Reform is becoming as thin-skinned as the Tories

Dr Charles Peete, a noted American fertility doctor, was discovered last year to have secretly used his sperm to impregnate multiple women over the course of 20 years, leading to a dozen strangers accidentally discovering years later that they were half-siblings. As you can imagine, it caused shock, controversy and no small amount of anger among those the story impacted.

Like half-siblings discovering each other’s existence for the first time, the British right, split between an old establishment party and a new upstart, is coming to terms with the fact that both sides have more in common than either would like to admit.

The Conservatives, no strangers to a squabble and long rotted by grievance politics, once tried to escape the label of being ‘nasty’ only to suffer a fate worse than cruelness: cringe. A party that spent years apologising for its instincts now finds itself incapable of defending anything at all.

But as Kemi Badenoch fires off her cattiest attacks, seemingly unaware that she’s already been de-clawed, Reform UK still fails to realise that the Tories have one remaining talent: the ability to drag others down to their level.

Reform, while hoovering up disaffected Tory voters (and politicians), appears to be inheriting Tory habits, too. Once again, a public crying out for competence and still reeling from the cruel joke of Labour’s ‘grown-ups’ being back in charge has been subjected to a squabble so pathetic it feels less like a clash of ideas, more a messy celebrity divorce.

Last week, the Tories put out an ill-judged statement responding to Suella Braverman’s defection, saying ‘we did all we could to look after Suella’s mental health’. This should have merited a sarcastic quote-tweet from Reform and nothing more. Instead, it spiralled into demands for apologies, mutterings about legal action and ritualised outrage, turning poorly written comms slop into full-blown theatre.

You would (perhaps) expect better from two groups competing to lead the right. But the uncomfortable truth for the Tories is that Reform has already won that battle. After 14 years in government, they are politically spent – relevant only by technicality as the official opposition, reduced to shouting from the sidelines while their remaining voters quietly eye Nigel Farage’s party.

This is why Reform’s fixation on Tory bitching is so baffling. Why bother rolling around in the mud with a party that has already lost? If Reform wants to be taken seriously as the opposition to Labour, it should start acting like it – behaving as though power is a plausible destination rather than existing in a permanent state of grievance.

Instead, threats of legal action and an oddly thin-skinned response to mild provocation sit uneasily with a movement that styles itself as blunt and uninterested in offence. A party that claims to oppose a culture where hurt feelings justify punishment cannot credibly threaten to sue at the first sign of personal irritation.

People don’t want it, yet Reform is absorbing the very baggage voters hoped it was leaving behind. Public shaming, moral absolutism and the elevation of personal grievance into political principle – these were meant to be the pathologies of Britain’s failed parties, not its successor. And it’s simply grievance politics in a different accent.

Reform is polling strongly, and it’s far too early to say whether a Reform government would simply repeat the substantive failures of its right-wing predecessors. But it could at least avoid repeating their cultural ones. There is a real risk that they aren’t smashing the system so much as running the same software with new branding. As Reform absorbs defectors from a government voters are desperate to escape, suspicion grows that this is merely Conservative Party 2.0. And shouting at the Tories won’t prove otherwise. The danger for Reform isn’t that they look too different, but that they’re starting to look too similar.

And as Dr Peete’s dynasty discovered, you don’t have to like your origins for them to keep showing up.

Simone Hanna is a writer.