Reform’s toxic masculinity

Farage’s latest candidate catastrophe...

For a party apparently set to form a future government, Reform has a remarkable inability to win elections.

In the two Westminster by-elections held this year, they’ve been routed – first by Hannah Spencer of the Greens, and then by Labour’s Andy Burnham.

The scale of Reform’s defeat has been surprising in both cases, which were seen as knife-edge contests, only for Farage’s party to fall embarrassingly short.

A similarity in both of these recent races has been the ineptitude – and the obnoxious, charmless personalities – of his two candidates.

Matthew Goodwin and Robert Kenyon are self-evidently two very different people. Goodwin is a slippery and arrogant – self-impressed to the point of self-obsession, superimposed on his face with a trademark smirk.

Kenyon isn’t so polished. He was clearly anxious in front of the camera and came across not as a local lad speaking truth to power, but as someone out of their depth, struggling to remember the lines recited by Farage’s press team.

But, despite these differences, the pair shared some mutual deficiencies.

They both proudly came across as ignorant, laddish, and unapologetic. Goodwin slandered anyone who questioned his extreme views towards race, religion, and immigration. Kenyon stubbornly refused to repent for his online misogyny – including his past confession that he was a proud sexist.

And they suffered the consequences.

Polling in the run-up to the Makerfield by-election showed women breaking heavily for Burnham – kicking Kenyon in the electoral bollocks.

These two candidates epitomise Reform. They’re two sides of the same coin – manifestations of the party’s toxic masculinity. As we all know, Farage has modelled his movement on MAGA, attempting to replicate Donald Trump’s ugly, brash narcissism. The language they use – and the positions they adopt – are combative, angry, devoid of compassion. They try to speak to protein-swilling tech bros and middle-aged patriarchs resentful that the world has left them behind.

In the process, they’ve forgotten about – or have actively tried to malign and belittle – half the voting age population.

That’s why they’ve adopted increasingly hostile policies to women’s rights – with Farage openly questioning the abortion term limit, and committing to scrapping the Equalities Act, which (among other things) protects women from being sacked for being pregnant.

Plenty of ink has been spilled over the voting patterns reshaping British politics, but relatively little attention has been paid to how Reform has consciously waged war on women, who are now punishing the party at the ballot box.

The last two by-elections reveal Reform’s stark vulnerabilities, particularly when it comes to its selection of candidates. Despite self-identifying as the party of “normal” people, they’ve selected two oddballs with views offensive to the average voter.

As a result, rather than helping to detoxify Reform’s image, they have exacerbated the widespread perception that Farage has created a new nasty party.

This speaks to something I wrote a few months ago – namely, Farage is sabotaging his own party by absorbing and platforming deeply unpopular people, often extracted from the most ghoulish wing of the Conservatives.

This especially hurts Reform during by-elections, when the focus is on the local candidate – and their creepy remarks on Twitter – rather than on Farage, who, despite being thoroughly dislikable, is a more effective political performer than Robert Kenyon the sexist plumber.

However, that doesn’t mean Farage can wave away Makerfield as a flash in the pan. If Reform continues to push its macho grievance politics, it will suffer in national elections – not only in races featuring avowed sexists. If anything, Makerfield will be seen as the tipping point when Reform became seen as a party waging war on women’s rights; the moment when the genie escaped the bottle.

Treating half the electorate with contempt doesn’t seem like a genius political move, and Westminster needs to wake up to this gargantuan strategic and moral blunder.

Support journalism that holds Reform to account

---

---

---