Inside Reform UK

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, we go inside Reform UK, where things are not quite going to plan.

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1:35So we've come to a side room of the main conference because Nigel Farage is about to give a press conference with Jordan Bardella from the National Rally Party in France who's just addressed the main room to rapturous applause. About Reform UK's annual conference at the Birmingham NEC. I've just been in the main hall to witness what should have been the main story of the event. A promise between Farage and the young star of the French far right to work together to stop the boats. But things haven't quite gone according to plan. I'm sure that the questions, at least from the British press, are going to be focused very much on what was going on in that undercover investigation and just sort of get a sense of what Nigel Farage's answer is going to be to it all.

2:23The room is absolutely packed. The journalists have been given translation headsets to decipher Bardell as French. But they're really only interested in what Farage has to say about reform's latest funding scandal. In this documentary published last night, you met a person that you thought was an American man who wanted to donate to reform via his British resident's son. You know that that's illegal under UK... An undercover investigation, broadcast by Channel 4 on the eve of conference, appeared to show Farage and two of his closest aides at least flirting with the idea of accepting illegal donations.

3:00Do you accept that there are real questions here about the professionalism of your party, your desire to play fast and loose with the rules? Even GB News are unimpressed. Would you apologise to your supporters out there who love your party, love you? This scandal makes your party look like you're just like all the rest. Farage's response to these questions is telling, I think. He is a man who prides himself on shooting from the hip. Instead, he takes a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and he reads out a statement. Make no mistake, this was an exercise in entrapment. Let me be clear, the party has done nothing wrong, taken no illegal money.

3:41In fact, no money was taken at all. The comments were injudicious at best. Neither of these men was authorised to act in that way. Accordingly, they've stepped down pending an investigation. By this point in the day, those two aides were gone. But if Farage thought their departure would kill the story, he was wrong. The party conference was supposed to be a reset for Farage after months of unhelpful headlines about dodgy donations, plunging poll numbers and consecutive by-election losses. Apart, of course, from the one where his main opponent was a man with a bin on his head. And yet here he was, in front of thousands of his most ardent fans, in the news for all the wrong reasons.

4:29Again. Now, even people close to him are asking whether he and the party have what it takes to reach number 10. And maybe they have an even bigger question too. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus, does Farage still want to lead reform?

4:52Before setting off for Birmingham, I decided to call a reform insider. Well, a former insider, I should say. Tim Montgomery is an ex-Tory advisor and the founder of Conservative Home, who defected to reform a few years ago. He was close to Farage and ran Reform's Christian Fellowship Group, but he's been suspended after airing some criticisms recently about the direction of his new party. Are you currently suspended or are you expelled from reform? suspended this suspension came from headquarters and when I texted Nigel to say do you know I've been suspended he didn't and I genuinely believe he didn't know and you know even even this conference you know I said oh I won't be going to conference he said you must come he said we must be seen publicly to be friends and I said but Nigel I'm suspended and if you're suspended you can't come to conference so it's been um sometimes the left hand and the right hand don't in reform don't quite seem to know what they're doing.

5:50And just before you were shown the door, you were creating the reform version of Conservative Home, weren't you? And I think it was going to be called 900 Days, that being roughly the amount of time you thought the party has to prepare for power before Andy Burnham will have to call the general election, which I presume that is all now on ice. But how would you characterise the mood in reform at the moment? It depends. I think it operates at different levels. The grassroots, I love the grassroots. They are the caricature of reform voters. They're these upper working class people who, you know, they do the right thing.

6:26They want something better for their country and they feel like they're being taken for granted. When I go, you know, all over the country to speak to reform gatherings, those people are anxious about the country, but they're resolved. There's that raw commitment to changing the country that I love amongst reform voters. The reformed leadership, though, just seems to have got, in the last six months, very self-preoccupied, very sort of concerned about investigations led by newspapers such as yours, Helen. You're the troublemakers. Proudly so. The sort of concern that the world is out to get us.

7:07And I think anger, voters don't mind anger from politicians if that anger is on behalf of them, on behalf of voters, that they think voters are being treated well. But if you're angry at how you're being treated, you know, people will tolerate that for a while, but, you know, not forever. And I think a form of look to sort of a little bit self-indulgent at times. That's what I tried to point out internally for a while and got nowhere, talked about it publicly, and I got suspended.

7:51Tim wasn't the only person banned from conference. My colleague Anna Isaac was too. She was the reporter who revealed that Nigel Farage had accepted that£5 million gift from a crypto billionaire, which has dogged him ever since. But Reform let me go along, along with Today in Focus producer Eleanor. And we're just packing our bags, ready to head to Birmingham when Channel 4 drops its bombshell investigation. For the past year, a team from Verbatim, a group of investigative journalists, has been undercover in the heart of Reform UK. Yeah, good to meet you, how's it going? Posing as super-rich donors with American money.

8:28And we've been given exclusive access to their footage, which we've verified. I'm going to get it with a champagne top. Nigel Farage is celebrating tens of thousands of pounds of illicit foreign payments.

8:43By the time we're queuing up to get our security passes at the NEC, Farage has suspended the two aides who'd been caught on camera. These were not nobodies. One of them, 30-year-old Dan Jukes, his de facto chief of staff, had been by his side since he was a teenager. The other, Cambridge Professor James Orr, reforms policy chief, was considered the party's brain. A very good morning to you and welcome to the live stream across the Reform UK socials. We are at the NEC for Reform UK's 2026 conference. So we've just battled our way through security at Birmingham NEC for the first proper day of Reform's annual conference.

9:24And it has not been an ideal start for the party to say the least. And I think we're really interested to hear from members. The people who are here, there's thousands and thousands of them, many of them in regulation turquoise. This is the third time reform have booked the NEC. And this time, they're taking up almost as much space as Crufts does each year. We pass a lobbying stand for the government of Gibraltar and spot former Tory MP Nadine Doris dressed in powder pink near a double-decker bus with a bar on the roof. Conference 2026 is a strange mix. There's the corporate side, a lounge sponsored by Heathrow, for example, and the esoteric.

10:00We're just browsing a selection of crystals and tarot cards when I get a tap on the back. Oh, yes, from Lancashire. The hit job. What was it? Keyboard warrior with a Millwall vibe. Yeah, everybody thinks it's nobody cares. I've got a stamp now. Have you? Yeah. It's Joel Tetlow, a reform councillor for Lancashire, who producer Ellen and I met last year when we followed that council's transition from Labour to reform. He'd got himself in hot water early on with a social media post that was, a bit too ambiguous about Hitler. For the record, he wasn't really praising the Nazis. And I firmly deny that my journalism amounted to a hit job.

10:38It was a balanced piece of reportage which merely quoted his own words. But it doesn't seem to matter. He's forgiven me. He has something else to discuss. I've started my own company brand. So this is a company called MOLGA. So that's M-O-C-G-A. It stands for Make Our Country Great Again. How do we say it? So it's MOLGA. I have it as a silent seat. It's all based in around the British flag boat with a bit of a twist in the sense of some people love wearing these Union Jack hats and something that's really in your face. And then there's a lot who want to be patriotic but don't want to actually put it in your face.

11:19So I've come up with this badge. So it's a battleship. It's a bit the size of a Lacoste badge. yeah yeah that type of thing so you're a fashion designer now uh well it looks like i am yes and how are you feeling about reform at the moment i'm just getting on with it so there is a lot of uh news there's a lot of rumblings about nigel and what he is saying and all this type of stuff but you know we've just ultimately we're just trying to make our country great again that's what i'm we're pushing. The problem is is that there's a lot of heat on us. The whole world is watching us. Is it an unwelcome distraction though?

11:59You're in Lancashire, presumably trying to get potholes fixed, trying to help people with their problems and then in the news every day, there's some other question about money that Nigel Farage has accepted. Is that difficult? I mean, ultimately, that's aimed at Nigel. So, I think for us, we've just got to get on with the day-to-day. I approach a smartly dressed young man with a lanyard saying he's from Clacton, Nigel Farage's constituency. I think this is quite a gutting investigation, the Channel 4 documentary. He calls the journalism, which was conducted by undercover climate activists, a fishing expedition.

12:38For it, but unfortunately they've come up with something. I feel like any kind of party would have come back with the same stuff. Do you think that it's damaging? I think you would be gutted to kind of be caught with your pants down, essentially. Right, and you think that's what's happened? That is unfortunately what's happened. It's deeply embarrassing to have Nigel Farage caught on camera in the dock. But look, ultimately, he'll recover. He always does. And there's an awful lot of people... On my way past the smoking area, I spot another familiar face. It's one of Farage's most loyal lieutenants, former UKIP press officer Gwaine Towler.

13:15Gwaine Towler! Gwaine! He's dressed in his usual tweed with a fag in his hand. Colin Pitt from The Guardian. Do you remember me from back in the day? How's it going? Very fun. Entertaining. Not an ideal start to conference. It's all right. These things happen. I'm just having a cigarette. You're always having a cigarette. I know. Do you think people here care about the channel forcing? Clearly. We'd think not to, but these things happen. And the fact that the wound has been cauterised, we can move forward. There's an investigation. It will take place. I'll follow that. but what has happened is right in the sense of that should have happened but what we have done is right I'm happy that's happened and we move on And what's your job in reform now?

13:56Because two years ago you were... Fired Yeah, you were fired I was texting your conference two years ago not realising that you'd just been... No, no, two years ago I was fired two days after the conference so I was still in that job then No, I'm on the board which means what it does and I'm sure the next meeting will be interesting Yeah. And we spoke to a lot of members this morning asking them about, well, the£5 million gift as well as the sting overnight. Nobody seems bothered. Not particularly, yeah. What I think the summer has proven is that despite the bad stuff and people chucking stuff all the time, our polling has gone to around between 20 and 22, 23, and it's not dropped below that.

14:37Two years ago, we were delighted when we got 14%. We now have got a base of around about 20, 22. and that I think is shown by you talking to people here and people going well and whilst that investigation has uncovered what it's uncovered and those resignations have taken place it would be nice if those investigations took place elsewhere whenever there's an undercover investigation which party is it oh yes it's reform again

15:14Tim Montgomery's suspension came after he expressed his disappointment, shall we say, at Farage's behaviour after the Clacton by-election when he refused to attend the count. But he'd also been pretty scathing about Zia Yusuf, Reform's Home Affairs spokesman, the former party chairman and one-time capo of Reform's short-lived Doge cost-cutting unit. I think it's fascinating that Nigel Farage claims not to have known that you were going to be suspended. So who do you think is behind it? Is it Zia Yusuf? Because you've been pretty uncomplimentary about him in the weeks in the run-up to your suspension and subsequently.

15:49Well, I think the real reason was, as you said, your question focuses on my criticisms of Zia Yusuf. And I try not to be personal in politics, but there is something about how he talks and behaves towards other people in politics. the way he describes opponents in he describes them as enemies really he treats them as you know talks about people not who've done badly in government or failed in government but almost set out to sabotage the country he talks about not wanting to spend time with opponents in green rooms he's just very very hard to get on with and he's been quite disloyal in many ways to Nigel Farage trying to sabotage for example the movement of conservatives over to to reform so So I think it was my criticisms of him that caused the suspension that was issued.

16:38Yeah. And I mean, the day before conference started, Yusuf tweeted something negative about Labour's frontrunner in the by-election to replace Keir Starmer, a woman called Sagal Abdiwali. Now, she is a former child refugee from Somalia who now leads Camden Council. And Yusuf tweeted something that basically suggested that she wasn't British, that it was wrong for her to stand. And that came after he had called Ben Wallace, a stalwart of the Tory party, a former defence secretary, a traitor. Who served his country in uniform. How can someone who serves his country in uniform be called a traitor?

17:13No, it's exactly that sort of language I object to. And, you know, my belief is if you were given a British passport yesterday, you are as British as me or you. You are a British citizen and we protect you. We honour you in exactly the same way as anyone else. I don't think there is a second-class status for a British citizen. And I think, yes, with that tweet that he made about Labour's possible candidate to succeed Keir Starmer, I think he didn't communicate that. And I wonder if there's a bit of head-scratching in Nigel Farage's office, wondering how on earth can we get Zia Youssef off Twitter or X, because he spends an awful lot of time on there.

17:55And I'm not sure a lot of what he tweets is exactly what HQ would want him to be tweeting. And I'm afraid Zee Youssef, the way he talks about opponents, the draconian policies that he advances in some respects, he is making people dislike us, actively dislike us. Tim worries that the party is not thinking enough about moderate voters, Ex-Tory voters like him, who, until the barrage of funding scandals, were thinking about voting reform. There's more people to be gained in the middle ground, from want of a better expression, who like a lot of reform's policies but are worried about whether we're decent enough a party to be trusted to implement them.

18:41My mum, my best political advisor in the world and the best person in the world, wasn't happy when I joined reform. but she has a sympathy for a lot of reforms policies but she wants reassurance, I think, that even I don't think she would ever vote reform, to be honest, but she wants reassurance that policies that she might support, like the deportation of illegal immigrants, are in the hands of decent people. Lots of people support reforms, hard-aligned policies, but they don't want those policies in the hands of people that they would not trust to implement what is a controversial policy. People like Zia Yusuf, is that what you're meaning?

19:25He's the home of first... People like Zia Yusuf, yeah. I don't want to make this sound over-personal, but yes.

19:41Tim thinks Yusuf is on manoeuvres to replace Farage, a notion that only looks more likely when Yusuf uses conference day to launch what looks suspiciously like a campaign video. A video for someone who thinks he ought to be leading reform. Could he be sensing an opportunity that Farage might not stick around for much longer? I've spent my career getting things done, doing hard things in the real world, and that's exactly what I'll bring to the office of Home Secretary. If you want another career politician doing TikToks about crisps, There's plenty to choose from. If you want someone who will do whatever it takes to deliver on our promises, vote reform.

20:26He then gives a speech in the main hall, a speech full of superlatives. We will launch the largest mass deportation operation in modern history, removing every foreign national who entered this country illegally.

20:43afterwards he comes to meet journalists and i seize my moment can i ask you about the tweet that you put out yesterday about the labor's potential candidate somalian refugee some people would see that as somebody who's contributing to society becoming part of the civic community and yet you've suggested there's something inherently wrong with that why um when did i suggest there's something inherently wrong you said do you see what they're doing here it was a it was a it was a very hostile tweet well look i think there is an important conversation that we need to have in this country about the fact that from my from what I can tell there are more uh foreign-born representatives in the House of Commons today than at any point uh in recent history now does that necessarily uh does it have to be a bad thing no but I will say that I was concerned for example let's talk about you know people say well let's judge people on their actions so let's do that you know as a British citizen yeah I'm going to be frank I was concerned when I saw a group of MPs.

21:40I'll give you the example of people of Pakistani heritage who wrote a letter lobbying the Pakistani government about an airport in Mirpur. Not for their constituents. I mean, I don't see how an airport in Mirpur... He carries on at some length, but I don't really feel he's answering the question, so I have another go. Reform always wants immigrants to contribute to society and to integrate, and what better example than somebody who decides that they want to serve their local community? I just want you to explain why you have a problem with somebody doing that. Well, you know, to quote you back, to serve their local community.

22:15And so, again, if we're looking at what has happened in British politics and we're actually honest about this, then somebody, I think, does need to speak up. I'm not making a policy prescription, but neither am I going to be tone-policed or bullied out of articulating these points. And these, I think, are serious discussion. And I would also say... It strikes me that Yusuf, a self-described Muslim patriot, is going much further than many in his party on the question of what makes someone British. In fact, it's closer to the position of Restore Britain, whose leader, Rupert Lowe, has refused to say even if King Charles can be properly considered British, as his father, Prince Philip, was born in Greece.

22:56I'm mulling this over as we head back to the main hall, and almost immediately bump into Councillor Celia Hibbert, who's the leader of Reform UK in Wolverhampton. She's a striking figure, very tall with platinum blonde braids. She tells me she was born in Nigeria and feels lucky to live in the UK. If you live in a country, you should be grateful for living in a safe country. You should be grateful for living in a country that gives you equal opportunities. There's everything to be happy about. There's everything to celebrate in England. There's everything to be proud about. There's everything to be patriotic about.

23:29It's not racism to be patriotic. Do you feel welcome as an immigrant who came to this country? I make myself welcome. But it doesn't bother you that you've got Zia Yusuf, potential future Home Secretary, suggesting that if you're foreign-born, that you're somehow not fit to represent your country or your community? Zia is an impeccable spokesperson, not just for reform, but for the country. You know, Zia epitomises what we're talking about when you're from immigrant family or when you're an immigrant yourself, you need to... That's why it's so kind of weird in a way that he is making such a song and dance about saying that people who are not born in this country are not British and are not...

24:09It needs to be viewed in context of how Zia has said it. I wouldn't think for a moment that Zia would misspeak. I walk away almost impressed at just how much loyalty reformed senior leaders inspire in the party faithful. But conferences are not just for those in the hall. They're a chance to show the country who you really are And I do wonder what everyone back home makes of it all. Coming up, Farage's big moment is sabotaged.