How Reform UK's 12,000 Scottish members are being snubbed by Nigel Farage
Reform UK members have had no say in the selection of their new leader in Scotland, widely expected to be Malcolm Offord
When Nigel Farage arrives in Scotland tomorrow to announce the new Scottish leader of Reform UK, it will confirm the worst kept secret in British politics. Less than six weeks after defecting from the Conservatives, the former business and Scotland Office minister, Lord Malcolm Offord, is widely expected to be announced as the man tasked with spearheading the party’s campaign in the run-up to May’s Holyrood election.
There is no leadership contest, and the peer himself has declined to comment on the selection process, describing it as an internal party matter. Despite speculation that Graham Simpson, the Tory MSP who jumped to Reform, is a genuine contender, he is a mechanical hare in a race where there will only be one winner.
The appeal of Lord Offord to Mr Farage is clear. He is someone who will be expected to bring fiscal discipline to the party’s Scottish operation, and ensure that its policies – some of which could best be described as scattergun – are more robust in the eyes of voters.
Yet the looming coronation is problematic. Fundamentally, the lack of transparency around the process of appointing Reform’s Scottish leader affords scant opportunity for its members – a cohort Lord Offord said is around 12,500 strong – to ask reasonable and routine questions.
That opportunity seems especially pertinent when faced with a frontrunner who, despite having served in different UK Government portfolios, has a low public profile, and who, according to Electoral Commission records, donated nearly £150,000 to the Conservatives and its candidates between 2007 and 2019.
As recently as August 2024, meanwhile, he described Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay as a man with a “blueprint for a common sense conservative moment”. Sure, Reform may attract political chameleons, but that is fulsome praise for a man who will be one of Lord Offord’s main rivals, and it reveals how, at heart, he has more in common with his former party than his new one.
At first glance, the 61-year-old may seem as if he is cut from the same cloth as Mr Farage. Alan Partridge would doubtless approve of the peer’s vintage open-top Jaguar, and both he and Reform UK’s leader worked in finance before entering politics. But Mr Farage is an unashamed populist, someone prepared to stoop however low it takes in order to get ahead. Lord Offord, by contrast, has a track record as a liberal conservative who has called for greater immigration to Scotland.
It is hard to know whether, in joining Reform, his views on such a key electoral issue have genuinely shifted, or whether he is content to sacrifice his beliefs on the altar of naked ambition. Either way, it would, again, be helpful were his new party’s rank-and-file members able to pursue their own enquiries in this regard.
On top of that, there are questions about Lord Offord’s business ties. He plans to leave the Lords, but will he also scale back his corporate interests? He is a director of at least six firms – the most recent of which was incorporated in November – and has extensive shareholdings, especially in whisky firms, which may lead to perceived conflicts of interest with his nascent Holyrood career.
These are legitimate and important points, and they can only be ignored for so long.
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