Dan Hodges

You had a guy up there who'd been bussed over from the States who was talking, some anti-vaxxer who was talking about how the King had got cancer from some sort of vaccination program.

You had,

I think it was Sarah Poochin who had to be, I think almost physically stopped from walking onto stage dressed in a Union Jack Berker.

And Andrea Jenkins came on the stage singing a song or whatever.

And the point was this whole sort of modernization, we're taking ourselves to the next level, we're gonna be a serious party.

It kind of didn't happen.

And when I dug down and asked people why wasn't it happening, what became clear for me was for reasons I still don't quite understand, Nigel Farage and the people around Nigel Farage were becoming spooked by what they saw as some sort of nascent sort of threat

from Rupert Lowe and whatever you call the new right or the faction that Lowe represents.

And that instead of sort of embracing, moving forward and trying to embrace the country as a whole, they were instead adopting a policy of trying to neutralize that faction.

And that to an extent is kind of what we saw replicated as well in Maker Field.

So we had this initial poll that came out right at the start of the campaign, which had obviously Restore on 7%.

In that poll, it seemed to be like it could be the difference between reform winning and reform losing.

But for the next three weeks of the campaign, Reform stopped trying to talk to the people of Maker Field as a whole, and instead spent all their time just talking to that 7% of Restore voters, trying to plead with them, bully them, beg them into voting for Restore.

of voting, switching from result to reform, we saw increasingly sort of aggressive

messages in relation to obviously the backdrop of some of the issues.

So the appalling death of Henry Novak, the appalling scenes in Belfast, the riots in Belfast.

What was broadly an attempt to outflank Restore on the right and convince Restore voters, Nigel Farage and Reform were as hardcore on these issues as Restore were.

And the broader attempt to engage with the electorate, the wider electorate, an electorate, by the way, that as we now know, was broadly lining up behind Andy Burnham, went out of the window.

And I think that is kind of part of the problem that we're seeing replicated nationally for Reform and Farage at the moment.

I mean, I think I thought what was interesting is I thought we kind of just saw there with Julia's criticism of Andy Burnham.