Bloody weird. The underlying racial policy of Reform doesn’t surprise me. The Russian connections do. I am always surprised by the connections between Russian power and the right wing of the UK. It’s like an inversion of the politics I grew up with, where Russia (Soviet) had a spy in every Labour leader, Tony Benn was a Trot and Thatcher talked about freedom of expression.
Russia still seems oppressive in many ways. The embrace of disaster capitalism and oligarchs does not dispel the impression that basically the KGB are still in charge, albeit far richer than when they called each other comrade.