Hypocrisy of Reform and how East Yorkshire is paying the price for an awol Mayor - David Behrens
Hypocrisy is as ingrained in our language as dropped aitches and unnecessary expletives. Vested interests, self-doubt and shamelessness can make a hypocrite of almost anyone – but some people have made it an art form.
Allan Leighton, one must assume, is especially insensitive to how others see him. He was chairman of the Post Office while it was maliciously prosecuting innocent subpostmasters instead of fixing its faulty IT system. But he appeared not to notice that. Two years ago he was reduced to making a grovelling apology at the public inquiry into the scandal.
“It’s unbelievable that it’s happened.” Those were his exact words.
So he should be the last person to criticise anyone else’s incredulity. But that was his knee-jerk response when the Government accused petrol retailers of something we all know to be true: profiteering from Donald Trump’s incursion into Iran. (By the way, Trump called it an excursion the other week, confirming something else we all thought – he doesn’t know the difference between a war and a bus trip to Blackpool.)
Leighton these days runs Asda, which sells fuel as well as frozen peas, and he accused ministers of having “zero credibility” on pricing. Well, maybe he’s right: he if anyone should recognise what a credibility deficit looks like.
But, really, does anyone think he’s the best person to hand out advice on propriety? It would be like taking financial tips from Kwasi Kwarteng. Who’d be gullible enough to do that?
Funny you should ask. From the file marked ‘You couldn’t make it up’ is this headline from three weeks ago: ‘Nigel Farage invests £215,000 in Kwasi Kwarteng’s Bitcoin firm’.
Fresh from his disastrous 38 days in charge of the country’s real money, the ex-Chancellor is now playing with the toy stuff, as head of a cryptocurrency business. And there’s nothing Farage likes more, apart from his buddy Trump, than crypto. He’s promised to more than halve the capital gains tax on selling it.
Why? Because it’s where a lot of his party funds come from. Last year Reform UK received £9m from a single cryptocurrency investor – the largest ever donation by a living person to a British political party.
So in promising tax breaks for such people Farage isn’t interested in driving the “digital money revolution”, as he claims; he is simply returning favours for his wealthy chums. He is hypocrisy personified.
And it’s not as if anyone else has been crying out to relax the rules. The people most attracted to crypto are money launderers and drug dealers, for whom its lack of transparency is a windfall from heaven. They can expect to profit handsomely from Farage’s largesse but what about everyone else?
Here in East Yorkshire, it has become obvious to all who were seduced by the ‘new politics’ his party was touting this time last year that they’ve been had. Luke Campbell, the former boxing champ who, despite no political experience or apparent ambition, was carried to office as Reform's mayor, has let down everyone who thought he could punch his way out of political paralysis.
He is Yorkshire’s missing mayor: almost completely absent from the headlines since taking office, he was reported last week to have ducked his last two meetings with Cabinet ministers. Talking to the government is literally his job. He is paid £72,000 for doing it and on his record so far it’s money for nothing.
It’s no surprise. I wrote at the time that he was completely unqualified for the job. In a depressingly low turnout he was elected on a national swing against a ruling party that was flailing and an opposition in disarray. His boxing record got him over the line but after 11 months his reputation as a local hero is in ruins. The mayoral chain is a millstone around his neck.
Is that his fault? Not really. He’s just another Reform victim: a willing stooge who swallowed the rhetoric and believed the party had a plan.
In Kent it’s a similar story. It is one of 10 councils the party now controls and is considered its flagship, a proving ground for its ability to govern competently. It has proved it can’t.
In the latest of many little lies told there, its claim to have saved £40m on net zero policies has been debunked as merely the sum of hypothetical projects that never existed.
Nor can it continue to proclaim itself a new broom: its top tier consists mostly of sweepings from the floor of Conservative Central Office. Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman, Nadhim Zahawi, Nadine Dorries: yesterday’s politicians bemoaning a “broken Britain” they somehow failed to notice during their old party’s 14 years in power.
Compared to them, Allan Leighton suddenly looks like an amateur on the hypocrite-ometer.