ELECTION EXCLUSIVE: Reform in Croydon is in meltdown, with members resigning over top-down decisions from Farage HQ. WALTER CRONXITE, Political Editor, reports on the Fairfield Halls exercise in onanism, where the real fireworks were going off backstage
Grifter-in-chief Nigel Farage launched Reform’s London election campaign at the Fairfield Halls on Saturday amid pyrotechnics and his usual, self-regarding rhetoric.
But the real fireworks were going off behind the scenes in Reform’s Croydon branch, with mass resignations over Farage HQ’s imposed mayoral candidate, the ex-Tory Ben Flook.
Dan Milner-Tebbutt, who until last Monday was the local party’s chair and primed to be Reform’s first mayoral candidate in Croydon, yesterday announced that he had quit the party altogether, saying, “Croydon deserves serious politics – politics driven by a love for the borough, not by career ambition.”
Tebbutt’s resignation has been followed by around 10 other disgruntled members quitting, angry at how Farage’s party HQ has imposed Flook on them as their Croydon mayoral candidate. Most of those resigning were to have stood as council candidates in the local elections on May 7. They have left a gaping hole in Reform’s candidate list, with the declaration deadline fast approaching.
The party that is claiming that it wants to “Fix Britain” – adopting a somewhat inappropriate Jim’ll Fix It-style logo – doesn’t seem capable of fixing its own internal party processes.
Reform is targeting New Addington, Selsdon and Shirley wards in the local elections in Croydon.
But Saturday’s scheduled campaigning was cancelled at the last minute.
Tory tales: at the 2024 General Election in Chesterfield, Ben Flook was the Conservative candidate. He’s now defected to Farage’s party
Reform’s selections and elections to local councils across the country have frequently been followed by chaos and confusion, and generating lots of controversies. In Croydon, the in-fighting has begun before the far-right party has even had a single councillor elected.
Last week, just hours after this website published its report about Tebbutt switching party positions, to take on a “new role”, Milner-Tebbutt (as he is now known following his recent marriage) announced on social media that he was resigning as the party’s candidate for Croydon Mayor.
That was to prove to be just the first of a series of resignations.
Despite the late cancellation of the “campaign day” activities and the Farage walkabout, the £5-a-ticket rally at the Fairfield Halls went ahead, with a small anti-fascist demo outside. Reform supporters gesticulated at some of the protestors from the safety of the Fairfield’s hospitality area on the upper floors.
There were some scuffles outside, with a member of the venue’s security staff video’d committing an assault on a woman protestor. Police officers stood by and did nothing.
Gesture politics: Reform supporters, pints in hand or wearing torquoise ties, look down on protestors from the safety of the upper floors of the Fairfield Halls. Photo: Rakesh Jaitly
In the Hall, Trump fanboy Farage stuck to his usual script about what a great bloke he is.
The carefully stage-managed event saw two hecklers dragged from the stalls. Reform does not tolerate dissent in any form. Nor questions: in the whole hour-and-a-half wankfest, while Farage and Cunningham were free to dissemble, deceive and lie (the Council Tax porkies get bigger by the week), not a single question was taken from the floor.
Inside Croydon’s requests for media accreditation were refused.
Yet even before Farage had stepped off stage, Reform members were speaking out about how the party had become a shitshow, Conservative Party v2.
On Saturday night, Kostas Dexiades appeared in a social media video hosted by Croydon Tories, to disassociate himself from Reform. Until earlier today, Dexiades still appeared on Reform Croydon’s list of May 7 election candidates, for Waddon ward.
Un-Reformed: former election candidate Kosta Dexiades
Dexiades has been through the resigning in a huff from a political party routine before: after being an unsuccessful council election candidate in 2022, for the Conservatives, he resigned not long after in a dispute over selection for a by-election in a safe Tory ward.
In his video, Dexiades said, “When I joined Reform, I thought it was not the Establishment,” demonstrating a naivety that ought to disqualify anybody from holding political office automatically.
“Unfortunately,” Dexiades continued, “that’s not what you get when you join Reform in Croydon.
“Decisions in Croydon are not made in Croydon. They are made by HQ in London.
“The issue with this is that we waited for nearly a year to get a Mayor candidate. We didn’t know until it went to Inside Croydon yesterday that the Mayor candidate actually doesn’t really care about Croydon.
“The person who is getting to be a candidate is a parliamentary person who just wants to be an MP, but not to deal with the issues in Croydon.
“And the fact that we weren’t told, as members, who it was until the last minute shows the contempt that Reform have for the people of Croydon.”
That Dexiades was making this late revelation on behalf of Croydon Conservatives, including the ludicrous claim that somehow the council finances are better now than in 2022 (did we mention naivety?), means that some of this can be taken with a pinch of salt.
For instance, when Inside Croydon reported last Friday that Ben Flook was to be Reform’s Croydon mayoral candidate, it was based, at least partially, on Dexiades’s own social media posts.
Values: Surrey Street trader Jose Joseph was slow to realise what Reform stands for
First, they tried to line up Jose Joseph, previously a Labour council election candidate. That arrangement collapsed when the Surrey Street stall-holder belatedly realised that “my values don’t align with theirs at all”. That was not until after he’d set up social media accounts “British Indians for Reform UK”, which have since been deleted.
Joseph is now intending to run for Croydon Mayor as an independent “and show the power of the common man”.
In the past week, Reform has had two new mayoral candidates, first Milner-Tebbutt and now Flook.
Things are far from running smoothly. One member of their local management committee has openly told other Reformers that he won’t be voting for Tory defect Flook.
And despite the party spending thousands of pounds on Saturday’s Trump-style rally, Reform in Croydon is almost broke. Membership locally has halved since the middle of last year, and the branch was rocked when at least £2,000 “disappeared” from the branch’s account (though no crime was reported to the Met Police, according to sources).
In the past day or so, a message has gone out to Croydon members with an urgent appeal for campaign funds. For while Reform HQ is funding Flook’s campaign for Mayor, “we need to try and raise some money for our fighting fund”. Oh dear.
Run a council? They couldn’t even run a whelk stall.
Be warned. As Farage told his audience in the Fairfield Halls on Saturday night: “If you vote Reform, you get Reform.”
Grifter-in-chief Nigel Farage launched Reform’s London election campaign at the Fairfield Halls on Saturday amid pyrotechnics and his usual, self-regarding rhetoric.
But the real fireworks were going off behind the scenes in Reform’s Croydon branch, with mass resignations over Farage HQ’s imposed mayoral candidate, the ex-Tory Ben Flook.
Dan Milner-Tebbutt, who until last Monday was the local party’s chair and primed to be Reform’s first mayoral candidate in Croydon, yesterday announced that he had quit the party altogether, saying, “Croydon deserves serious politics – politics driven by a love for the borough, not by career ambition.”
Tebbutt’s resignation has been followed by around 10 other disgruntled members quitting, angry at how Farage’s party HQ has imposed Flook on them as their Croydon mayoral candidate. Most of those resigning were to have stood as council candidates in the local elections on May 7. They have left a gaping hole in Reform’s candidate list, with the declaration deadline fast approaching.
The party that is claiming that it wants to “Fix Britain” – adopting a somewhat inappropriate Jim’ll Fix It-style logo – doesn’t seem capable of fixing its own internal party processes.
Reform is targeting New Addington, Selsdon and Shirley wards in the local elections in Croydon.
But Saturday’s scheduled campaigning was cancelled at the last minute.
- The planned Reform street stall on Central Parade in New Addington never appeared.
- A bus booked to transport dozens of Farage supporters to the Fairfield Halls was cancelled due to a lack of numbers.
- And a walkabout in New Addington by Poundshop MAGA Farage and his hand-picked candidates, former Tories Laila Cunningham and Ben Flook, was abandoned due to lack of support.
Tory tales: at the 2024 General Election in Chesterfield, Ben Flook was the Conservative candidate. He’s now defected to Farage’s party
Reform’s selections and elections to local councils across the country have frequently been followed by chaos and confusion, and generating lots of controversies. In Croydon, the in-fighting has begun before the far-right party has even had a single councillor elected.
Last week, just hours after this website published its report about Tebbutt switching party positions, to take on a “new role”, Milner-Tebbutt (as he is now known following his recent marriage) announced on social media that he was resigning as the party’s candidate for Croydon Mayor.
That was to prove to be just the first of a series of resignations.
Despite the late cancellation of the “campaign day” activities and the Farage walkabout, the £5-a-ticket rally at the Fairfield Halls went ahead, with a small anti-fascist demo outside. Reform supporters gesticulated at some of the protestors from the safety of the Fairfield’s hospitality area on the upper floors.
There were some scuffles outside, with a member of the venue’s security staff video’d committing an assault on a woman protestor. Police officers stood by and did nothing.
Gesture politics: Reform supporters, pints in hand or wearing torquoise ties, look down on protestors from the safety of the upper floors of the Fairfield Halls. Photo: Rakesh Jaitly
In the Hall, Trump fanboy Farage stuck to his usual script about what a great bloke he is.
The carefully stage-managed event saw two hecklers dragged from the stalls. Reform does not tolerate dissent in any form. Nor questions: in the whole hour-and-a-half wankfest, while Farage and Cunningham were free to dissemble, deceive and lie (the Council Tax porkies get bigger by the week), not a single question was taken from the floor.
Inside Croydon’s requests for media accreditation were refused.
Yet even before Farage had stepped off stage, Reform members were speaking out about how the party had become a shitshow, Conservative Party v2.
On Saturday night, Kostas Dexiades appeared in a social media video hosted by Croydon Tories, to disassociate himself from Reform. Until earlier today, Dexiades still appeared on Reform Croydon’s list of May 7 election candidates, for Waddon ward.
Un-Reformed: former election candidate Kosta Dexiades
Dexiades has been through the resigning in a huff from a political party routine before: after being an unsuccessful council election candidate in 2022, for the Conservatives, he resigned not long after in a dispute over selection for a by-election in a safe Tory ward.
In his video, Dexiades said, “When I joined Reform, I thought it was not the Establishment,” demonstrating a naivety that ought to disqualify anybody from holding political office automatically.
“Unfortunately,” Dexiades continued, “that’s not what you get when you join Reform in Croydon.
“Decisions in Croydon are not made in Croydon. They are made by HQ in London.
“The issue with this is that we waited for nearly a year to get a Mayor candidate. We didn’t know until it went to Inside Croydon yesterday that the Mayor candidate actually doesn’t really care about Croydon.
“The person who is getting to be a candidate is a parliamentary person who just wants to be an MP, but not to deal with the issues in Croydon.
“And the fact that we weren’t told, as members, who it was until the last minute shows the contempt that Reform have for the people of Croydon.”
That Dexiades was making this late revelation on behalf of Croydon Conservatives, including the ludicrous claim that somehow the council finances are better now than in 2022 (did we mention naivety?), means that some of this can be taken with a pinch of salt.
For instance, when Inside Croydon reported last Friday that Ben Flook was to be Reform’s Croydon mayoral candidate, it was based, at least partially, on Dexiades’s own social media posts.
As Inside Croydon was first to report last year, several Croydon Reform members quit over that shambles. It took Reform months to get their candidate selection process up and running.
Values: Surrey Street trader Jose Joseph was slow to realise what Reform stands for
First, they tried to line up Jose Joseph, previously a Labour council election candidate. That arrangement collapsed when the Surrey Street stall-holder belatedly realised that “my values don’t align with theirs at all”. That was not until after he’d set up social media accounts “British Indians for Reform UK”, which have since been deleted.
Joseph is now intending to run for Croydon Mayor as an independent “and show the power of the common man”.
In the past week, Reform has had two new mayoral candidates, first Milner-Tebbutt and now Flook.
Things are far from running smoothly. One member of their local management committee has openly told other Reformers that he won’t be voting for Tory defect Flook.
And despite the party spending thousands of pounds on Saturday’s Trump-style rally, Reform in Croydon is almost broke. Membership locally has halved since the middle of last year, and the branch was rocked when at least £2,000 “disappeared” from the branch’s account (though no crime was reported to the Met Police, according to sources).
In the past day or so, a message has gone out to Croydon members with an urgent appeal for campaign funds. For while Reform HQ is funding Flook’s campaign for Mayor, “we need to try and raise some money for our fighting fund”. Oh dear.
Run a council? They couldn’t even run a whelk stall.
Be warned. As Farage told his audience in the Fairfield Halls on Saturday night: “If you vote Reform, you get Reform.”
