Vanity politics: MP defects to ‘Reclaim’ party
Posted by admin978 on May 10, 2023 · Leave a Comment
This morning we saw a perfect example of this, when the MP for North West Leicestershire, Andrew Bridgen, defected to the Reclaim Party.
Bridgen has been a Tory MP since 2010 but was suspended from the parliamentary Conservative Party in January this year and expelled from the party three months later, after endorsing a series of bizarre conspiracy theories about the CoViD pandemic.
Some readers whose political knowledge depends on a social media echo chamber might be tempted to regard Bridgen as an anti-establishment hero. In fact aspects of his record indicate fairly clearly why Richard Tice and Reform UK (the main civic nationalist party) chose not to welcome him, despite the fact this would have given them an MP, and why he ended up joining a tiny vanity project like Reclaim.
Last year Bridgen was found repeatedly to have broken parliamentary rules on paid lobbying, including failure to declare financial interests. This included payments of £12,000 per year from a company based in Ghana.
Among many other questionable incidents, Bridgen has been involved in a long running financial disputes with his own relatives over his family business, which resulted in a High Court judge stating that the MP had “lied under oath and behaved in an abusive, arrogant and aggressive manner”, was “an unreliable and combative witness who tried to conceal his own misconduct”, and “gave evasive and argumentative answers and tangential speeches that avoided answering the questions”.
Some might think this is the sort of behaviour one should expect from Members of Parliament – but it is tragic that one of the few MPs to have broken with the mainstream should be someone of this sort, and that the defection should have occurred on a fringe, crank issue rather than on one of the many serious issues where the political establishment has betrayed our country.
Reclaim is not even a serious political party. There were over 8,000 local council seats contested at last week’s elections, and Reclaim had precisely zero candidates. It is an online vanity project, not a serious political party. So perhaps it is ideal for Andrew Bridgen.
Reclaim was created during 2020-2021 by the actor Laurence Fox, based on a pro-Brexit party founded during 2019 by Fox’s main donor, billionaire financier Jeremy Hosking.
