There have been some noisy headlines about chaos in councils where Reform won seats last month: resignations, council meetings in disarray, councillors disappearing on holiday en masse.
Durham became a Reform-controlled council last year, and I finally managed to catch some Reform councillors in action. I had spent months trying to speak to, photograph or communicate with current and former Reform councillors in Durham, but with little success. They seem to prefer posting on X to talking to people like me.
So, a year on, how do they look? Has the chaos subsided?
The year-old Reform councillors still look very inexperienced. They continue to confuse pomposity with professionalism. Meetings are ponderous, rambling and often ill-informed. Members wander out in the middle of debates to take phone calls, despite having a perfectly decent chair. A handful of remaining Liberal Democrat and Labour councillors provide most of the informed contributions. Some Reform councillors say nothing at all. County Hall is condemned, and the Councillors were sat in an empty building, crumbling and antiquated, which added to the sense of an administration stuck in the past.
The only one who really stood out was Darren Grimes: sleek, well-fed and sharply dressed. Looking every inch a wealthy far-right influencer, he turned up, read his piece into the minutes and vanished again in a cloud of smugness.
Oddly, the meeting appeared to operate on an informal seating plan that placed the men at the front and most of the women several rows behind. Whether deliberate or accidental, it was a curious sight in 2026, as if Sharia Law had been introduced.
For the most part, Reform members simply followed officer recommendations. This is not unusual in local government, but the degree of compliance was striking. The policies they care most about, particularly immigration, are largely outside their control. As a result, beyond a few headline-grabbing gestures such as defunding Pride and withdrawing support from Lumiere, they appear to do very little.
Their reluctance to make difficult decisions, or indeed many decisions of their own, helps explain why the council has millions of pounds more risk in its budget than I would ever have accepted as an accountable officer.
What struck me most was the gap between the noisy, attention-seeking social media presence and the conventional, rather plodding reality of the elected members sitting in the chamber. Removed from Twitter, they are not that different from the Conservatives and Old Labour councillors they replaced.
The real change is one of tone rather than governance. The cancellation of funding for Pride and Lumiere illustrates that. Reform presents itself as an insurgent movement, but in office it often resembles something much more familiar: the party of the nosey parker, the misery guts and the bossy bureaucrat.
It is tempting to see this as part of a broader cycle. Socially conservative Labour councillors who did little for their wards were replaced by equally lethargic Conservatives, who in turn were replaced by Reform councillors whose greatest achievement has been to lower expectations even further. Eventually Reform will be swept away by an even more extreme right wing party with madder claims and higher expenses.
Still, they did agree to a Badger Mitigation Strategy. Which was nice.