If you want to know what Reform would be like in power, look at how it threatened Bangor University | Gaby Hinsliff

A debating society didn’t want to invite two figures connected to the party to speak. Cue an authoritarian response

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t must have seemed the easiest offer in the world to refuse. Would students at Bangor University enjoy a question-and-answer session with Sarah Pochin – the Reform UK MP famous for saying it “drives me mad” to see TV adverts full of black people – and Jack Anderton, the 25-year-old influencer who helped send Nigel Farage’s TikTok account viral among teenagers? No, the university’s debating society decided, it would not.

And had it filed the request in the bin, you wouldn’t be reading this. Until now, Anderton’s A New Dawn campus tour – a homage to the “debate me bro” style of the American rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, killed last year, who was famed for inviting liberal students to take on his arguments and live-streaming the results – hadn’t exactly set the heather alight. Reform is actively pushing to recruit inside universities, but in Cambridge, according to its student newspaper Varsity, only about 30 people turned up to hear Anderton argue that migrants are taking the part-time jobs students once used to do.

The same was true in Exeter and York, according to their respective student papers Exposé and York Vision. And despite noisy counter-protests, the tour wasn’t juicing the kind of controversy that commands attention on YouTube, where the really big crowds are. (The Cambridge event livestream had a paltry 177 views when I checked.)