Is this a Farage ploy to bring forward the general election?

It was probably very foolish of me to expect that Nigel Farage was going to live up to the billing and, with his latest speech, unveil a properly prepared economic and fiscal programme for a Reform UK administration that would actually reassure people that he and his party are ready for government. True to form, of course, he unveiled no such thing.

- SEAN O'GRADY

Instead of anything recognisable as a plan, with his first big economic speech since becoming party leader last year, at his press conference in the City of London’s Banking Hall, he delivered a political “hope” - namely, that the markets would force the chancellor into austerity measures, that the Labour government would implode sometime in 2027, and a general election would swiftly follow.

That, I think, is wishful thinking masquerading as wisdom. No Labour government since 1931 has fallen over a financial crisis. Quite the opposite.

Labour cabinets managed to stay together during: the global financial crash of 2008; the IMF crisis in 1976; various sterling crises in the 1960s; and, for connoisseurs of economic history, the convertibility crisis of 1947. The idea that Labour MPs, most freshly elected in 2024, would rebel and lose their seats in 2027 on a 15 per cent poll rating is for the birds.

More important, Nigel’s numbers - of which there are very few for a speech reputedly outlining his party’s proposed economic agenda - still don’t add up. Analysing Reform’s economic policy remains akin to wrestling with a big turquoise blancmange: messy, unsatisfactory and hard to know exactly where to start.

So let’s first take an actually quite promising proposition, which was trailed before he dumped this great disappointment of a pudding upon us. Reform’s unfunded tax cuts of £90bn that were central to its general election manifesto — or “contract”, as they termed it - have been scrapped. I seem to recall Farage casually dismissing them during that campaign, but they've now been formally renounced. Which is progress, given that they were about double the equally unfunded tax cuts that Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng attempted to implement in the infamous 2022 mini-Budget before the financial markets and her own party stopped them from wrecking the UK's credit rating for good.