Richard Tice: 'Despite my views on net-zero, I do have a Tesla'

“I put a nice blue tie on especially,” chuckles Richard Tice, a former Tory donor and newly elected Reform MP, knowing this interview with The House will appear in the Conservative Party edition. 

We meet in a room he has booked on the parliamentary estate – Tice’s new office being too small for both of us and the photographer to fit in. Just three months ago, against almost all odds, Tice won the seat of Boston and Skegness, overturning a huge 25,000 Conservative majority. 

“A couple of the Tory MPs are properly grumpy,” he says. “Funnily enough, it’s the ones that used to be friendly that are now very, very grumpy.”

Comparatively, many of the new Labour MPs, Tice claims, have been “very civil and very courteous”.

The MP and businessman, 60, cut all ties with the Conservative Party for good in 2018 after putting his hat in the ring to become the Conservative candidate for mayor of London. “That told me a lot about the Tory Party,” he says. “They didn’t want a straight, white, male Brexiteer who’d been successful getting anywhere near the nomination, so they fudged it to keep me out.”

It was at this moment he realised he had no future with the party. “It was the tipping point. At that point I knew that it was permanently fractured,” Tice says.

That same year he set up the Brexit Party, which would later become Reform UK. Just six years on, an MP and deputy leader of the party, he is at the height of his political career. 

No longer driven by Brexit, Reform has shifted its focus to issues such as immigration and net-zero. 

If there was a net-zero referendum, we’d win it

Previously stating “there is no climate crisis”, Tice has long opposed net-zero targets, calling for them to be scrapped altogether.

Is he at all worried about climate change? “I’m not. Just adapt to it,” he says. “What you can’t do is force the impoverishment of the least well-off and the poorest for an ideological cult that has no basis in geological science, and that’s what they’re doing.”

“You go to the Middle East, there are two words that are not mentioned: net-zero,” he adds.

A number of the party’s big donors are wealthy climate sceptics with links to the Global Warming Policy Foundation think tank, and will be pleased to see Reform take an anti-climate stance. 

Labour’s ‘moon-shot’ commitment to decarbonise by 2030 has been met with scepticism all round. “We do have a very different view on it. It’s the greatest act of financial self-harm ever imposed on a nation by the people in charge and I’m convinced I’ll be proven right,” insists Tice, who knows his lines and sticks to them.  

“In terms of the 2030 target, it’s physically impossible. They won’t meet it. But if they carry on as they are, they will make us all a lot poorer in trying to get there.”

Enthused by the prospect of another Brexit-style referendum, Tice reaffirms his support for a nationwide vote on net-zero. “We quite like referendums. We’re good at them. We win them. And if there was a net-zero referendum, we’d win it.”

Despite his anti-climate credentials, Tice laughs off the suggestion he travels to and from Boston and Skegness in a helicopter. “It’s absolute garbage,” says the Reform deputy leader.
He has actually been making the drive to his constituency in a Tesla, his luxury electric car. “Despite my views on net-zero, I do have a Tesla, which I love, because I’m not a petrol head. It’s an incredible piece of technology.”

“I just have to be very careful about some of the speed limits,” he jokes. 

When it comes to policy, the Reform MPs are putting effort in to make sure they are on the same page. “On major policy, we’ll discuss it and it evolves,” explains the arch-Brexiteer. 

They typically allow whoever has more experience on a policy issue to lead the party’s position. “We’ve got different skills and in different areas. So someone will say, ‘Well, I know a lot about this and I’ve got this view’. For example, I’ve got a very strong view about steel and that’s a bit of a thing that I’ve had, so I’ll front that up.”

But as majority shareholder – until recently – and party leader, Nigel Farage will undoubtedly have the final say. 

From charismatic to slippery, Tice elicits strong views. Nicknamed ‘The Hairdresser’, he was once described as a “pound shop” version of the Reform leader and has long operated in Farage’s shadow. Shuffled around the party following Farage’s return, rumours have resurfaced of a rift between the pair. Tice laughs off the suggestion, branding it “nonsense” and “a long running ambition of the press”.

“It’s complete garbage,” he insists. “We agree on almost everything.”

“The only difference is I don’t smoke,” Tice jokes. “He’s the most recognised, famous politician in the country, equal with Boris. That’s the reality.”

The pair first joined forces during the Brexit years at Leave.EU and later at the Brexit Party, before coming together once again to lead the Reform Party.

Until recently Reform was a limited company, Farage owning more than 50 per cent of shares and Tice owning a third. The reason it was set up as a limited company, Farage says, was to make fast decisions and prevent the party from being taken over by malign actors. 

But plans to professionalise Reform UK were ramped up after the party was criticised for racist and offensive comments made by candidates during the election campaign, which Reform blamed on a poor vetting process. The party’s new chairman Zia Yusuf is tasked with leading the democratisation of Reform and turning it into a fully fledged political party. 

Now with over 80,000 members and 266 branches opening across the country, Farage has given up control of Reform UK and passing it over to the members. The party’s new American-style ‘constitution’, passed at conference, gives members the power to remove Farage as leader through a no-confidence vote, triggered by 50 per cent of members writing to the chairman. 

Reform MPs can also remove the leader if 50 per cent of them write to the chairman – but only if there are more than 100 Reform MPs.

Reform has so far been heavily funded by Tice, who has lent the party over £1.4m since 2021 to stay afloat. The multi-millionaire first made his money as joint-chief executive of The Sunley Group, his grandfather’s property business, where he worked for 14 years until 2006. He then moved around a few property investment firms, including CLS Holdings and Quidnet Capital, before deciding to focus on politics full time.

Securing proper funding and establishing party infrastructure over the next five years will be a priority. If they do, Tice insists it’s all to play for at the next election – they could even walk into No 10. “You’ve got to be optimistic otherwise you wouldn’t go into politics,” he says. 

Scotland is a key battlefield for Reform, aiming for a stack of MSPs at the 2026 Holyrood elections. “We are polling, give or take, equal to the Tories now in Scotland,” says Tice, who is speaking at the party’s Scottish conference in November.

But the first test will be at next year’s local elections in England and Tice claims that Reform will stand a large slate of candidates. “Absolutely. There’s, I think, two and a half thousand, give or take, next May and we will be standing in a big, big quantity of those.” Next year’s coveted Lincolnshire mayoral election will also be a likely target for Reform – and they have every chance of winning. 

But as Reform reaches new heights, the Tories, Tice’s former party, finds itself at a low point, still bruised from a crushing defeat at the polls. Looking to the party’s leadership contest, Tice won’t say who he’d back. “I don’t have a favourite. I don’t care. They’re all responsible for the mess we’re in.”

At this stage just four candidates are left in the running: Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick, Tom Tugendhat and James Cleverly. “I was surprised that [Priti] was the first person voted out,” Tice admits but won’t speak on any possible defections. “I couldn’t possibly comment, but everyone’s got my number,” he teases. 

“Whoever gets elected, the chances of them being leader by the time of the next general election is remote.”

Like Farage, Tice is rooting for a Donald Trump victory in the upcoming United States presidential election. “I think that we will all be safer and our economies will grow faster if Trump wins. It’s as simple as that.”

Respect and fear are two sides of the same coin

He believes that if Trump had won the presidency in 2020, Putin would never have invaded Ukraine and suggests the October 7 attack in Israel may not have happened. “I’m absolutely convinced that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if Trump had been president. I’m convinced that we wouldn’t have withdrawn from Afghanistan in such a chaotic way as we did, which was disgraceful, and I don’t think that Iran would be in the strong position that it is providing extra backing to Hezbollah and Hamas. So it’s quite possible that October 7 may not have happened.”

The former president has also been highly critical of Nato, threatening to quit if European countries don’t “play fair”. 

“Respect and fear are two sides of the same coin,” says Tice. “What he’s doing is he’s in a negotiation. And of course, he’s starting from a bullish position. That’s what you do in a negotiation. People can’t understand that.”

Trump refuses to say if he wants Ukraine to win the war, but again Tice puts it down to tactics. “He’s negotiating and people over here are stupid enough not to realise that’s what he’s doing.” 

Following the riots over the summer, Reform accused the Labour government of presiding over two-tier policing, the idea that people are treated differently by police because of their race and politics. 

“Whether you’re assaulting a police officer in a riot or assaulting a police officer in Manchester airport, you’re still assaulting a police officer. It’s the same offence and you should be dealt with equally promptly and equally harshly,” insists Tice. 

The Reform MP contrasts the riots to the incident at Manchester airport in July, where a police officer was caught on tape kicking a man following a fight. “The reason they’ve not been charged is because they’re from ethnic minorities. It’s as simple as that. People will find that uncomfortable, people will accuse me of all sorts of nasty stuff, but it’s true.”

Four individuals have been arrested in connection with the incident. No charges have been made to date, but the police watchdog expects its own parallel investigation to take six months and has said it is working with the Crown Prosecution Service on ‘the best course of action’. to avoid compromising its inquiry.

A divisive political figure for well over a decade, Tice is used to being at the sharp end of threats and abuse but says since becoming an MP it is on “another level”.  

“I’m probably a bit tougher than most, and just because of our politics, we probably get more abuse than most,” he admits. “It’s the other family members who get most upset.”

“We live in a slightly hairier and scarier world where funnily enough I feel much safer in the constituency than in London.”

A few days before our interview around 1,700 prisoners were released early to tackle overcrowding – another policy Tice strongly opposes.

“We’ve got about 10,000 foreign national criminals in our prisons. Why not just remove them all and deport them all?” he suggests. “If I was in charge it would happen in a month, trust me.”

Labour says they are deporting foreign national criminals where they can, but that this alone is not enough to free up space. “Don’t just deport a few hundred, deport the lot,” argues Tice.

“It would save billions of taxpayers’ money every year, and it would secure millions of support in terms of votes. The Tories should have done it, but they didn’t have the courage.” 

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