Broken? 99% of Reform's policies are same as mine!

DEFECTOR BRADLEY'S DIFFERENT NOTE TO FARAGE

- By OLIVER PRIDMORE

BEN Bradley believes "99% of things are the same" at Nottinghamshire County Council since Reform UK took over.

Nigel Farage said during the local election campaign that "Nottinghamshire was broken".

But in an interview after announcing his defection to Reform, Mr Bradley said he gained "satisfaction" from observing the similarities to his time running the council.

The former Conservative MP for Mansfield also says he has “no doubt" he will reenter frontline politics as a Reform candidate and that he has been thinking of joining the party for "years".

Speaking about last year's general election, in which he lost his seat to Labour's Steve Yemm after seven years, he said: "If it weren't for the fact that I was a sitting Conservative MP and I was just looking at who I most agreed with, I'd have been voting Reform in that election."

Ben Bradley's defection to Reform was confirmed on Thursday and his title will be "head of local government action", working with the party's administrations across the county and with Richard Tice at the national level to achieve efficiency.

Mr Bradley's political career began when he was elected as Mansfield's Conservative MP in 2017, one of the first "Red Wall" Labour seats to flip to the Tories in a foretaste of the 2019 election under Boris Johnson.