Your Party, OnlyFans, Reform UK… and the Great British Tragedy of the Left
Say what you like, she knows how to climb a greasy pole in heels without breaking stride.
Britain has many national talents, queuing, complaining about the weather, and pretending not to recognise someone in Tesco. But the one we excel at above all others is this, taking a political movement with promise and watching it implode under the weight of its own ego before it even reaches the starting line.
It is almost a tradition now.
You take an underdog, cheer it on, give it a little hope, and just when its head rises above the parapet, you trip it up, blame the system, and start the whole miserable business again next season.
And so we come to Your Party.
A movement born out of frustration, idealism, and the admirably stubborn hope that something better is possible. A fresh project. A blank page. A new start.
It took six minutes for the factional knives to come out.
Because nothing says “we’re different” quite like forming a new party and then immediately diving into the sort of internal warfare that would make the writers of a bad sitcom say, “alright lads, this is too much.”
But to understand the chaos, you have to understand the characters at the heart of it.
Zara Sultana, meteor, megaphone, master of procedures
Zara didn’t wander into politics like she’d taken the wrong turn off the ring road. She was made, shaped in Birmingham Labour circles, sharpened through university politics, polished at protests and plenaries, and primed for the Corbyn surge.
When Jeremy Corbyn’s star rose, hers didn’t simply rise, it went into afterburner mode. The regional Labour organiser at the time saw her spark, her charisma, her instant crowd appeal, and he made sure she ended up in Coventry South, a seat so safe you could drop a traffic cone into it wearing a red rosette and still collect eight thousand votes.
The ingredients were obvious,
youthful appeal
left wing glamour
sharp debating steel
and an uncanny ability to turn any procedural rulebook into a trampoline
Say what you like, she knows how to climb a greasy pole in heels without breaking stride.
And nobody jumps a political bandwagon faster.
It’s astonishing.
A new cause appears, and she’s on it before the handbrake clicks.
Remember that early day motion she backed demanding that MPs who leave the party they were elected under should resign and fight a by election
Stirring stuff.
Delivered with the passion of someone who truly means it.
And now she has left Labour herself, seat intact, no by election in sight.
Funny that.
Principles sound glorious through a megaphone.
Harder when they demand you hand in your pass.
Jeremy Corbyn, the underdog whisperer
Then we have Jeremy Corbyn, political saint to some, eccentric uncle to others, but unmistakably a man who always sides with the underdog. It is a lovely British instinct. You never want to lose people like him from public life, they remind us what politics could be if more people were driven by conscience rather than career.
His tragedy, he sees the good in everyone, especially those who dazzle.
Zara dazzled.
He backed her.
She took off like a bottle rocket.
And Jeremy, bless him, was left blinking in the glitter trail.
He is also the only man in British public life who could accidentally join OnlyFans thinking it was an online forum about allotments. He would be there saying, “I thought we were discussing compost techniques. Why is everyone shouting and undressing.”
Your Party the OnlyFans of the British left
And that brings us neatly to what Your Party has become.
Because Your Party, earnest, hopeful and chaotic, is beginning to resemble the political version of OnlyFans.
Look at the evidence,
everyone is promising exclusive content
nobody knows who actually owns the subscriber list
half the contributors are leaking material they shouldn’t
the other half are shouting that their page is the official one
and in the middle stands Jeremy trying to upload a recipe for beetroot chutney
It is political slapstick wearing a revolutionary T shirt.
Zara understood the algorithm early.
She sparkled.
She jumped.
She posted.
She adapted to the platform.
Jeremy still believes the whole thing is about community.
Honestly, Your Party doesn’t need a founding conference.
It needs content moderation.
And a subscription tier that includes therapy.
And now Wales enters the chat
Because it wasn’t chaotic enough, the Morning Star reports that Your Party’s Welsh organisers are now demanding access to their own membership data, basic stuff, the political equivalent of asking for the office keys, and being stonewalled by Westminster HQ.
Beth Winter and Mark Serwotka say they cannot even email their own members because the UK leadership will not release the data or approve correspondence.
It is devolution done via hostage note.
Wales now accuses the centre of contempt, which tells you everything.
Even in a brand new party, the central machine has already managed to alienate the regions.
It is like watching someone pitch a tent, fall into it, and then blame the pegs.
Could Your Party learn anything from Reform UK
This is where the comedy becomes educational.
Because Your Party and Reform UK position themselves as complete opposites. You would need a rucksack and oxygen to travel from one worldview to the other.
And yet, they are both chasing the workers vote.
The crucial difference,
Reform UK actually has it.
Your Party believes it deserves it.
Your Party assumes Reform voters are racists, which is very stirring until Reform rolls out another local organiser called Patel or Ofori and the stereotype collapses like a soufflé.
Reform speaks to real people on estates.
Your Party speaks to itself on social media.
Reform listens outward.
Your Party listens inward.
Reform has messaging that sounds like it comes from someone who pays bills and uses public transport.
Your Party has messaging that sounds like it comes from someone arguing with themselves in a committee.
And if Your Party wanted one lesson from Reform UK, one simple truth, it would be this,
Stop preaching to voters you have never met.
Go and talk to them.
Really talk to them.
But of course, they won’t.
Because Reform talks to the public.
Your Party talks to its factions.
And Jeremy, bless him, is still trying to work out how his allotment forum turned into OnlyFans.