Is Reform unstoppable?

Lying in bed pissed on Boxing Day night, I was visited by the ghost of Christmas Future, dressed in a grey jacket with a velvet collar, hovering over my pit cackling and in a similar state, alcohol-wise, to myself. It seemed very happy, this ghost. It led me to a graveyard where it pointed, in jubilation, at a headstone which had the words ‘Kemi Badenoch 2024-2026’ on it. ‘You shouldn’t joke about people passing away, Nigel,’ I told this phantom a little sententiously. ‘She’s not actually dead, you idiot,’ replied the wraith, lighting a fag. ‘It’s a metaphor.’ When I awoke 12 hours later, my mobile phone flashed a message inviting me to join Reform UK, Europe’s fastest-growing political party. Incidentally, on the same night, my eldest son had a dream in which Ed Miliband was named as the new manager of Millwall and was relentlessly barracked by the crowd at The Den for his catastrophic net zero formation.

I suppose it was galling for Badenoch to hear Farage crowing, but she was unwise to take the bait

I suspect Sir Keir Starmer had a comparatively pleasant Christmas, despite having wrecked the economy and being about as popular with the voters as an Anglican priest who has just nonced a few altar boys. The sight of the leader of the opposition and Nigel Farage knocking seven bells out of each other will have cheered him considerably and comprised, in its own way, another Ghost of Christmas Future – Christmas 2029, when the right-of-centre vote is almost precisely divided between the Tories and Reform, leaving Labour still the largest party and able to make a deal with the absurd Liberal Democrats. That was precisely the scenario invoked by the latest mega poll. Of course, things can change. The question is how and why.