Abstract
This book is chaotically (indeed, sometimes barely) organised, not only leaping back and forth in time but often making it difficult to know exactly who is being quoted. It is highly partisan, too. Nigel Farage, former leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and The Brexit Party, is not so much lionised as beatified - not altogether surprisingly, perhaps, since the author (a senior lawyer, a property developer, a farmer, and a horserace trainer to boot!) is proud to describe himself as the ‘Servant’ to Farage’s ‘Prince’. In contrast, any individual or institution judged to have worked to undermine the ‘will of the people’ and the very hardest of ‘hard’ Brexits - be it Commons speaker, John Bercow, assorted Conservative MPs, the Guardian newspaper, and even (indeed, especially) the UK’s independent Electoral Commission and the country’s Supreme Court - is effectively demonised.
And yet, for anyone interested in the nitty-gritty and nuts and bolts of political parties, and particularly in what it takes to set one up from scratch, it makes for a fascinating, albeit often frustrating read. Written by an insider who in no small part was responsible for getting the party off the ground so it could, in a matter of months, win a stunning 30.5% of the vote and first place in the 2019 European Parliament elections, the book reminds those of us who are interested in party competition that some of the biggest obstacles facing a political start-up are balls-achingly administrative rather than ideological or electoral.
Not that the latter is completely ignored, of course: Reid is well aware of the difficulties first-past-the-post poses for a challenger party - and how could he not be, given the fact that, just six months after it rose like a rocket in June 2019, the Brexit Party came down like a stick, winning a mere 2% at the general election held that December? Indeed, for those readers particularly interested in that election, the book contains an in-depth discussion (pp.189-202) of the dilemma Farage and those around him faced back then. Although they didn’t trust Boris Johnson to deliver anything like the ‘clean-break’ Brexit they were hoping for, it seems they were ultimately persuaded to beat a partial retreat by withdrawing their candidates in Conservative-held seats for fear that carrying on might ultimately put the Tory majority, and therefore Brexit, at risk.
The book also provides a solution (although not necessarily a convincing one) to a puzzle that many have pondered since then - namely why, if the aim in the end was to ensure Johnson secured a mandate for Brexit, did the party not stand down its candidates in seats the Tories were hoping to take from Labour (a decision that may have cost the Tories around 25 seats they otherwise might have won)? The answer, apparently, was that (p.201) ‘The momentum behind us was too strong. So many candidates. So many supporters. We couldn’t pack up our tents entirely. Nor did we truly believe that the Tories would finish the work as we wanted it.’
In the course of that discussion, incidentally, Reid repeats accusations that un-named Conservatives dangled peerages and knighthoods in front of the party’s leadership and some of its candidates, in what he regards as a potentially criminal attempt to get them to stand down. Sadly, however, he doesn’t provide any hard evidence or specifics.
Being short on specifics, however, is not something that Reid can be charged with when it comes to detailing the legal, financial and administrative hoops through which anyone seeking to set up a new party is obliged to jump. Obviously, as he notes, these were an incredible source of frustration for the politicians involved - not least for Farage himself. But, as a lawyer, he nonetheless appreciates the rationale for some (though not all) of them. The book is also good on how some of the bureaucratic obstacles were surmounted, often highly creatively and with only hours to go. And it provides a wealth of detail on the challenges, especially in the era of social media, of selecting and vetting candidates (pp. 115-123).
Those challenges, of course, were made slightly less daunting by the way The Brexit Party - mainly in the hope that it could avoid the seemingly endless, time-consuming and energy-sapping infighting that had plagued UKIP - was set up as a (non-profit) company with registered supporters rather than members, thus ensuring Farage (who claimed to have been inspired by Geert Wilders in this regard) was ‘a boss unfettered by any possibility of internal competition’ (p.36). On the other hand, this did make things difficult when some of those initially given crucial bureaucratic responsibilities were very soon obliged to step down after some of their embarrassing social media posts came to light.
But while The Brexit Party had no-one to blame but itself for some of its trials and tribulations, Reid makes a case - not an altogether unfair one, one can’t help concluding - that, on occasion, it was subject (at the very least) to more scrutiny than other political parties, both by banks fearing for their reputations and, more importantly, by the Electoral Commission. In the case of the latter, however, it seems at least possible that what Reid (Chapter 8) sees as its unwarranted suspicion and interference stemmed as much from an understandable concern on its part about procedural and financial probity as it did from what he calls ‘Remainer Derangement Syndrome’.
For all its faults and omissions, then (a timeline and an index, for instance, would have come in especially handy), this book is worth reading for anyone interested in Brexit and, all the more so, for anyone who believes, as the late, great Peter Mair once put it, that to really understand political parties, we need to do all we can to ‘get inside’ them. It also serves as a how-to (and occasionally a how-not-to!) guide to anyone ‘brave’ enough to set up a new party.