Meet Reform's new top team - for now

As he tries to rid Reform of the “one-man club” tag, Nigel Farage has announced his shadow cabinet. But you can’t really call it that – Reform is still only the fifth largest party by size in the Commons, if you count independents, and would need 17 more MPs to shadow everyone in Keir Starmer’s top team.

But what a squad Nigel has assembled! Farage’s new Treasury spokesperson – he’s not the shadow chancellor, BBC – is Robert Jenrick, who only joined the party a month ago and has already leapfrogged the two men who had been scrapping it out for the role for much of the past 18 months or so.

Deputy leader Richard Tice, when asked if he wanted to become chancellor last year, told the BBC: “I’m not going to assume anything, but …”. It’s a good job he didn’t: despite being leader of the party for the three years in which Farage couldn’t be bothered – and at one point being personally responsible for about 80% of its funding – Tice’s reward is for the potential chancellorship to slip through his fingers to a man who was a member of an entirely different party just four weeks ago.

Similarly, Zia Yusuf also had designs on No 11, telling POLITICO last year that “chancellor is obviously a very interesting and important position”. His loss to Jenrick is even more personal: Yusuf is said to have been the most lukewarm on Jenrick’s defection of Farage’s inner circle after Jenrick accused him of “bullshit” last year.

Yusuf had claimed that a member of his team “accidentally pressed like” on an antisemitic X post attacking Jenrick’s wife, who is Jewish. Jenrick had also dubbed him ‘Zia Useless’. No chances of any big bust-ups here, then!

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Tice’s consolation is a new role combining business, trade and energy policy, which at least gives him the opportunity to use his hilarious catchphrase “net stupid zero”, which has so fully inserted itself in the greater public consciousness, even more.

And he has experience in the area, though: while Tice calls renewable power a “massive con” in public, last year it emerged a farm and horse racing business he owned had installed solar panels and battery storage. In addition, he co-owns Quidnet Reid Ltd, a business operating industrial estates across the country. In its accounts for 2022, the company celebrated installing solar on three sites, noting that “these initiatives will save hundreds of tonnes of CO2 every year and help our occupiers with lower electricity bills… as well as provide an attractive return to shareholders”.

Yusuf has been handed the Home Office brief, which means he may need to rethink which end of Parliament he wants to aim for. Reform-watchers had widely expected Yusuf to be handed a peerage if Farage becomes PM, rather than contest a seat for the Commons. But the last home secretary to do the job from the Lords was Constantine Phipps, the 1st Marquess of Normanby, in 1841: surely a party which has trumpeted the need for democracy so loudly in the past couple of days wouldn’t follow suit?

Finally, with Farage perhaps remembering that women are a thing, he appointed another recent defector from the Tories, Suella Braverman, as his education and equalities spokesperson. The latter is a brief she showed her suitability for with an article for the Daily Telegraph last year headlined “I will never be truly English: here is why” in which she argued that Englishness “must be rooted in ancestry, heritage, and, yes, ethnicity – not just residence or fluency”.

It does mean that just four of Farage’s MPs don’t have cabinet roles to shadow – Danny Kruger is leading the party’s preparations for government, Lee Anderson is chief whip and Andrew Rosindell is mad. The fourth, Sarah Pochin, might feel hardest done by, having all but announced in a Times interview last year that she would be justice secretary under a Farage government – but perhaps the leader’s saving that for the inevitable spring reshuffle once the current crop all fall out.