It is the surest sign – although blink, and you just might have missed it. The man who can hardly start a sentence without adding a gag, or a grin, or a chortle, gave a speech about his approach to the economy in which he barely produced any. Nigel is trying to get serious.

What that tells me is that Mr Farage really does want power. He senses it is within his grasp. He smells it and, most importantly of all, he wants it. Badly.

The leader of Reform UK – the party which has been ahead in the opinion polls for 26 weeks – declared that “above all we will be responsible and realistic”. In so doing he seemed to admit that the policies he ran on at the last election were something of a joke. No one remotely serious believed they were remotely serious because, as the Institute for Fiscal

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