Isaac Levido, the Tory election strategist who helped secure Boris Johnson’s landslide victory in 2019 and saved the Tories from oblivion in 2024, says (with the wisdom of grim experience) that ‘politicians are confidence players’. They perform best when their tails are up. In 2019 he had a candidate with his tail up who took the public with him. In 2024, in Rishi Sunak, he had a leader who had suffered a major crisis of confidence and projected a self-fulfilling air of doom.

This eternal truth is likely to be reinforced on Saturday when Nigel Farage takes to the stage in Birmingham for the first party conference speech he has given as a potential prime minister. A year ago, when he last addressed his supporters, the poll of polls which is closely monitored in Reform UK HQ had the party o

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