Sometimes, it's OK to laugh at the clowns

Reform overshadows their own progress by highlighting their worst instincts.

Yeah I suck at Canva, but you get the point, and I am doing a course next week.

I was going to write about the Spending Review this week, but to be honest, I don’t have a lot to say that I haven’t read elsewhere. There have been some really positive announcements on regional transport, infrastructure, the retention of the Warm Homes programme and free school meals. My concern is that this is a government that does good things almost immediately followed by bad things and that expectation is becoming baked in. We will see if Rachel Reeves can defy that next week - and until I hear what she has to say in totality, I’ll be speculating as much as the next person.

So instead, I thought I would have a nice, long, hard laugh at Reform. And what a lot there has been to laugh at this week.

The warm up was the breathless coverage of Reform in the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse byelection to the Holyrood parliament. Where they came… third.

Yes, for all the noise about the moving of the political tectonic plates, Labour came a slightly unexpected first and the SNP second. Traditional politics reasserted itself north of the border. Sure, the Scottish Tories were pushed to fourth. And there is a lot to be written about the transference of the right-of-centre vote from Tory to Reform. But Labour won the seat (one I heard more than one highly paid political journalist refer to as in the “Labour heartlands” as if the Labour to SNP shift had never happened) for the first time since 2011. A win largely credited to a highly effective and organised GOTV operation of Scottish Labour, to whom much credit - and more coverage - should be given.

But really, that was just the starter. Because the main course - served up for us all to see - was the story of Zia Yusuf and the fun little merry-go-round he’s been on this week.

Yusuf was brought in to “professionalise” the party. Which appears to be largely code for “stop us selecting quite such totally awful candidates who revel in saying the quiet part out loud.”

On Wednesday, we all got a chance to see how that was going as the latest Reform MP, Sarah Pochin, used her first chance to ask a question at PMQs to push Keir Starmer to ban burqas. Now I don’t doubt that this question has a certain amount of Reform voters - particularly those who spend way too much time online - cheering. But I agree with Yusuf - it’s a dumb question (though I think it’s generally a dumb question - particularly for a party that favours libertarianism - rather than just being dumb because it’s not party policy).

So if you have an MP - one of only five - whose first question is quite so dumb, you would have to ask how that professionalisation is going.

I guess when Yusuf himself contemplated that very question, he realised that he had failed. So he resigned. Publicly. On TwiX.

It’s not a terrible idea to resign when you’re failing that badly at something. But it’s probably not that great if you do so so publicly. Burning your boats is often a tempting option. When you’ve been pushed to breaking point by a meaningless job, a micromanaging boss or colleagues who drain you the idea of not just walking away but pouring the petrol and throwing the match over your shoulder is a dream we all have from time to time.

Most of us don’t do it for a variety of reasons. For a start, it’s not *great* for your professional reputation for a start to trash your last workplace publicly.

One really good reason not to do it, is that you might go back 48 hours later. I mean I wouldn’t - but Yusuf has done just that.

He set Reform alight, walked away and walked back in again. To do a job he has publicly shown that he believes he’s failed at. What a brilliant strategic mind.

Yusuf has vastly underminded his public credibility and that of his party’s supposed professionalisation process. He’s gone back in to a party that knows it can’t trust him and that he might walk away again. Reform was already looking like a sniping nest of vipers after the horror show that was the Rupert Lowe resignation. They were supposed to be moving on from that. But it is clear that Farage has never been able to share his toys.

There is no part of this that is not funny. There is no part of this that does not expose the endless weakness of the clown show that is Reform.

Equally, there is no reason not to have a bloody good laugh about it.

Sometimes, when the left laughs at Reform, we’re accused of laughing at those voters who are attracted to them. Whether that be for policy reasons on immigration or political nihilism reasons. We’re told we don’t get it. That we’re sneering at the very voters Labour used to represent.

So let me be very clear. It’s not me taking the piss out of Reform curious voters - it’s Reform. For treating politics like a carnival sideshow, it is them treating their potential voters like a joke. And every time something like this happens (and it keeps happening - remember Ben Habib? Remember Rupert Lowe?) it shows a little bit more how like the Wizard of Oz Nigel Farage truly is. A sad, scared, stupid man putting on a smoke and mirrors show.

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