How much Farage Kool-Aid did Chris Mason consume at Reform’s Birmingham conference? That’s the question even BBC types are posing of their political editor after he penned a review that was so fawning it could have come from the party’s press office.
Under the headline “Reform conference shows party’s growing ambition like never before”, Mason wrote that the Midlands shindig was “the most fascinating party conference I have ever been to”, telling readers that it “illustrates the pace of growth of Reform UK” and “now feels like a big party conference – but retains the insurgency vibe that the party is seeking to channel”.
“I spot a queue of folk waiting for Nigel Farage to sign their light blue Reform UK football shirt, bought at the nearby merchandise shop,” Mason reported breathlessly.
“The number 10 and Farage on the back of them all is not exactly subtle about this movement’s ambitions. Can you imagine Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch, Ed Davey or John Swinney pulling that off? Not in a million years.”
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The cringing coverage attracted plenty of opprobrium online, including from Steve Richards, a regular presenter of Radio 4’s Week in Westminster, who wrote on X: “What a naive, gullible assessment… but his bosses – in the unlikely event they bother to read it – will approve.”
The BBC has received an awful lot of complaints recently about the wall-to-wall coverage it gives every spit and cough of a party that boasts just four
MPs, even posting an article online early this month justifying it. “With regards to Nigel Farage, he is an elected MP and leader of a political party with clear evidence of significant electoral support,” it wrote.
“Many political analysts across the media, with different political perspectives, report that Reform UK are ‘making the political weather’ – in other words, the reactions and policies of the other political parties can only be properly understood in the context of knowing what is happening with Reform UK and its increased support.”
Which might almost be fair enough, were it reporting in full “what is happening with Reform UK”. The party’s conference featured a crackpot speaker claiming without evidence that the Covid vaccine caused the King’s and Princess of Wales’s cancer diagnoses, a joyous celebration of a guilty-pleading convicted criminal as “Britain’s favourite political prisoner” and the defection of a former cabinet minister who introduced the very online legislation the party spent much of the weekend railing against.
None of these made Mason’s write-up. Perhaps a £270,000-a-year salary wasn’t enough to lure him out of the merchandise shop?
