Dan Hodges

That's not sort of... Why is it?

Well, I think this is, I mean, this is a much broader conversation that I hope we can get on to, but I think... Well, let's get on to it now.

Well, I mean, let's go back.

I mean, firstly, just to pick up your point, there is no ambiguity here.

Polls go up, polls go down.

If you look at the polling averages in September of last year, reform broke 30% in the polls.

And we all remember that because that was the moment when people were talking about, you know, a reform majority government was possible.

from that moment on reform have been in been into a relatively steady decline to the point they're now back down to about 25 in the polls and i remember last september having a discussion with a number of senior reform sort of figures and they explained to me that they had a strategy for if you like taking reform onto the next level and it was essentially threefold firstly it was to to modernize professionalize the party

get rid of some of the cranks, the loonies, the overt racists who had sort of gravitated towards the Reform brand.

The second thing was a very, very specific policy, which is Reform's internal polling showed that whilst Nigel Farage is very popular amongst men, he's much less popular amongst women.

And to put it simplistically, Reform have a woman problem.

And the third thing was that they were going to start to need to set out

a serious policy programme and prospectus for government.

And that was kind of what the backdrop was in the run up to their party conference.

I think it was in October that year.

I might be slightly wrong about the date.

And I remember turning up to that conference and generally being interested in seeing how this programme was going to, you know, this sort of new reform was going to play out.

And frankly, it was a bit, when I got there, it was frankly a bit of a circus.

So you had, and I don't want to rehash sort of the old arguments, but I'm just literally saying what I observed.

So you had the situation where Lucy Connolly, who had just been, you know, got out of jail for saying, you know, tweeting about burning down hostels and et cetera, was literally on stage and fated like she was Mother Teresa.