A chaotic afternoon with Reform’s newest Wirral recruits

Dear readers — Last year, three councillors for the Heswall, Gayton and Barnston wards broke away from the Tory party, declaring themselves as “independent Conservatives.” Considering recent high profile defections to Reform UK, perhaps less shocking was the announcement last month that the trio of husband and wife Andrew and Kathryn Hodson and colleague Graham Davies had joined the Nigel Farage-led party.

Just over a year since Victor Floyd became Reform’s first Merseyside councillor, the party already has seven across the region. Farage has set 7 May as the deadline for further defections: will there be more across Merseyside before then? Is this just the start of a populist-right surge? And just how is Reform planning to simultaneously appeal to voters in working-class and well-to-do areas? 

To find out, Laurence and Abi travelled to meet the Hodsons in their Gayton home. What began as a cordial morning became a somewhat chaotic afternoon. Read on to find out more.

But first, your Post briefing.

Your Post briefing

“Persistent, wicked and abusive”: Merseyside Police have launched a new investigation into ex-Liverpool Labour councillor Gerard Woodhouse after his conviction in December for sending “persistent, wicked and abusive” cards to a fellow councillor Christine Banks. A BBC investigation found that police first received complaints about a series of poison pen letters sent to a member of the public over a decade ago — years before cards were sent to Banks. At the time, Woodhouse was not linked to these letters, however after samples of his handwriting were published by the BBC the victim has renewed their complaint to the police. Merseyside Police confirmed an inquiry has been relaunched due to “a victim coming forward". Read the full investigation by the BBC here.

Two New Brighton councillors have come under fire after “award[ing]” cash to two projects that were supposedly already earmarked for funding. In a statement posted by Tory councillors Sue Powell-Wilde and Tony Jones on Facebook this week, the pair wrote: “We received several very worthy project ideas from community leaders and businesses across New Brighton, and we are delighted to be able to award [funding to]... a series of street art celebrating local heroes and…the launch of a Creative Technology Hub”. In response, the New Brighton Coastal Community Team described the announcement as “sheer nerve” — adding: “These projects were earmarked for this funding before they tried to hijack it. Are they both going to support the local economy by calling for the parking charges to be reversed?” Things are certainly feeling tense over the water…

And some sad news for Walton’s Rice Lane City Farm, which is now facing permanent closure. The farm, which opened nearly 40 years ago, hit financial trouble last year and now needs to raise around £30,000 to stay open. Jamie Dowling, the farm's chair of trustees, said he would be “heartbroken” if it was forced to shut, adding: “I really want to keep it going but I'm not confident we can do it.” The farm needs cash for repair works to its barns and shelters, as well as food for the animals. A GoFundMe campaign has raised over £7,000 so far.

A chaotic afternoon with Reform’s newest Wirral recruits

“That’s the old windmill there,” Andrew Hodson says, pointing to a red sandstone tower a plot away. It’s old, grand, and redundant, its sails having fallen off sometime in the 1900s, but remains a landmark of no small local pride. 

We’re standing in a beautifully maintained back garden in Gayton. It belongs to Andrew and his wife Kathryn. The former is keen to show me the sights but I’ve come to talk politics — the Hodsons are two of three local Wirral councillors who last month caused a stir by defecting to Reform UK after 32 and 14 years as Conservatives respectively. While Andrew shows me the sights, including a well-stocked country pub-like bar in the summerhouse, a brief scatter of wet snow barely dampens the lawn.

I want to know why this retirement-age, upper-middle-class couple decided to jump ship to a populist right-wing party after a long and mostly happy stint as Tories. But despite having served as a councillor since 1994, the houseproud Andrew describes himself as “not really political”, and is much happier showing off his possessions. 

When I first arrived two hours previously, I was struck by the georgic pomp of Barnston and Gayton — with Heswall, two of the three wards now represented by Reform. (The Hodsons’ colleague, Graham Davies, another ex-Tory defector, is not able to join us.) Alongside the two country pubs nearby, the Glegg Arms and Devon Doorway, Gayton’s windmill marks one’s entrance into Merseyside from the Cheshire half of the Wirral peninsula. 

The houses are old, large and well-to-do, but none more so than the Hodsons’, with its Range Rover and classic Bentley in the drive. “My pride and joy,” Andrew tells me, although I come to learn he has a lot of prides and joys.

After Andrew proudly shows me framed photos of the couple meeting Tory luminaries like Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Jacob Rees-Mogg, I sit in a pristine living room, creepingly self conscious of my own shabby appearance. In the front garden, a Union Jack flaps in the February breeze.

For the first half hour of my visit, I mostly chat to Kathy, who graciously plies me with cream coffee and delicious mint chocolate biscuits. Friendly, intelligent and unguarded, Kathy’s background was in finance as a manager of an Abbey National branch. Before that, she was brought up in a council house, and owes her conservatism to her parents’ gratitude to Margaret Thatcher for being able to afford to buy their home. Despite this, she says she wasn’t really political until she met Andrew in 1997, their courtship constantly interrupted by his dedication to canvassing and leafleting. They married a year later. 

Andrew comes in and out, occasionally making quips — “You’ve not made us out to be the Ku Klux Klan yet, have you, Kath?”, sometimes accompanied by his friend Mark, a tall, grey-haired gentleman who’s come round to help Andrew with something, although I never discover what. Mark, I’m told, did four tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, fixing tanks and other ordnance under gunfire. He says he used to vote Labour, but is now intending to vote Reform. 

Andrew built his own facility management and industrial cleaning firm, and freely admits he was drawn to the Conservatives because they “take care of you” if you’re in business. “Well, not ‘take care of you’,” he corrects himself, “but they do make things easier.” 

Kathy has a keen interest in history. We talk about the lamentable decline of school Latin, the legacy of the British Empire going back to its Elizabethan founding, and her belief in the importance of patriotism regardless of a country’s past wrongs. As she’s now the leader of the Reform councillors group, I’m interested to know whether her views have evolved, or whether the modern Conservatives left her behind. Before the Hodsons defected to Reform, they briefly sat as independents in 2025.

“We feel we’ve stayed in the same place,” Andrew calls from over by the Aga, but that the Conservatives were no longer fit for purpose. Before he can expand on this, a knock at the cottage door draws him away. 

“I began to think that the Conservatives had lost their way,” Kathy says, picking up the thread. “They weren’t the fiscally responsible party I thought they always would be.”

Was this during the Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng era? 

“Under David Cameron,” she says, surprising me. “That’s when they became more liberal. I thought then, these politicians who are coming in now, they’re not conviction politicians. They haven’t had a job, they haven’t been the director of a company, to be able to take those skills and see this is how you should manage a country. I voted for David Davis,” she says of the former Tate & Lyle senior executive and author of How to Turn Round a Company, who lost the 2005 party leadership race to Cameron. 

I ask whether the liberal Cameron/Osborne era wasn’t just a continuation of the neoliberal economics the party embraced under Thatcher — after all, a radical departure from the Conservatives' more traditionalist past — and suggest that that might be what got the country into the mess it’s currently in. Kathy doesn’t disagree, and even says she is for the renationalisation of essential services like water and other utilities — “So long as it’s done correctly: we all remember how bad British Rail was!”

Before I can probe further, Andrew returns with my colleague Abi. When he finds out we’ve been discussing renationalisation, he rolls his eyes indulgently, as though he knew what he was getting into when he married a communist. 

My more genial line of questioning gives way to Abi’s spikier style, until a kind of good cop, bad cop routine emerges, further confused by five people sometimes speaking over each other. Trying to keep things local, I infer from asides that the decision to break away from the local Conservative group was not wholly ideological: both Hodsons feel Kathy was unjustly passed over for the kind of leadership position she now holds. Meanwhile, Abi asks about the scandal over Reform leader Nigel Farage’s alleged tax avoidance.

“You’re advised to do it!” Andrew says. 

“Everyone who puts money into an ISA is evading tax,” Kathy concurs.

What about the racist comments Farage allegedly made at school? 

People of all ethnicities were created equal, says Kathy. “But we’ve probably all said things we’re not proud of as kids”.

About gassing Jews? Abi asks, referencing one of the songs a young Farage isaccused of singing. 

“No, probably not,” Kathy says, before endeavouring to make a general point about how what's acceptable evolves over time. “When I was a little girl, if you went to buy cotton in a shop, and you went to the brown section, there would be ‘fawn brown’, and then there would be ‘n***er brown’." (She does not censor the word.)

“N***er brown, that’s right,” Andrew says, breezily.

“It was not said in a [deliberately] racist way,” Kathy stresses. “But you can’t say that any more, obviously.”

The conversation becomes tangled, if not inaudible when Kathy begins demonstrating her hoover's flexibility and suction. (For context: she and I had been discussing the necessity of vacuuming up after pets.) I ask about Wirral’s Reform councillors deciding to name their wasteful spending review team “Wirral DOGE”, after the US government department introduced by Donald Trump. This devolves into a fruitless debate over whether two civilians recently killed by ICE agents in Minnesota were shot in self-defence. While Abi and Andrew spar, Kathy shows me a pot of pea and ham soup she recently made.

When the topic moves to immigration in general, both Hodsons are keen to note they have nothing against people of other races or religions, but that illegal immigrants are a big problem in this country. (“No,” they both say, when Abi asks if they have ever met any.) Here, Mark comes into his own a little more: Muslim communities do not respect women in the same way we do, he says, admitting his view on Muslims is coloured by the fact they spent a lot of time shooting at him while he was in the military. “You were in their country,” I say, which elicits a chuckling shrug. 

Reform wasn’t their immediate choice of political home but they’re increasingly enthused about the party. The experiment as independents went awry when the Hodsons and Graham Davies realised they needed a “machine” behind them to get anything done. I get the sense some council colleagues have reacted to their defection with outright hostility; Kathy emphasises the need in local politics for a collegiate atmosphere. Still, there’s admiration in unexpected quarters; Andrew admits grudging but magnanimous respect for Green councillor Pat Cleary for, in Andrew’s view, having built Wirral Greens from the ground up. 

The Hodsons think there are more defections to come, and not just from the Conservatives. I can believe it: the same day as the Wirral trio were announced, David Hawley left the Green group on St Helens council and joined Reform too. Surprisingly, Kathy reveals that, in fact, she and Andrew voted Reform in the 2024 general election when both were still Tories. "And so did three others, beside Graham. So that's six [then-Conservative councillors on Wirral Council] at least."

Andrew has wandered off again. When he comes back, he’s brandishing an air rifle — “for shooting magpies”, he says, waving it in the general direction of the trees in the back garden. "They're terribly cruel, you know." He also owns a couple of shotguns, he says, but they have to be locked away. Then we get back to the topic at hand: defections. 

Do Reform run the risk of losing their outsider edge by providing a refuge for too many establishment Tories? At the national level, although Kathy concedes that Nadhim Zahawi has a "chequered past", Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman are just the kind of “conviction” politicians she admires. "And [Zahawi] is a very good businessman," she says.

Locally, the Hodsons' constituents are on board — at least according to them. A 20-minute stroll up Telegraph Road to Tesco “takes us nearly two hours because we get stopped by everybody,” says Andrew. 

“Nine out of 10 people say, ‘when are you going to join Reform?’ And yeah, you see all this hate stuff on the Facebook. But most people, one-to-one, will say ‘well done.’ One fella — and we couldn’t accept it — but one fella, he turned up with a bottle of champagne on our doorstep.” (The Hodsons are not obliged to stand for a by-election and haven’t voluntarily elected to trigger one, so this won't be put to the test until 2027.)

“I look after my constituency,” he continues. “The reason I want to be a councillor is to look after my community. 32 years under a [Tory] flag, it was wrench to leave. You have to weigh up the pros and cons. But I thought, well, the way we’ve been treated, and the way I want to move forward, it’s the right thing to do”.

Kathy and Andrew feel their defection has given previously shy neighbours a licence to support Reform. Kathy especially feels she can bring the best bits of Conservatism to their new party, and both seem genuinely excited about being part of a nascent, dynamic political movement for the first time. Both express a deep sympathy for the region's less well-off.

"I've got a lot of friends in Rock Ferry, so I know all about Rock Ferry voting for Reform," Kathy says. "As for Birkenhead, well — Birkenhead should be like Liverpool waterfront. Birkenhead should be thriving."

It’s almost time to leave. While Kathy, under Andrew’s instructions, takes Abi to show off their en-suite bedroom, I make conversation with Mark. I say that, as a lifelong Labour voter, he must have often disagreed politically with Andrew in the past. “Not really,” he says.

Satiated by the Hodsons' hospitality, I spend the next hour canvassing the local denizens to see what they think. Many say they are busy or don’t wish to talk to a journalist. A woman in Lower Heswall says she’s not political; another, in Gayton, embarrassedly tells me she has no idea who her local councillors are. 

A retired lady on the Heswall/Barnston fault lines asks me to wait while she fetches her husband, an older gentleman with the mustache of an old army colonel; as a Labour voter, he does not think Davies’ and the Hodson’s defections to an even more right-wing party is a good thing. One of his neighbours, an elderly lady named May, criticises them for "leaving the sinking ship" and not going right-wing enough by joining Advance UK, the party led by Reform’s ex-deputy leader Ben Habib. 

A Barnston man in his fifties answers his Ring doorbell suspiciously, squinting in what's left of the daylight. I ask him what he thinks about the defections, and he pauses, shielding himself from the cold with the door.

“Something you can put in your paper,” he says, after a moment’s thought. “Hang the lot of them.” The door bangs shut.