From Royal Cancer Conspiracies to ‘Nut Zero’: 5 Wild Moments From Reform Party Conference

We are witnessing the collapse of at least one, perhaps two of the main parties that have governed the UK for the last century – but what comes next? This was the question attendees of the Reform party conference gathered to solemnly contemplate on Friday and Saturday of last week.

Reform UK conference 2025 took place in a massive air hangar-style conference centre near Birmingham airport, a venue that usually plays host to strongman contests, monster truck rallies and A Place in The Sun Live.

While the wealthiest attendees could pay £2,500 to have a champagne breakfast with Nigel Farage, for the average punters walking around with two-pint plastic cups, it was more like being an audience member for a daytime TV show. Those sat in the main auditorium watched tightly choreographed interview segments with party figures compered by Dr David Bull, formerly of The Wright Stuff and the Jeremy Vine Show.

In the quiet moments, Jeremy Kyle stalked the conference hall speaking to random attendees for a live stream which was beamed into the main hall to fill time. At one point, Vine collared former Lib Dem MP Lembit Opik. Asked if he had joined Reform, the sometime I’m a Celebrity… contestant and former partner of Cheeky Girl Gabriela Irimia joked: “I go where the money is.”

It was a gaudy, high-energy and silly affair. Party leader Nigel Farage walked out onto the stage to pyrotechnics and a grime fanfare, like a WWF wrestler. Andrea Jenkyns strode onto the stage in a glittery trouser suit, singing a self-authored song about being an insomniac. Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be … suspicious that all Turkish barbers are money-laundering fronts.

High camp was accompanied by flag-shagging jingoism. One of the fringe theatres was overlooked by the biggest Union Jack I have ever seen. Dozens of men wore Union Jack waistcoats. Perhaps the weirdest moment of the conference, however, was watching the Jacksons – the two remaining members of the erstwhile Jackson 5, Jackie and Marlon – entertain the official afterparty crowd as they sipped £9.25 pints of Madri.

But beyond the Trumpian razzmatazz, what did we learn?

1. Party of landlords.

On Friday, Farage held an additional, unscheduled lunchtime speech to make as much political capital as possible out of the resignation of Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister who had to step down after it emerged she paid too little stamp duty on the purchase of a house. Farage joked that Rayner was “an accomplished property developer and speculator”.

“You simply can’t get away, can you, from being the housing secretary and avoiding £40,000 council tax?” Farage said. “It screams entitlement … Despite all the promises of a new, different kind of politics, it’s as bad, if not worse than the one that went before.”

Farage then neatly segued to thanking Nick Candy, Reform party treasurer, for giving £500,000 of his own money to the cause. This is probably chump change for Candy, who actually is an accomplished property developer and speculator.

Farage now faces claims of hypocrisy. Last year, amid claims that he was too busy cosying up to Donald Trump in the States to spend time in his constituency, Farage said he had bought a house in Clacton. Turns out he saved himself £44,000 in stamp duty by having his wife, Laure Ferrari, buy the house.

While his wife owns the Clacton pile, Farage owns his £1m family home; two properties in Kent, one of which he rents out; and another property which he rents out in Surrey.

Farage’s digs at Rayner seemed all the more bold given that there was a stand in the conference hall advertising Direct Bullion, the UK’s number one bullion dealer, which proudly boasts that it is endorsed by the Reform leader and had plastered his face everywhere. “Are you safe from the wealth tax?” asked one of its signs. Another company, Tally Money, invites you to “beat the system with gold you can spend”.

There’s no suggestion that these companies are bending any rules, but they speak to a sharp-elbowed mindset which makes you wonder if Farage would laud Rayner’s accounting if only she had been advised by him personally.

Also represented at the conference were crypto companies. At an event sponsored by Aave, a “decentralised non-custodial liquidity protocol”, head of policy Zia Yusuf told the audience he wants to make Britain a leader in crypto, even somewhere you can pay your taxes in crypto. Reform is the party of self-made landlords and the party of finance-prepper bitcoin bros.

2. Complete and utter Marxism.

Is climate realism inevitable? That was the question posed at a fringe meeting hosted by the Heartland Institute, an American thinktank which, according to climate website DeSmog, has been at “the forefront of denying the scientific evidence of man-made climate change” and which claims to be “extremely influential” in Donald Trump’s policy circles. Here, “realism” meant getting rid of policies designed to slow or mitigate the climate crisis, in particular net zero, which was referred to as “nut zero”.

The meeting was chaired by Viscount Christopher Monckton, who in 2021 told a meeting of the far-right group Traditional Britain that homosexuality is “medically dangerous”, saying: “It’s not some abstract theological reason, it kills you and it might kill a lot of other people as well.”

In answering the question of the inevitability of climate realism, Lois Perry, UK director of the Heartland Institute, then offered an intriguing theory: “There’s a reason why this neo-Marxist, communist, shambolic government wants us in electric cars. It’s so that we have no freedom whatsoever. They don’t want us to be able to afford to heat our homes. They want to completely de-industrialise the West so that they have complete and utter Marxism. This isn’t socialism, because you need capitalism to pay for socialism. This is Marxism, and net zero is this government’s horse of Troy.”

Perry, who was previously leader of Ukip and a member of Laurence Fox’s Reclaim party, went on to say: “There’s nothing wrong with C02. C02 is not a pollutant – we need C02. Hey, all of you green-fingered people here – what do you pump into your greenhouses to make your plants grow? C02! I mean, come on. There’s someone sitting in a white cave somewhere, stroking a white cat, literally laughing at us, saying we are charging them for air that they breathe. Well, not any more.” Really makes you think.

There was also a “yikes” moment on the main stage on Saturday when doctor Aseem Malhortra, a British cardiologist, gave a speech entitled ‘Make Britain healthy again’, in which he claimed that a fellow doctor had told him “it’s highly likely that the Covid vaccines have been a factor – a significant factor – in the cancer of members of the royal family”, reportedly drawing sharp intakes of breath from the audience.

3. Far-right pandering.

At a conference event hosted by The Spectator, Yusuf was asked whether he thought Jeremy Corbyn or Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) was worse.

“Jeremy Corbyn is absolutely the worst,” Yusuf said, because Corbyn “refused to say” he would “use a nuclear deterrent”, rendering it “null and void”.

Yusuf then praised former English Defence League leader, saying: “Tommy Robinson has said things about the rape gangs and was making those arguments for years and was disparaged and has been proven correct, and deserves some credit for that.”

Asked if Robinson could join Reform UK, however, Yusuf immediately said “no”.

After a summer of anti-migrant protests and far-right-coded flag-flying, Reform could be vulnerable to parties even further to the right. Robinson has joined the Advance UK party, a Reform UK splinter party headed by Farage rival and former Reform deputy leader Ben Habib. In August, Elon Musk backed the offshoot: “Advance UK will actually drive change,” he tweeted. “Farage is weak sauce who will do nothing.”

4. Not a one-man band.

These days, the party is keen to present itself as more than just the Nigel Farage Show. This was slightly undermined by the fact that, on Saturday morning, the early fringe events were interrupted by an earsplitting announcement over the public address system: “THIS IS A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT. PARTY LEADER NIGEL FARAGE SIGN REFORM FC SHIRTS AT THE MERCHANDISE STAND AT 11.45 THIS MORNING”. There was then a huge queue for signed shirts, which cost £100.

The party insists that it’s democratising, so it’s a bad look that the signing was scheduled for the only half hour of the conference in which members get to vote on anything: namely, three pre-agreed motions about immigration; repealing the Climate Change Act; and removing “destructive gender ideology” from public service organisations.

5. Plus ça change?

Would a Reform government represent a terrible break from the past or a dire intensification of our dismal present? It was standing room only at a meeting in which former leader of the house Jacob Rees-Mogg spoke to disgraced historian David Starkey about the counter-Blairite “reformation” the country is overdue, Rees-Mogg’s desire to unite the conservative “family”, and how his 16-year-old daughter Mary has joined Reform. The patrician toff and former speaker of the House of Commons disappointed his enthusiastic fans in teal T-shirts by saying he would not be joining Reform. It’s hard to see why not: in its transition from an outsider party to the would-be party of government, Reform looks more like the Tories every day.