About whether you'd move right or whether you just got sick of the Tories.

Yeah, so she asked me to look at the energy brief, and I said, I don't really have any particular...

I know energy reasonably well.

I don't have any particular expertise in energy.

Why that? She said, because you're a business guy, you'll look at it from first principles, and you don't have any baggage.

You weren't involved in the Tory party that put through the net zero thing in 70 minutes without a vote, right? So I looked at it, and you peel the onion, peel the onion, and I got more and more horrified at what we'd done to ourselves.

Nothing to do with the fact we've got a climate change situation.

No,

... we seem to be heading towards?

Well, we've now got this, these proliferation of, of parties and, um, you know, I was reflecting recently on the fact that, uh, when the Conservative Party lost that last election, um, uh, in '24, that was, there was a lot of heart-searching within the Conservative Party at that time 'cause that was the worst election defeat they'd had in 200 years.

And there was a presentation done by John Curtice, the polling expert, Professor John Curtice, where he put a chart up to show polling over the last 200 years, and until one generation ago, 90% of the votes went to two parties.

Back in the 19th century, that might have been, that, that would've been the Lib- the Whigs and the Tories, the Liberals and the Tories.

When Labour came along at the beginning of the 20th century, they actually displaced the Liberals, and it became Labour and Tories, not a three-party system.

It became, remained a two party.

So you had for two, almost for 175 years or so, a two-party system, and that's now fragmenting.

Mm-hmm.

How do you feel, and what's your stance?

I feel that, um, I was approached by some GPs who came to me.

I didn't seek them out.

They came to me and said, "Can we just explain what's going on?" And so what they told me was the level of sort of health tourism that's going on disguised as asylum seekers is really quite shocking, and it ha- doesn't happen anywhere else in the world, and we are being taken for fools here.

And the public are right to be angry because there's a real squeeze on health right now, health services for, for the local people here, and they're being squeezed out by new arrivals who've just turned up, and they're, they're, you know, they're, they're opportunistic.

It's a subject that establishment does not wanna talk about, but I believe we've gotta, we've gotta give it some daylight, and that's what I'm gonna do this evening.

When Reform chairman Dr. David Bull introduced Malcolm, he was met with loud applause as he walked on stage, and he explained his concerns to the Scottish people.

I know that I will be pilloried again in the press for being a racist and for stirring something up.

[clapping] Malcolm.

Okay.

Um, here we are in the northeast, uh, where we basically had a world-class energy, uh, industry, uh, which we basically shut down as an act of self-harm.

Our energy prices are now four times more expensive than the US, seven times more expensive than China.

We're importing 70% of our North Sea from, uh, or gas from the North Sea from Norway, from fields over the fence from the ones that we've shut down.

Even the Norwegian energy minister thinks that is daft.

In the meantime, we account for less than 1% of global emissions.

You've now got a little bit of a speak.

Well, it, it's certainly a sensational move, but can he be trusted, given the political journey that he seems to have been on, going from an ultra Cameroon to somebody who speaks the, uh, language of s- the hard right?

It's interesting, this, because for those of us who have done this, um, I mean, journey is the right word.

These decisions are not made easily, and they're not made quickly, and they take quite a long time in the gestation, and then in the delivery, indeed.

And, uh, you know, Danny Kruger went through his own journey.

That was an important part of my journey, watching how he did his, which is when you feel that you cannot live in the party you're in because you're having to disagree continually with the party line, you actually have no choice but to move.

We're all fundamentally pretty loyal people, pretty tribal people.

We want to stay, we think, in the family we belong in, but you get to the point where you don't belong there, you've got to move, and it, it has to come from conviction.

That's not indicating change, is it?