Nigel Farage is a fool to copy Elon Musk's failed DOGE experiment: David Behrens
By laying bare his volatility and gracelessness, Elon Musk has rendered his trillion-dollar car company as lame as a Reliant Robin with three flat tyres.
On the very week he left Washington with his tail between his legs and a black eye beneath his baseball cap, only a fool would have tried to emulate him. Enter Nigel Farage.
The leader of Reform UK doesn’t strike me as the Tesla type. He’s a combustible straw man in a Barbour jacket who drives any car whose image he thinks will rub off on him. Appearance is everything to someone of little substance.
He talks not of what he will do but of what he won’t. He won’t have net zero targets, won’t stand for ‘woke’ policymaking and of course won’t tolerate immigration. But when he had a go at setting out a manifesto last week it had more holes than a Yorkshire Water supply pipe.
In Kent, they’re discovering that already. Farage parked his tanks on the council’s lawn on Monday by sending in his ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ – not an actual department but two apparatchiks who took their name from Musk’s operation, apparently unaware that it was now a bonfire of the vanities.
Their stated mission was to eliminate wasteful spending at the council they now run. It was a campaign promise they kept for precisely three days before it evaporated into hot air and exposed the house of cards that Reform really is.
First things first: they did have a point about wastefulness, for councils are hopeless at spending money sensibly. If it costs you or I £200 to build a wall, they will immediately add an extra zero to cover the contractor’s markup, equality compliance and all the other administrivia.
But the way Farage’s team went about their work was transparently inept even before they lifted the lids of their laptops.
The problems began with the British version of Musk they had brought in to inspect the books: Nathaniel Fried, a 28 year-old tech entrepreneur who looks like an advert for a Remington beard trimmer and whose profile picture on Twitter shows him sporting a Union Jack face mask. This was the man Reform was now letting loose on a database of 1.6m residents.
He made his name by getting his hands on other people’s details. He is a leading practitioner in the emerging and secretive world of Open Source Intelligence or OSINT, the practice of gathering data from public records, websites and social media and legally repurposing it. Five years ago his firm used information it had trawled to reveal that Virgin Media was running an insecure database with details of customers who had accessed pornography.
Fried related this to the magazine CEO Today in 2023 in a candid interview in which he also revealed meeting the co-founder of his former company “in one of the darker parts of the internet that I liked to frequent in those days” and that “being two founders in our 20s did not lend us a lot of credibility”.
Now, there is no suggestion of impropriety in any of this. But being given the keys to a treasure trove of sensitive council data throws up the obvious risk of a conflict of interests. Fried had built a business model on seeking out information and now an entire countyful of it had landed right in his lap.
Reform was noncommittal about how he might use it. The party talked only of harnessing artificial intelligence and “forensic auditing techniques” to identify wasteful spending and recommend solutions.
Its communication with council staff was less obtuse. They faced the sack if they didn’t give Fried’s team “full and prompt access” to a whole litany of documents, said a report signed by Farage himself. There it was: a first taste of life under a Reform monocracy.
What happened next made even the Trump administration look coherent. On Thursday the Reform chairman, Zia Yusuf, resigned in protest at one of its new MPs asking the Prime Minister if he would ban the burka. Yusuf was the other half of Fried’s team and when he went, Fried went too. “Liz Truss lasted longer than me at DOGE,” he said.
He went on to admit he had “a huge amount of respect” for what councils were doing to save money”. So much for forensic auditing techniques. And so much for Farage’s denials that racism runs through Reform like a stick of rock.
Look, the people of Kent didn’t know their personal details would be handed over to a 28 year-old whose business is trawling public records. But they voted for Farage so they can’t say they didn’t ask for it. The same goes for us in Yorkshire’s East Riding with our Reform mayor.
As Elon Musk himself discovered when his Washington adventure wiped $100bn off his personal fortune, you reap what you sow.