which they created a made-up South Korean consultancy firm that offered current MPs large amounts of money to sit on their international board of advisors as a second job for a few days a year, and we’re talking thousands of pounds a day; racking up hundreds of thousands of pounds each year. All those interviewed for board positions seemed to neglect their duties as parliamentary MPs and did not utter so much as a murmur about having responsibilities to their constituents.
This action may be where Reform went wrong in trying to win over Anderson. They were too direct. Asking a prominent right-wing MP to defect from the party he’s staunchly represented since being elected to a party with no current Westminster representation, and will likely cost him his future political career, would create too many headlines that were not favourable.
I say that as though he’s been there a long time, only since 2019. Anderson was expelled from Labour in 2018 for receiving a community protection warning. He moaned that Momentum and the hard left had taken over the Labour Party, despite campaigning for the 80’s left-wing Labour leader Michael Foot and Arthur Scargill, the former leader of the National Union of Mineworkers. While I get people can change over time, this isn’t a change of conscience. This move is a desperate power grab by moving from a Labour loyalist to a Conservative headbanger. He only skipped the entire political spectrum to get to that position. He can hardly be painted as a good person for outing all of this.
Reform needed to be more discrete. The Farage clique have always been most effective when moving in the shadows to achieve their desired results. Farage himself would often make a lot of noise using smoke and mirrors to deceive the public and the media. At the same time, in the cloud, you would have people like Aaron Banks throwing his money around or Dominic Cummings twisting the message to make it more favourable to the public and potential MP suitors. Reform might have failed this time, but they will try again with other suitors and with more money as bait on the hook.
Q in Skyfall said, “I can do more damage than you (Bond) sitting on my sofa with my laptop before I’ve finished my first mug of Earl Grey than you can do in a year out in the field, but occasionally a trigger has to be pulled.”
The metaphor makes sense in this context. Many of the big decisions in politics and with the country are done behind closed doors with no knowledge from the public, though eventually, a significant event has to happen and be revealed to the world. And while we may not be able to influence the political tide's direction, we can at least get off the beach before the waves of incompetence, idiocy, corruption, and headbangers come crashing home.