Robert Jenrick, Reform UK's economic spokesperson, has appointed Mitchell Palmer — a rightwing economist from the Adam Smith Institute — as a key adviser. Palmer's documented positions on pensions, the NHS, and immigration place him sharply at odds with the party's public-facing platform, revealing a fault line that runs through Reform's entire political project. Palmer has called for abolishing the pensions triple lock, telling GB News in April that the mechanism is 'an expensive way to ensure that pensioners have dignity in their retirement' and that it creates an 'unpredictable ratcheting effect' that makes pensioners better off in real terms than workers. He explicitly disagreed with Jenrick's decision to back the triple lock. Nigel Farage had previously suggested the policy was 'up for debate.' On healthcare, Palmer told former Conservative MP Steve Baker's podcast that privatising the NHS was 'long past time,' citing lower cancer survival rates, rationing via GP appointment scarcity, and a 'pretty bad safety record.' On migration, a 2020 post from his time in the New Zealand parliament argued that allowing economic migrants to earn significantly more than at home 'is one of the best contributions we can make to global poverty alleviation.' Both positions are antithetical to Reform's stated platform. The appointment lands amid a visible power struggle within Reform. Jenrick announced £50bn in annual welfare cuts by 2030 — cuts that a leaked government analysis says would slash incomes of people with terminal illnesses and permanent disabilities by up to £10,000 a year. Meanwhile, Reform's home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf posted a pointed jab about people with 'Right Honourable' titles being 'among the most dishonourable people in the country' — a shot that applies to Jenrick, Suella Braverman, and Nadine Dorries, all privy council members who defected from the Conservatives. Reform's spokesperson responded with a line that reads as candid strategy: 'Unlike the Guardian, Robert believes in hiring smart people with whom he disagrees.' That framing only works if Palmer's views stay advisory. If they migrate into policy — even partially — Reform faces an impossible sell: telling its overwhelmingly older, economically anxious base that the triple lock should go and the NHS should be privatised. The structural problem is not that Palmer holds these views. It is that Reform is simultaneously a libertarian economic project funded by free-market ideologues and a populist insurgency whose voters are disproportionately pensioners, NHS-dependent, and anti-immigration. These constituencies want opposite things. Palmer's appointment is the clearest signal yet of which faction is shaping the party's intellectual infrastructure, regardless of what the manifesto says. Labour's response — that Reform has 'long talked up selling off the NHS to the highest bidder' — is predictable but not wrong on the trajectory. The question is not whether Palmer's views will appear in a Reform manifesto. It is whether the policy machinery is being pre-loaded for a post-election pivot, where the populist pitch that won votes gives way to the libertarian economics that the party's intellectual class actually believes.
