The Reformer, Reform UK's actual newspaper, exists. That is the load-bearing premise of Crace's piece — the joke isn't invented, only amplified. Farage launched a party newspaper and gave himself every editorial byline: agriculture editor, home affairs editor, consumer affairs editor, football editor, agony uncle, literary editor, transport editor, media editor, competitions editor, and cryptic crossword compiler. Crace simply takes the conceit at face value and runs it to its logical terminus. The formal device is tight: a mock front page for a mock newspaper, with each section reproducing the rhetorical moves of Reform's actual communications without quotation marks or citation. The agriculture piece blames immigrants for hot summers. The consumer piece equates Nigerian email scammers with Kemi Badenoch. The agony column features Isabel Oakeshott and Richard Tice stranded in premium economy. Each section is a compressed argument about what Reform's politics actually imply when stated plainly, stripped of the euphemisms the real version requires. Crace's technique here is closer to Private Eye's 'Election Addresses' format than to standard sketch writing — the joke is less 'here is a funny version of the politician' and more 'here is what this politician would say if the social conventions requiring indirection were removed.' The 'chiselled cheekbones' interview section, in which features editor Nigel interviews editor Nigel with additional reporting by Nigel, skewers Farage's solipsism with a precision that a straight profile couldn't achieve. The sun streaming through the window, the champagne, the valet named Richard Tice — it works because it's structurally accurate to the vanity politics being parodied. The weaker sections are the ones that rely on pure absurdism rather than structural exposure — the Pothole of the Month and the Travel News are broader, less precisely aimed. The crossword clue (Robert Jenrick confused Newark MP, six letters, anagram beginning with W) is genuinely funny if you do the anagram and will be invisible if you don't. The Book of the Month entry, which references Farage's actual school-era antisemitic remarks and his self-description as 'the most consequential politician of the last 200 years,' is the sharpest item in the piece — it puts documented claims next to self-aggrandisement and leaves the reader to sit with the combination. The piece will read differently in five years. Farage's political trajectory — and whether Reform ever forms a government — will determine whether this parody feels like it was punching at a target that mattered or swinging at a foam cutout. Right now, with Reform polling ahead of the Conservatives, the target is live. Crace is working in a tradition that requires its subjects to remain culturally significant to retain their sting.
