Is she Britain's Trumpette? Rachel Johnson asks after meeting Reform's first woman MP Sarah Pochin

20 June 2025, 16:26 | Updated: 20 June 2025, 16:29

By Rachel Johnson

@RachelSJohnson

“I don’t care if you call me racist,” says Reform's newest MP Sarah Pochin, in the middle of her first ever podcast, for Difficult Women.

Okaaaay, as we say.

During any interview, you hope for clips. When someone says something fresh and punchy that you can pull out to make a juicy quote for social media, that moves the story on, but not so fresh and punchy it causes problems for the platform that publishes them. Well, there was no shortage of clips in her sit-down with me, for LBC, but my worry was, could we use them without being Ofcommed?

Was Sarah Pochin Britain’s Trump (think of his Mexicans-are-rapist type comments, his mass deportation programme, his bullying ICE tactics) or was this well-presented former Justice of the Peace, and mother of two adult sons, only saying what a lot of people down the Dog and Duck were actually thinking?

Before we got onto the politics of race and the failures of mass immigration, Pochin started strong - by revealing the only sexism she’d encountered in the mother of Parliaments so far had been from…. the Prime Minister.

She accused Sir Keir of refusing to refer to her by name, only calling Mrs Pochin (a former councillor, pillar of the Cheshire community, businesswoman and magistrate before she became an  MP) only “she” or “her” rather than by the more dignified conventional appellation, which is, and has been since May 1, The Honourable Member for Runcorn and Helsby.

This narrow victory made her Reform’s first woman MP, but she has already broken other records. She won her seat in a by-election by the smallest margin in electoral history (she overturned Labour’s 14,700 majority by just six votes, after a recount - no wonder Sir Keir was a bit cheesed off with her).

She has also had the fastest impact, I’d say, by delivering her maiden speech within a fortnight of entering the Commons (some slouches take months if not years) which entitled her to ask a question at PMQs.

This question then caused the Chairman of her own party, Zia Yusuf, to resign in a snit (he’s since apologised and returned). Pochin asked the PM if it was time for the UK to ban the burqa, along with several other European countries. He ignored her, which led to a point of order.

Now, the subject of her maiden speech was illegal immigrants (she rose to her feet for the first time during the debate on the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill) and this is the first thing that comes up when I ask her about the burka ban question, too.

“We have a huge problem of illegal immigrants being housed in the community,” she says, and goes on to report “literally terrifying stories of people coming across the door telling me about it in the by election” including, she says, “rape in broad daylight,” and goes on to say, “two illegal immigrants are currently under arrest for that.”

When she gets onto the burqa, she says it is oppressive, and unBritish: “Not our culture,” she insists, with passion. “If you want to integrate, then I'm sorry, wearing this type of stuff on our streets, in our, in our public places is no way to integrate with our culture. So if you want to wear that or if your husband wants you to wear it, go back home to where it's acceptable. It's not acceptable here and I stand by that. It is utterly divisive in our community.” She remembers campaigning in Bolton in 2017, and going from house to house in a Muslim area. “I felt like I wasn't in my own country,” she says, echoing Sir Keir’s incendiary nod to Enoch Powell in May, when the PM said mass immigration risked making us an “island of strangers.”

But when Reform’s first female MP asked her burqa-ban question, Sir Keir brushed her off, which she described as “chauvinistic.”

“He refused to answer my question. What kind of example is that to our modern society of a man speaking to a woman? We're both elected officials. I was raising a subject which I'm fully entitled to raise in the Houses of Parliament. If we can't debate these issues there, where can we debate? So he's trying to shut down a perfectly reasonable question.”

She says the other two parties have been “in denial” over the ethnicity of the grooming gangs, and they need to “wake up and smell the coffee.”  She recalls debating the Labour MP for Blackpool, who said to her, “Why are you saying it's Pakistani? We don't know that these are Pakistani.” At this, “I said, oh, my God, you're in denial. You are still in denial. We do know that these are Pakistani, predominantly Pakistani men that have raped our children. Let's not beat around the bush. Let's not try and soften the language. They have raped children. And by the way, it's predominantly young girls, but it's also boys as well.”

With Sarah Pochin, the clips some will call clickbait, others call “far right” dog-whistle, keep coming – and this is why. It’s more important to her to call out the failures of multiculturalism and mass immigration than anything, even her family, who she says feel they have lost her to politics (even though she reveals her husband is now Reform too).

Keir is a chauvinist, the burqa is unacceptable on our shores, and (British) Pakistani men have raped “our” children. It was only in 2023 that IPSO, the press regulator, ruled against Suella Braverman. In a piece for the Mail on Sunday, she described the grooming gangs as ‘groups of men, almost all British-Pakistani, who hold cultural attitudes completely incompatible with British values.” The regulator said that was misleading.

What a difference two years make.

It is 2025, and we have Reform ahead in the polls, we have just had the Louise Casey report, which concluded that the perpetrators were “disproportionately Pakistani British” and also, that a “significant proportion of live police operations involved migrants and asylum seekers.”

This is why Sarah Pochin – who says Reform is not only going to win, but “win big” - speaks out, and says things that were unsayable just months ago.

As we end, I’m beginning to think that Sarah Pochin is not just the first woman Reform MP, is she Britain’s Trumpette? For saying the quiet part out loud, over and over again?

She says, “I don’t care if you call me racist,” because in her mind, she’s not racist, because she’s only telling the truth: and facts cannot be racist.

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