Doge in Trouble

Two of the leading Reform UK figures brought in to hunt for savings at Kent County Council have abandoned their roles in less than a week.

Here is an analysis piece by DANIEL ESSON of the Local Democracy Reporting Service:

At the start of this week, Kent County Council was officially made the test tube for Reform UK’s Doge (Department of Government Efficiency).

Explicitly modelled on the US version headed by Elon Musk until very recently, the organisation was meant to root out the profligacy and waste the party views as endemic to the public sector.

However, both the Doge across the pond and the one probing County Hall have lost key figures in recent days, leaving the future of the project up in the air. Is the Doge already doomed?

What’s happened?

Reform UK chairman Zia Yusuf arrived in Maidstone on Monday to announce the start of the Doge’s examination of Kent County Council’s (KCC) books. He was accompanied by long-time financier of the Eurosceptic Right, Arron Banks, and tech entrepreneur Nathaniel Fried.

They came in swinging, writing in a letter that they expect full access to KCC’s records and data, and that any “obstruction” of their work by council staff would be considered “gross misconduct”.

Yet by Thursday afternoon, reports emerged that Mr Yusuf had been “sidelined” within Reform and put out to pasture at the Doge.

That evening, he announced: “I no longer believe that working to get a Reform government elected is a good use of my time and hereby resign the office.”

Mr Fried packed up and went with him, saying that as Mr Yusuf brought him in, it’s “appropriate” to follow him out the door.

Revealingly, Mr Fried’s post said: “I have absolute confidence that the Reform Doge will succeed without me.” This was accompanied by a picture of Elon Musk with photoshopped laser-red eyes, a trope of online memes much like the name Doge itself.

Why did they jump ship?

Many have speculated Mr Yusuf’s departure may be related to a social media spat he had with the party’s newest MP Sarah Pochin this week. She asked Sir Keir Starmer during Prime Minister’s Questions if he would move to ban the burqa. On social media, Mr Yusuf referred to her as “dumb” for this intervention and stressed it is not Reform policy.

It’s harder to assess why Mr Fried left with him. The supposed dynamism and creativity of young tech entrepreneurs has been vaunted as the animating spirit of both Reform’s own Doge and its godfather in the US. Did he lose his taste for bringing the forensic data skills developed in the private sector to the delivery of public services?

Some years ago in 2021, Mr Fried tweeted referring to Nigel Farage’s appearances on Cameo – a personalised video message service – as “rubbish.” Perhaps he genuinely was drawn into Reform by Mr Yusuf as he says and, shorn of his sponsor and ally, feels he would be less able to deliver on his plans.

What does it mean for Kent?

The effect this will have on KCC is as yet unknown, in large part because Doge’s plans for Kent aren’t very specific as it stands. There is no known timeframe for the delivery of the swingeing cuts implicit in the Doge’s mission statement, and the aforementioned letter seemed to hint at just about every avenue of spending in the authority being at risk.

On Monday, Mr Yusuf said the team had already identified about £2.8 million of wasted public money – spent on everything from care for people who were already dead, to stolen council bank cards and fake grants. It helps that the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) already identified these irregularities for them in an article last year.

But members of the previous Tory administration at KCC have long told us that there’s almost nothing left to cut – with the council now providing little more in services than it is legally required to, and social care alone consuming about 60% of its budget.

If Reform are serious about the work of the Doge, they will be scrambling to replace Mr Fried as its chief inquisitor in Kent.

If that’s the case, one would expect that by next week the new team will be poring over council contracts and budgets, grilling officers and setting about finding savings, cancelling apparently wasteful spending and identifying alternatives.

But one could be forgiven for expecting the Doge as a political body to instead recede into the background, and cost-cutting to instead be sought in the usual way through the council’s budgeting process.

What has the reaction been?

In a video on X, Reform‘s Linden Kemkaran (pictured below) admitted she had not expected her first post on her new @LeaderofKCC account to be about the resignation of the party’s chairman.

She thanked him for his hard work and wished him the best for the future.

Leader of the Green Group at KCC, Cllr Rich Lehmann, described the situation as “chaos”, adding: “This bizarre and unexpected move feels like it could go one of two ways.

“On the one hand, the controversial flag policy and the rushed ‘Doge’ announcement both appeared on Mr Yusuf’s Twitter feed before anywhere else, so there was a sense that, despite being an unelected bureaucrat, he was very much running things at KCC instead of the locally elected representatives.

“What’s not clear is whether any of his interventions were also behind the significant number of meeting cancellations we’ve seen over the past couple of weeks.

“It feels like we are now at a crossroads where the KCC administration may feel directionless without the person who has been making the majority of their policy announcements, or perhaps they will actually be more able to start running the council the way they want to. I hope it’s the latter.”

Jonathon Hawkes, the leader of the Labour group in Dartford, described Reform’s performance so far as a “clown show” and that Kent “deserves better”.

“Since they took control of KCC the first priority of Reform was to take down flags and cancel meetings.

“Their local Cllrs have gone AWOL.

“They then send their Chair to lead their ‘DOGE’ only for him to resign two days later.”

Mark Ellis (pictured below), a Lib Dem county councillor representing Tunbridge Wells, says he is “disgusted by Reform UK’s dangerous games with Kent County Council”.

“They parachuted in some Musk wannabe promising a ‘DOGE effect’ on services for thousands of vulnerable people,” he wrote on X.
“5 days later? Gone. A reckless populist stunt.”

What does it mean for Reform?

Mr Yusuf’s opposition to his colleague’s view on the burqa is almost certainly not the only reason he resigned. Banning the burqa is not an exotic view on that part of the Right, and he no doubt will have expected to encounter it at some point.

Despite describing himself as a “British Muslim patriot” it has been widely reported that he has faced a torrent of abuse on social media from supposed bedfellows on the Right, especially in the wake of the resignation of former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, who positions himself more a figure of the dissident (ie Online) Right than most in his former party’s elite.

Perhaps being sent to ferment in the Doge and despairing at Sarah Pochin’s comments were the final straw.

Reform represents an unstable coalition of parts of the middle class with disaffected working class voters for whom immigration has become the totem issue, representing an establishment which has ignored them for decades.

But at the level of party elites, it depends on an even more precarious alliance of figures.

Insurgent politics and the world of tech and finance tend to attract and produce large personalities who do not readily share the limelight and are not prone to compromise – evidenced by both the ongoing collapse of the American Doge and our own.

But people don’t vote Reform because they view it as a well-oiled governing machine. They do so because they want to give every other party and politician a kicking.