As the dust settles from the May 2025 local elections in the United Kingdom, a wave of political turbulence is sweeping through the country’s corridors of power. Reform UK, the insurgent party that captured headlines with its rapid rise, is now at the center of a series of high-profile defections, internal strife, and battles with entrenched bureaucracies—each episode revealing the deepening volatility and fragmentation of British politics.
On August 15, 2025, Rupert Matthews, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Leicestershire and Rutland, publicly announced his defection from the Conservative Party to Reform UK. Matthews, a veteran of the Conservative fold since the 1980s, offered a candid diagnosis of the party landscape and his own shifting allegiances. According to his remarks, reported by The Daily Telegraph, the once-stable loyalties of British voters have fractured, giving rise to a political marketplace more reminiscent of continental Europe, where “mobility between political parties” is the norm and smaller parties rise and fall with remarkable speed.
Matthews recounted his early days in politics, when “if a person was canvassed as Conservative 10 years ago the chances were they would still be Conservative now.” Those days, he argued, are gone. He traced the roots of this transformation to the early 2010s, when the Liberal Democrats began urging voters to “lend us your vote” on single issues. The Brexit referendum, he noted, “cemented that trend,” breaking down tribal party loyalties and making the ballot box a place where issues—rather than party leaders—determined choices.
This shift, Matthews contended, has left the Conservative Party flat-footed. “The Conservative Party does not seem to have woken up to this,” he said. “They are still behaving as if all they need to do is wait for Labour to be unpopular and all those Conservative voters will flood out at the next election. It is not that simple.” He argued that the main dividing lines in British politics have moved from economics to culture, with issues like immigration, law and order, and the role of the European Court of Human Rights now dominating the agenda.
Matthews’s critique extended beyond party strategy to the very heart of Britain’s establishment. The so-called “Elites,” he argued, “can be relied upon to be wrong, time and time again,” especially on cultural issues. He reserved particular scorn for senior police commanders, citing the “scandalous behaviour of Wiltshire’s Chief Constable” in participating in Pride marches, even after legal judgments against police involvement in such events. “I would have thought that obeying the law would be a prime prerequisite of being a Chief Constable,” he remarked, “not if it involves compromising woke beliefs, apparently.”
His frustration with the Conservative Party’s response was palpable: “This country needs radical change. It needs the Elites to be put in their place. While Reform UK are getting down to serious work on what needs to be done, when and how, the Conservative Party has not even recognised that there is a problem.” He concluded with a stark verdict: “The Conservative Party has been ‘weighed in the balance and found wanting’. And now, like Belshazzar of old, their time is passing. Britain needs a new party to drive the radical change this country needs. Britain needs Reform UK!”
Yet, even as Reform UK attracts disillusioned Conservatives, it faces its own internal convulsions. Paul Bean, who secured a seat as a Reform UK councillor for Crook division on Durham County Council in May 2025, announced on August 15 his intention to defect to Advance UK—a splinter group founded by ex-Reform Deputy Chairman Ben Habib. Bean’s disillusionment with Reform UK, documented by Harry Shukman, stretches back to early 2024, when he described the party as “clueless nobodies” and “amateur.”
Bean’s criticisms have been especially pointed toward party leader Nigel Farage, whom he accused of having “submitted” to Islam and of despising Reform’s own voters. He even made an unfounded suggestion linking Farage to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Bean’s social media presence, often under an anonymous account, has veered into far-right rhetoric and misogynistic language—remarks all the more alarming given his role as a Home Office civil servant assessing asylum claims. His decision to leave Reform UK was triggered in part by anti-Muslim activist Tommy Robinson’s endorsement of Advance UK, but as the reporting makes clear, Bean’s dissatisfaction with Reform UK’s direction is longstanding.
The party’s leadership now faces an awkward question: will Bean “jump, or will he be pushed?” As Advance UK welcomes defectors from Reform’s ranks, including controversial figures like Robinson, the episode underscores the challenges Reform faces in maintaining internal discipline and a coherent message as its profile grows.
Meanwhile, the party’s new standard-bearers are running into resistance from the very system they hope to disrupt. Luke Campbell, elected as the first ever mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire in May 2025, has encountered what The Daily Telegraph describes as “official obstructionism and dysfunction” from local government officials. Despite winning by a comfortable margin—eight percentage points ahead of the Liberal Democrats—Campbell has found his ability to govern stymied by bureaucratic rules that prevent him from appointing trusted political advisers and from compelling officials to work in the office full time.
Such restrictions, the reporting argues, “impede regular function of government and erode the value of the votes cast by the British people.” The story is emblematic of broader problems with devolution in the UK, where overlapping jurisdictions and diluted responsibilities leave directly elected mayors with little real power. Campbell’s limited authority over housing, planning, and bus transport is hemmed in by consent mechanisms that empower other members of the combined authority—officials who are often seconded from elsewhere and may have little stake in his democratic mandate.
The dysfunction in Hull mirrors what is happening in Whitehall, where civil servants have been accused of frustrating elected governments by blocking or delaying appointments and resisting changes to working practices. “The terms on which officials and elected politicians are serving are no longer in happy tension,” the report notes. “They are often now totally at odds with one another.”
Proposed solutions include granting elected officials greater powers to appoint their own advisers and private secretaries, moving toward a model used in Australia where ministers are supported by teams of political appointees rather than permanent bureaucrats. As the article observes, “Voters are putting their faith in outsider politicians like Campbell for a reason. Unsurprisingly, they expect results. British democracy needs a system which can deliver them, otherwise its legitimacy in the eyes of the public will turn to dust.”
Taken together, these stories paint a picture of a political system in flux. The old certainties of party loyalty and bureaucratic impartiality are eroding, replaced by a landscape of shifting allegiances, insurgent parties, and frustrated ambitions. Whether this volatility leads to the “radical change” that figures like Matthews demand—or to further fragmentation and disillusionment—remains to be seen. What is clear is that the UK’s political center of gravity is moving, and no party or institution can afford to ignore the tremors.
