Reform's new defence spokesman, Angus MacIntyre, has said he lost all faith in the Conservative Party during the Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak years, and is now aiming for a Cabinet post.
MacIntyre, who previously voted Conservative all his life, said the chaos of that period left him with no trust in the system he had spent four decades defending. The veteran, whose service took him from Afghanistan to the Pentagon, watched regiment after regiment axed in successive rounds of defence cuts.
Loss of trust in the Tories
Speaking to the Express, MacIntyre said: "I had been a Conservative voter all my life. But the Boris Johnson-Sunak years were absolutely definitive examples of how not to do business. I looked around and there was just no trust. I'd always trusted the system to do the right thing by you, and there was none of it."
He added: "When Reform came along, it was an easy decision to join the party."
Four decades of service
MacIntyre signed up in 1986, aged just 17-and-a-half, joining the 17th/21st Lancers. The cavalry regiment was merged away under the Options for Change cuts of the early 1990s, and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, in which he was later commissioned, were eventually slashed to a single company.
"Almost every organisation I was in through the late 80s and mid-90s has been disbanded," he said. "I am the result of defence cuts."
After moving to the RAF Regiment in 1999, he served in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Liberia in 2003, where he says he was the only Briton on the ground, he watched China win hearts and minds by building a field hospital. "Where's the UK? Where's our influence?" he said.
Later postings took him to Mogadishu, the Pentagon and NATO's headquarters in Brussels, before he shuttled between Washington, London and Kyiv helping Ukraine fight back against Russian despot Vladimir Putin.
Aiming for power
On returning to the Ministry of Defence, he "instantly fell out of love" with what he found, describing a "deep decomposition of defence" and a "real reluctance at the top levels" to call it out.
MacIntyre applied to be a Reform candidate through the party's website, and was called for interview in June after being told vetting could take a year. He has his eye on a "very safe seat", though he will not name it, and insists he went through the party's assessment centres like everyone else.
"There's no point in doing this unless you're in power," he said. "I'm aiming at a Cabinet post."
He has faced a storm of online abuse since his appointment, but insists it does not bother him "in the slightest". "I guarantee you they wouldn't say it to my face," he said. "It's cowardice, and there's lots of it."
Among those who have taken him under their wing is Lee Anderson, whom he called "very genuine" and "a huge help". A Gloucestershire farmer's son and agricultural college graduate, MacIntyre is a devoted countryman with a soft spot for springer spaniels: "the best dogs in the world - flat out or asleep, nothing in between".
After the interview, he joined Anderson, Richard Tice, Sarah Pochin and Danny Kruger at the Cenotaph to mark Armistice Day.
