In Birmingham this weekend, Reform UK is already getting ready to govern. At its party conference on Friday afternoon, leader Nigel Farage announced that he would be launching a new “Department of Preparing for Government”. But, in the wake of Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner’s resignation shortly before, questions remain as to how ready Reform can be in the event of another general election as soon as 2027. With only four MPs at present, the party faces an obvious problem: who would fill its Cabinet seats in two years’ time?

To combat this problem, Reform is taking its cue from the Trump administration. Just as the US President eschewed career politicians in favor of TV presenters and former WWE execs, Zia Yusuf wants to do something similar. The party’s former chair, who will now become head of party policy, told the Telegraph this week that a Reform government would make many of its key appointments outside the party’s pool of MPs. These would be high-achievers from public life and the private sphere — “galactic-level” talent, per Yusuf’s modest assessment — parachuted into the Lords to form a particularly Faragist meritocracy. The party leader backed this up in his Friday speech, arguing that he wanted to build a “ministry of all the talents from all walks of life”.

While Reform’s policy is devised in-house, assistance is being provided by a new think tank, the Center for a Better Britain (abbreviated to CFABB to avoid any confusion with Celebrity Big Brother or children’s TV channels). CFABB’s offices are located in Millbank Tower in central London, just a few floors down from Reform’s own HQ, and the organization is proud to play up some of its Trumpian influences.

Earlier this week, I spoke to CFABB’s chief executive, Jonathan Brown, Reform’s former COO. He told me that for decades the British Right “has been good at winning elections and bad at running institutions”. His think tank is dedicating itself not only to devising ideas but to spotting capable people who can be trained up to become parliamentary candidates and special advisers. Brown, who formerly worked in the Foreign Office, has suggested that Reform should aim to streamline the UK’s bloated Civil Service, while cautioning that the Right has a bad habit of reflexively attacking rank-and-file mandarins.

Are there parallels between CFABB’s purpose and Project 2025, the 920-page mandate for a second Trump term drawn up by the conservative Heritage Foundation? Brown — while insisting that “we’re not MAGA” — acknowledges a debt, telling me that a Reform government has to be “prepared to hit the ground running”. He adds: “It has to be like Trump 2.0, not Trump 1.0.” To aid this goal, CFABB has launched a fundraising operation in the US as well as at home in order to drum up over £25 million by the next general election.

The current US administration has also influenced Goldman Sachs alumnus Yusuf, who has held up Trump’s action on the Mexican border as a model for Operation Restoring Justice, Reform’s deportations plan. The DOGE scheme he currently heads up is a direct cadge from MAGA’s own efficiency operation, while Reform’s Mayor for Great Lincolnshire, Andrea Jenkyns, has highlighted the presence of US-style “sanctuary cities” for asylum seekers in Britain.

Farage, meanwhile, has been in America this week to claim that Keir Starmer’s Britain is an authoritarian, speech-suppressing hellscape on par with North Korea. While the liberal press has roundly mocked him for this comparison, the context of the arrest of Graham Linehan for comments on social media has energized those who share Farage’s apocalyptic view of the state of free expression in modern Britain.

Reform received a boost on Thursday night following the defection of former Tory Cabinet minister Nadine Dorries, who offered a parting shot about her old party now being “dead”. She follows the likes of Jenkyns, Jake Berry and Lee Anderson in making the switch from blue to teal. But this parade of Conservative cast-offs may come to be at odds with Farage’s pledge to form a government out of people untainted by a prior career in politics. Are these “galactic-level” talents, or opportunists who see which way the wind is blowing?

The Reform leadership will need to ensure that it can integrate these turncoats with its appointments from outside Westminster life. Otherwise, the reality of a Farage government may fall short of what he’s promised.

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is UnHerd’s Deputy Editor, Newsroom.

RobLownie

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