It’s been a tough few days for Sarah Pochin, Reform MP for Runcon and Helsby. Having gone about assuring everyone that her party’s candidate, Robert Kenyon, was running Andy Burnham close in the Makerfield by-election, it turned out… that he really wasn’t.
Despite a huge Reform effort to win the seat, with big, staged appearances in the constituency by leader Nigel Farage, Burnham squashed the Reform challenge as flat as a pancake. That result seemed clear from early on Thursday, but Pochin still popped up at the count to assure journalists that “I think what you’ll see tonight is a very strong turnout for Reform”.
At the same time, a “Reform source” was telling the press that they would end up 2,500 votes behind Burnham. They lost by 9,231 votes.
So, Pochin got that wrong. But if a bit of wayward political soothsaying is maybe part of the MP’s job, another recent intervention of hers was far, far worse.
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“England won the football last night,” said Pochin, on a video message broadcast on her X account in the wake of the 4-2 win against Croatia. “And thank goodness they did, because on the occasions that England lose their football matches, the incidence of domestic violence goes through the roof. So, boys – keep winning.”
Even the (much less important) football bit was a deeply weird thing for a sitting politician, or really for anyone, to say. Is a message to professional sportsmen urging them to “keep winning” really necessary? Does Pochin really think that the lads on the England training ground would be listening to her in wonder, and saying, “you know, I’d never thought of that”?
But moving on to the most significant and much darker problem with Pochin’s comment, telling England players to keep winning at the World Cup to prevent domestic violence in the UK was a dreadful misjudgement, even for a Reform politician. The implication that domestic violence in the UK is the fault of the football results was as horrific as it was insulting.
To be clear, domestic violence in the UK is the fault of the abusers. And while cases increase by 38% when England lose in major competitions, they also rise (by 26%) when England win or draw.
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On Sky News, the Labour peer Thangam Debonnaire confronted Pochin, telling her straight: “The people who are responsible for domestic violence are the men who do it.”
In a remarkable example of refusing to stop digging, Pochin took Debonnaire’s self-evidently true statement as the cue to start an argument, saying: “That’s so wrong to twist my words.”
It was unclear how Debonnaire had done any twisting, and as the argument went on, Pochin didn’t help herself by smiling broadly, and appearing to be on the verge of laughter. Debonnaire asked her several times why she was laughing, and Pochin responded that she wasn’t laughing – while apparently laughing.
“You did not mention the perpetrators, and I think that’s really clear,” concluded Debonnaire, bringing the whole sorry discussion to a close and leaving viewers with the clear impression that whatever twisting was going on was taking place in Pochin’s mind. Spend a minute listening to Sarah Pochin and you understand immediately why Reform has not won a Westminster by-election since she got elected a year ago.
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