Nadhim Zahawi has just joined Reform UK, and that move has blown a hole clean through the party’s anti-elite pitch. Right, so Nadhim Zahawi has just joined Reform UK, and this isn’t a one-off, it’s the system doing what it always does when one brand collapses and another looks useful, when one gravy train starts running out of juice and another offers plenty. A former Conservative chancellor, dumped after a tax scandal and apparently sulking after having been blocked from a peerage, has walked straight into a party that claims to exist to smash elite entitlement, which is a laugh when it is led by the MP coining the most in by way of second jobbing and with the likes of Dubai Dickie Tice making the same tired old migration excuses, whilst literally being one himself. The cost ought to be immediate and would be if the media did its job, because Reform now owns the baggage, the settlement, the ministerial code breach, the heated stables, the whole public memory of everything Zahawi comes with, and it can’t put that back in the box. So from here on, every time Reform talks about tax fairness or a rigged system, Zahawi is standing right there, the living, breathing hypocrisy. And that’s why this matters, because this isn’t about forgiveness or second chances, it’s about how politicians who are supposedly finished never actually are, how power reroutes itself, and how an anti-establishment party just proved, in public, who it’s really built to serve. Right, so Nadhim Zahawi has joined Reform UK, and whatever polite language people want to wrap around it, what has happened is that a former Conservative chancellor and former Conservative Party chair has walked across the road to Nigel Farage at the moment Reform is doing well in the polls, and he has done it carrying the one thing Reform keeps pretending it exists to oppose: ministerial entitlement dressed up as public service.