Tory chairman gets into Nazi emblem row with Reform

It takes something for a Tory party chairman to make headlines these days, but Kevin Hollinrake – who, as you no doubt won’t need telling, is the current incumbent in the post – has managed to do it with a Nazi jibe at Nigel Farage’s Reform.

Hollinrake, a former junior business minister, responded to a social media post from Farage showing a new, gold-on-black Reform emblem with a link to a Wikipedia entry about a badge handed out to members of Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP parties in 1930s Germany which boasted a remarkable similarity.

He added no further comment beyond a ‘surprised eyes’ emoji, but immediately set the cat among the pigeons for Reformers, their cheerleaders in the media and even plenty of his own party who are either terrified of losing their seat to Farage’s mob or looking forward to sharing power with them after the next election.

The increasingly thin-skinned Farage deployed what is becoming his now favoured defence, that any criticism of Reform is an incitement to violence. “Not only is it only insulting and wrong but it’s actually inciteful and dangerous given the world we live in,” he said. “Just think, that’s exactly what they were saying about Charlie Kirk in the United States of America. Shame on him.”

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Reform’s chair David Bull, meanwhile, called on Hollinrake to go, telling the Daily Telegraph’s Daily T podcast: “I think actually, I’m a great believer in not playing the man, but you play the ball. But in this case, I actually think his comments are so disrespectful, so distasteful that he should actually resign.”

In the increasingly Reform-adjacent Spectator, historian and journalist Nigel Jones said that “Hollinrake’s gaffe is a measure of just how worried the Tories are about the rise of Reform, which has consistently topped opinion polls all this year on around 30 per cent – ahead of Labour and consigning the Conservatives to a distant third place on around 17 per cent… Is it any wonder when the Conservative Party behaves in this way?”

And Suella Braverman, the former Tory home secretary on the whips’ permanent defection-watch, hit out, saying: “Comparing Reform and their supporters to Nazis is wrong, irresponsible and highly counter-productive… Kevin does not speak for me.”

Still, Hollinrake has got them talking… which is an achievement for any Tory politician these days, let alone its chairman.