Starmer says Farage would spook the City and give us Truss 2 - he could be right

The criticism remains that Reform has mostly promised sweeping tax giveaways without measures to avoid widening the deficit

- Richard Partington

The message Zia Yusuf wanted to send was clear. With a backdrop of the City of London behind him, from the 34th floor of the Shard the Reform UK chair laid out an economic policy designed to show his party means business.

In a briefing over a full-English breakfast for some of the nation's journalists yesterday morning, Yusuf reiterated an announcement the Reform leader, Nigel Farage, had made overnight from another hotel 5,000 miles away in Las Vegas: the party would now accept donations in bitcoin, and if elected to power would make tax and regulatory changes to bolster Britain's adoption of cryptocurrency.

As far as settings go for a press conference, commanding views over St Paul's Cathedral and the banks and asset managers of the Square Mile is straight out of the Westminster playbook, even if the policy idea is pure Donald Trump.

However, the trouble for the Reform chair's message to the City was not the questionable credibility of crypto - viewed with unease at the Bank of England as the Wild West of finance - but the party's broader tax and spending policies.