When the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg was making a documentary about the rise of Reform earlier this year, the party was keen one of its brightest young stars was featured, lest it overwise be seen as a cadre of angry old men.
As such, in Reform: Ready To Rule? Kuenssberg found herself in the home of an angry young man, 19-year-old Kieran Mishchuk, a member of Swale Borough Council in Kent, who was shown hosting a (deserted) ward surgery and at home with his grandmother.
“So many people just hate the UK, hate Britain, hate what we stand for. Why?” he said as he strode across a village green. “This is the greatest country on Earth and it’s being tarnished by its own people. It’s so silly.”
Back at home in his stockinged feet, he explained to Kuenssberg the appeal of Nigel Farage’s party.
“This is a movement, a reactionary movement, made up of a lot of people of different political views who are fed up with the establishment, fed up with… no matter which party you get in, no matter which politician it is, they’re no different.”
Farage was, he said, “very inspirational, he’s very down to earth – he can talk to anyone and I really like that. I think he just generally symbolises what Britain kind of is at the moment – fed up but wanting to revive itself. He’s almost that lion, sleeping but trying to be awake.
“I think that is exactly what Britain needs. We need a prime minister or someone, a figurehead at least, to lead a movement who believes in it, he can do it for a long time and he’s the only person who’s done it.”
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Kuennsberg did address some dodginess in the young man’s past. “He has followed far right social media accounts in the past,” she said, “but says they go too far”.
Not any more! Because Mishchuk has just defected to Rupert Lowe’s avowedly far right Restore Britain party, a movement dedicated to mass migration even for some people with permanent UK citizenship. Mischuk, just earlier this year describing the Reform leader as a big cat, now says that there is “a cult around Nigel Farage” and that Restore Britain is “the true anti-establishment party”.
“There’s plenty of good people in Reform,” he told Kent Online. “I just prefer Rupert Lowe, I like Rupert Lowe, I believe him. I don’t get the same sort of conviction from Nigel as I do in Rupert.
“I thought I joined a movement rather than a party, it’s turned into a party with loyalties and a cult around Nigel. It should be about everybody – it’s about Britain, not Nigel Farage.”
As his gran says in the only time she got to speak in the BBC documentary: “Gosh, how long has he been talking?”
By the way, if you think you’ve seen Mishchuk before, he featured in Rats in a Sack in October last year when GB News presenter Patrick Christys reported from Faversham in Kent, where locals had been plastering the streets with Union Jacks and St George crosses only to see them removed at night.
Christys spoke to one unnamed local who told viewers how “the Union flag exists as a symbol of unity of the United Kingdom. Our people, our British people, deserve to have a flag that represents that. We’re flying them proudly and we should fly them proudly. What other country in the world has this kind of chaos going on? It’s a disgrace.”
That unnamed local just happened to be Kieran Mishchuk, then as now a councillor for Milton Regis on Swale Borough Council, fully eight-or-so miles from the cul-de-sac that he was randomly trotting around that day. Christys neglected to mention this to viewers.
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