Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm James Heel. And I'm Tim Shippman. And today we're going to

talk about the cover we wrote this week on the Rise of Reform UK and their story really since the general

election. Yep, the first Shipman-Hill collaboration. And it's a belter. And let's start with you,

because you went on the road with Farage this week and had a chat with him. Just give us a flavour for that. It's quite different from going on the road with any other politician, isn't it, in terms of the events, but also the kind of access and how he is around journalists. Just give viewers a flavour of that. Very, very relaxed. They're keen to get a journalist up each day this week, so I think the day after me it was The Telegraph and the one after that was another journalist. And what they'd like to do is chauffeurge at the areas where they think he's strongest, which is campaigning primarily. He loves being on the road. That's the thing he most looks forward to. It's no surprise that Reform UKF started campaigning earlier than anyone else. and you go along and you sort of sit in the green room and I was there watching him wolf down this bangers-a-mash-free speaking, sort of sipping from a coffee cup with red wine in. He's thinking about what he should say. He was in the back room talking to his age. What should I say? What should I be talking about? And he knows the sort of broad themes he's going to do different thirds of the speech. Yeah, but each local area has its own kind of issues that he wants to get into.

And also reflecting almost the day's agenda.

So that day he was very taken with the story around HMS Dragon, the decline of the Royal Navy.

And obviously Milton Keynes has no obvious connection to that being a new town, etc.

He was also then tailoring it to the sense of new towns. Our public

services are overstretched. You need to align that up. And really, it's almost more like a rock concert

in the sense that you had staff walking around with reform local election tour 2026. They were

treating it much more as a kind of event. You might get as a kind of O2 concert, etc.

And it was all very much hitting the marks, camera angles, getting it slick, looking impressive. And for ours, of course, it's the rockster who comes out the last at the end of it. And so you get the sort of steady drumbeat ever at the back. They have timed stories about how long they can speech. You know, they've got the sort of eight minutes. and then it's sort of counting down, hit your marks,

and really it's all about giving it a good vibe.

And it's very stage managed, but it's also reminiscent of when American politics was doing glitzy conventions and British politics, you know, sort of tea parties and the rubber chicken circuit and boring stuff like that. I mean, it's very much about the theatre and the event. And if you think about their conference where Barrage came on stage to fireworks and dry ice and do they do at these smaller gigs as well? I mean, I dread to think what their fireworks bill is. It's not inconsiderable. And talking to one to four of Tory who's gone across, they were telling me that actually they're much more concerned about sort of what the fireworks look like, the vibes, than the content of the actual speech. And they're fairly relaxed about that. And that's a very different culture to the Tories, where it's very sort of line by line messaging. I remember someone who was close to Robert Jenric when he defected saying, because a lot of people thought Generic and reform, you know, there were bits of the machine that wouldn't get on. And I remember someone saying to me, yeah, but when we were in the Tories, they're obsessing over every word in a press release. And now, this lot are much more interested in, well, where's the next rally, where's the next campaigning gig? And they'd trust Generic to use his own words. And in a sense, that's what Farage has always done, isn't it? He knows his kind of arguments

because he's been honing them

for 30 years. He's very confident speaking, and it's about putting on a show as much as it is about, you know, every dot and comma. Someone compared him to a stand-up comedian almost. He's feeling the room. one of the reasons why Franchers is an instinctive feel for the public,

is that he's on the road a lot, talking to lots of different people,

understanding which lines land, which lines don't. It was talking to him backstage. She was saying, or Basingstant, last week, a bit more middle class, not really necessarily a stronghold. Of course, Milton Keynes wasn't a sort of area where a form of really done really well or UKIP before that, but he was, the audience was getting warmed up and getting better, etc etc and as well as being a sort of like a sort of stand-up act it was also like a revivalist church you know he was a Billy Graham act he stood there they have this um union jack at the back as a sort of sculpture and the cross is most prominent the St George's cross and he's standing there beneath it's like I need 10 of you to come join me his hands raised I need 10 here, come up on stage, you know, and it's almost sort of the sense of faith which Farage channels. It's not here when you talk to GUE news videos, we believe in Nigel, we believe in him, and you've got Zia Yusuf talking there. Obviously, everyone's all about Nigel, but he's there saying, you know, he's been so much, he's suffered for us, and it is a sort of biblical element to this.

Yeah, no, that's quite, and so how many are at these gigs?

How many were the one you were at?

1,200.

1,200. I mean, that's, you know, I mean, those of us who've been around a lot of these things. I mean, I don't think the Tory party conference even had that many people in the room, probably.

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