Farage’s new tartan puppet

On Monday, Nigel Farage preened his insufferably smug way through a press conference at which he introduced the latest opportunistic Tory defector to Reform UK. This time it was Nadhim Zahawi, who was very briefly the Chancellor of the Exchequer under Boris Johnson. Zahawi was later found to have paid a seven figure penalty to HMRC for irregularities in his tax affairs which Zahawi insists were “careless and not deliberate”. That scandal led to Zahawi being forced to stand down as the chair of the Conservatives. Most Tory defections to Reform are opportunistic, it seems that Zahawi’s was more opportunistic than most. There is no former Tory who is too disgraced for Farage to accept.

When you stuff your party with ex-Tories who are best known for their serial scandals, it does not bode at all well for your promise to bring about the reform you claim the British political system so badly needs. It all sounds very like Keir Starmer and his promise of change, but with added fascism, and since Starmer is pretty authoritarian himself, that all points to a massive anger and disenchantment with Farage should he succeed in getting into Downing Street, by which time it may be too late.

The Tories have told friendly members of the press that Zahawi defected to Reform after being turned down for a peerage by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. Zahawi has issued a predictable denial, which we can file under “He would say that wouldn’t he?”

Zahawi is from a wealthy and well connected family of Iraqi Kurds who came to the UK as a nine year old as a refugee from Saddam Hussein. Now he’s in a party which had it been in power when he was a boy, would have made him remain in Iraq. So we can add hypocrisy to Zahawi’s opportunism and penchant for sleaze. Zahawi’s story is not exactly that of an impoverished refugee lad made good, his father was a millionaire businessman and his grandfather was Governor of the Central Bank of Iraq from May 1959 to November 1960 and later the Iraqi Minister of Trade.

Zahawi was one of the richest members of Parliament, only Rishi Sunak was worth more. Despite a net worth estimated to be as much as £100 million, in 2013 he was forced to repay part of a £5,822.27 expenses claim for his energy bills after it emerged taxpayers were paying for the electricity supply to his stables. There’s a Reform UK man of the people for you. By this time if you haven’t realised that reform is as much on the agenda of Reform UK as protecting the devolution settlement is on the Labour party’s, you haven’t been paying attention. No party composed of carpet bagging opportunistic Tory millionaires is ever going to work in the interests of ordinary working class people.

Talking of man of the people, on Thursday the frog faced fascist is due to slime into Edinburgh to announce who is going to lead Reform UK in the Scottish elections in May and who will lead the Reform UK contingent elected to Holyrood. It is widely expected that that man – and it will certainly be a man – is that other carpet bagging opportunistic millionaire Malcolm Offord, a man awarded a peerage by the Tories for services to making them a £150,000 donation. It’s highly unlikely to be the party’s sole MSP, the turncoat Tory Graham Simpson, a man with all the charisma and charm of one of those cheaply printed catalogues for cleaning products which gets stuffed through your letterbox before being consigned to the recycling bin.

Offord isn’t exactly blessed with charisma himself. He’s bought his way into politics, leveraging his wealth in return for influence, first in the Tories and now in Reform. Offord is best known, insofar as he’s known at all for his astroturfing Vote No Borders fake grassroots campaign during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, about which the BBC disgraced itself by effusively publicising on the main News at 6. Now Mr, sorry Lord, Vote No Borders has decided he’s rather keen on borders after all.

The truth is it doesn’t really matter who Farage anoints as nominal leader of the McGhouls of Reform, he will be Farage’s creature, with no authority other than that bestowed on him by Der Fuhrager. Even Anas Sarwar has more credibility than that. Quite incredibly even the accounting unit known as Scottish Labour is more of a real party than the Scottish branch office of Reform UK, which is merely the Scottish franchise of a private company masquerading as a political party. Reform in Scotland is a so called party with no specifically Scottish policies other than a determination to use Holyrood as a platform from which to bang on about its opposition to immigration – which is reserved to Westminster – and its opposition to net zero – energy policy is likewise reserved to Westminster.

Many of those in Reform do not even believe that there should be a Scottish Parliament, their candidates are standing for election to a Parliament which they do not believe should exist and for which they have no policies. These are the people who claim to stand for meaningful change, yet they can’t even change their underwear from the skid marks of Tory sleaze and opportunism. A party which claims Britain is broken but which is filled almost entirely by the Tories who broke it is not about to reform anything , not even the names of those who benefit from the sleaze.

With the BBC and much of the Scottish media desperate to find a new Saviour of the Union now that Anas Sarwar is a busted flush, they will turn to bigging up fascists, because they are more afraid of Scotland becoming a normal prosperous northern European nation than they are of far right Anglo-British nationalism. Watch out for Farage’s tartan puppet to be hailed as the man who’s going to take on the SNP and lock independence back in the Union flag themed shortbread tin. But the non leader of a non party who is the puppet of a man who is widely loathed in Scotland will quickly find out, like Anas Sarwar before him, that his career will be limited to yelling SNP Bad from the sidelines.

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