Hours before Reform UK’s conference opened in Birmingham, Channel 4 News broadcast an undercover sting on two senior party contractors. The footage appeared to show aides discussing how foreign-funded polling might benefit the party after two reporters posed as US financiers. Their targets, James Orr and Dan Jukes, stood down pending an internal inquiry.
Rival parties referred the matter to the Metropolitan Police and the Electoral Commission. Leader Nigel Farage called it entrapment, and said no money had been taken and no law broken.
The reporters worked for Verbatim Investigations, a company set up in July this year. Its founders, Lawrence Carter and Louis Wilson, had worked together at the Centre for Climate Reporting before that, and Carter ran Greenpeace’s investigative unit, Unearthed. It is, of course, no surprise that Farage’s party, which wants to scrap Net Zero, was investigated by journalists with backgrounds in climate campaigning.
One party insider told me Reform had always known this type of scrutiny was coming. The disappointment was not the sting itself but how easy the aides had made it to land. The lesson was that this will be constant, and that the organisation has to continue to up its game.
The rally was the answer
Farage’s Friday speech was the main rally of the conference, and it was also the reply. He did not treat the sting as a distraction to be cleared up before the real business started. He treated it as a preview.
Farage’s answer is roughly this. We will face dirty tricks, hostile institutions, and obstruction at every turn to a democratic mandate should we be elected. We cannot stop that. What we can do is move faster. Hence the conference theme, The First 100 Days, and hence Farage’s promise that Reform will call a national emergency from day one.
The conference had rallies and policy sessions along the same lines: so much in Britain is broken and we will need to be ruthless to correct it. The rallies were loud and full of razzamatazz, which you do not otherwise see at a British party conference. They were funny, impassioned and full of personality, with delegates and leaders bouncing off one another. The policy sessions were sober and generally packed. The ones directly themed on the 100 Days were the best attended of the weekend.
Both types of gathering were intended to answer the same doubt, one that those considering Reform often raise: they won’t let you change anything.
A European answer
There was another answer on the stage that afternoon, and for a European audience it may have been the most significant moment of the conference. Farage signed an agreement with Jordan Bardella, president of France’s National Rally, who Farage said was acting on behalf of Marine Le Pen. He called it a new entente cordiale.
The memorandum deals with one of Reform’s largest practical problems: the Channel crossings. A future National Rally-led French government would agree to accept migrants intercepted after launching from the French coast and returned from British waters. The arrangement would become operative if Reform governed Britain and National Rally governed France. Farage immediately connected it to his 100-day pledge to stop the boats.
Its significance goes beyond immigration. Reform’s programme is based on anticipating the things that could prevent an elected government implementing its programme and dealing with them before momentum is lost. Here was an example occurring before Reform had even reached office. Where implementation would require French cooperation, it was trying to build the political relationship in advance.
There is an interesting wider point for European conservatives, too. National sovereignty does not necessarily mean national isolation. Reform and National Rally were proposing cooperation between two sovereign governments precisely so that each could exercise greater control over its own borders. The emerging relationship between Europe’s populist parties may therefore be less about rejecting cooperation than replacing supranational management with direct agreements between elected national governments.
The 100 Days
The First 100 Days is not a Reform invention. It comes from American presidential politics, where the separation of powers eats into a new president’s momentum almost immediately.
In the UK, governments with a Commons majority have traditionally had much more scope to follow a mandate and less obstruction. Former PM Tony Blair’s reforms, however, shifted power away from the traditional institutions of parliamentary government. Reform’s diagnosis is that the left’s long march through the institutions has also left much of the administrative state instinctively pro-statist and hostile to radical political change. A Reform programme now expects to confront the Civil Service, the House of Lords, the courts, the quangos, teaching unions, and local administration—with academia and much of the media ranged against it.
The post-Brexit years are, for many at the conference, a case study in how this worked. After Brexit the democratic mandate was watered down, delayed, and frustrated by institutions set against the biggest vote for a single proposition in British history. Among delegates, that period is remembered as a betrayal rather than a setback. And it shapes the plan being drawn up and set out at the conference.
Reform’s electoral pitch now taking shape is not simply permission to govern, but authority to override. The hundred days makes that clear and specific.
Preparing for power
Farage promised a national emergency programme, with recesses cancelled and Parliament sitting seven days a week and around the clock if needed.
Others at the conference set out that the manifesto would be written in unusually explicit terms, so officials have less room to reinterpret it once ministers reach Whitehall. Ministers would publish measurable hundred-day pledges and resign if they missed them.
Reform expects the Lords to resist, and invokes the Salisbury Convention, under which the upper house does not normally block an elected government’s manifesto commitments. If the Lords will not defer, appointing enough new peers to carry the programme will be needed and will then reopen the question of what a second chamber is for. On the courts, the case made was that Parliament must remain supreme, linked to leaving the European Convention on Human Rights and to changes in how judges are appointed.
The same thinking applies to the Civil Service. Officials who will not carry out a clear electoral programme should be removed, and replaced from outside government where necessary. The Civil Service has expanded rapidly since Covid and, in Reform’s view, must be scaled back.
Quangos and the NHS England lesson
Quangos are a key element in how UK politics insulates government from reform and the democratic will. Roughly a third of state spending now flows through arm’s-length bodies that no minister is really answerable for. Worse, a great deal of decision-making and regulation is made in bodies removed from effective scrutiny.
The theory was that expert bodies would bring continuity and competence. What we got was scattered responsibility. When no elected person is clearly answerable, bureaucracies grow without political ownership and the country gets harder to govern. Reform wants to abolish probably a third of these bodies, pull the rest back into departments, and cut the regulation and bureaucracies that travel with them.
NHS England is a case in point. Its abolition was announced in March 2025 because it duplicated the work of the Health Department—for ministers under pressure on health spending, this had become an intolerable example of waste. Eighteen months later it has not happened. The NHS Modernisation Bill is still before Parliament, legal abolition is targeted for October this year, and the reorganisation is not expected to finish before April 2027.
A government with a majority, a clear intention, and a willing Secretary of State has needed two years to close one quango. That is the best argument for Reform’s urgency. It is also the best warning about its timetable.
From quangos to the high street
Robert Jenrick set out deep cuts to public spending, covering welfare, departmental budgets, Net Zero programmes, quangos, and the Civil Service, with part of the savings returned as tax cuts. The party wants to raise the personal allowance so lower and middle earners keep more of what they earn.
The aim is not just to save money. Reform presents a smaller state as the condition for an enterprising one, particularly for the small businesses and high streets that have had years of weak growth, high costs and heavy regulation.
Delegates came back again and again to how hard it is now to build anything here. Reform figures talked about speeding up development, making far more use of brownfield land, and stripping out procedural obstacles. Reform’s answer is to systematically reduce the regulatory barriers to building and give local authorities a year to have five-year development plans in place.
Beneath the fiscal argument is a social one. Speakers described a welfare system they think is both unaffordable and bad for the people it is meant to help, and tied high levels of borrowing to shrinking opportunities for the young. The party is trying to join the bond market, the tax burden, and the daily life of a young worker into one story. Britain cannot keep borrowing its way around structural problems. If no government chooses a settlement, the debt will impose one.
Can Reform—and “the People’s Army”—govern?
Reform’s argument that it is up to the task is being tested in local government. The party now runs around two dozen councils outright and is the largest party in several more. That gives it something populist movements usually lack: somewhere to prove the case.
I spoke to a Reform councillor from Barnsley who described how his council had started shifting money away from Net Zero commitments and towards the town centre, while carrying a very large inherited deficit. He was incredibly enthusiastic about how people had voted for people like themselves to turn things around.
His experience also reflected the problem being discussed on the national stage. Winning the council was one thing; making an existing administration move in a different direction was another. That is why Reform’s local authorities matter beyond potholes and council budgets. They are the first test of whether the party can convert an electoral mandate into administrative change.
I met former Labour voters, former Conservatives, small business owners, and people who had never joined a party before. What they shared was not a worked-out ideology but a conviction that the present settlement no longer delivers.
In several conference speeches the delegates were called the “People’s Army.” They were what allowed a few MPs to carry on, could run local government, and wanted to take back control. This was a pretty good description, I think, of what was going on.
There were protesters outside, and the contrast was instructive. The people calling themselves radicals were defending an arrangement that suits them: globalisation, the managerial settlement, business as usual. The people demanding change were inside the building. That inversion is the most underreported fact in British politics.
The test beyond Birmingham
Birmingham showed a party moving from protest to preparation.
Reform is betting on its People’s Army and laying out both policies and a mandate for its First 100 days. The agreement with Bardella showed that the preparation is already extending beyond Britain: where a policy depends on cooperation abroad, Reform is attempting to construct that cooperation before it reaches government.
It showed an organisation working on the central problem of populist politics across Europe: winning an election counts for little if you cannot turn votes into lawful, lasting and effective government. That problem is not uniquely British. Parties that were built to oppose an establishment eventually have to demonstrate that they can command a state.
“They won’t let you change anything” is the warning Reform hears from sceptical voters and, increasingly, the problem around which the party is organising itself.
The First Hundred Days programme is intended to be the answer.
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