The latest Tory defector to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party is a prolific author. Rupert Matthews, a Leicestershire police commissioner unveiled by Farage at a Westminster press conference on Monday, has written about 170 books.
The most recent, published in November, was on his favourite subject: aliens. Matthews believes in UFOs.
The defection of Matthews, a Tory activist and fringe politician of more than four decades, was an open goal for press apparatchiks working for Britain’s Labour government. He specialises in books on ghosts, UFOs, the paranormal and cryptozoology, which includes studies of yetis and the Sasquatch.
Downing Street’s press office gleefully highlighted Farage’s latest defector as a proponent of the “fantastical and unexplained”, which it suggested could include Reform’s uncosted fiscal plans and lavish promises to the electorate. Labour Party HQ welcomed Matthews as the “ghost of Tory past”.
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The defector himself was characteristically unbowed by the facetious attention. At the press event alongside Farage on Monday, he promised to venture deep into the “dark heart of wokeness” to save Britain.
Fun and frivolity aside, his switch to the Tories may be more significant than it first appears.
Matthews’s critics have dismissed him as a crank, the sort of Tory member that David Cameron might have decried as a “swivel-eyed loon”. But his defection also shows that the Conservative Party is losing its grip on its grassroots former stalwarts. If the local party organisations run by such leading local members fall apart, the entire Tory party could soon implode.
Matthews was a councillor in the 1990s before running for the European Parliament. He narrowly missed out in several elections.
He finally looked set for a Brussels seat in 2011 when another Tory MEP was set to leave and create a vacancy. There was a furore at the time, however, over an image of a golliwog on the front cover of book published by a company in which Matthews was a shareholder and director. He said he had nothing to do with the book, Britain: A Post Political Correctness Society by Bill Etheridge. Nonetheless, he was not elevated to the MEP seat.
He finally made it to Brussels when another Tory stepped aside in 2017 to take up a seat in Westminster, and he served until 2019. Matthews was then elected as the police and crime commissioner for Leicestershire and Rutland in 2021. He is the first prominent Reform UK member to hold such a position.
His defection this week to Farage’s party dovetailed nicely with another former Tory who made the switch the same day: Vanessa Frake-Harris, a former governor of Wormwood Scrubs prison.
There has been a steady stream of former Tories switching ranks to Reform in recent months, as many of them worry their old party may be in a death spiral.
Earlier in the summer, former Tory chairman Jake Berry, who served in that role under Liz Truss, defected alongside former Welsh secretary David Jones: the two most senior former Tories to make the jump.
More than 15 councillors, almost all of them former Tories, have also defected to Reform in Scotland. There has also been a slew of defections in Wales, where Reform could end up as the largest party after elections next May for the devolved administration in Cardiff.
There has also been a steady flow of former Tory MPs who lost their seats in the bloodbath of last July who have made the switch, including former Gravesham MP Adam Holloway; former Newton Abbot MP Anne Marie Morris; and Dudley North’s Marco Andrea Longhi.
This stream of defections suggests there is a significant chunk of the former Tory parliamentary party who have not given up hope of re-entering parliament, but who have calculated that they have no chance for the foreseeable future while running under the Conservative banner. That augurs ill for Tory leader Kemi Badenoch as she tries to rebuild the party.
The defections also present a challenge for Farage as well as an opportunity. Just how many disaffected former Tories can he accept into his ranks while claiming that Reform is the insurgent party that will clean up the Conservatives’ mess? After all, his many defectors helped to create it.
The real opportunity for Farage will arrive if there is ever a significant stream of defections to Reform from the Labour Party.
In last July’s election, Farage’s party came second to many newly-elected Labour MPs in so-called Red Wall seats in the working class areas of England’s midlands and north.
Some of those MPs will look at the polls, where Reform is riding high, and may calculate that their only chance of avoiding being one-term parliamentarians is to make the switch to Farage’s party.
If that happens, then a truly historic shift could be under way.
