Daniel Trilling

And I think that is the effect of Restore putting pressure on them and also Elon Musk putting pressure on them.

I think depending on how the by-election pans out, if

reform do lose and it's widely believed that Restore had a hand in that I wouldn't be surprised if you see a big falling out over strategy within reform itself you know an argument between I suppose this is all relatively speaking of course the moderates and the hardliners and you actually saw a sign of this the other day where

Robert Jenrick, in an interview, said one thing about their deportations policy.

And Zia Youssef, who's a Reformed Home Affairs spokesperson, went on to social media and said, that's nonsense.

What I'm saying is much more hardline than what he just said is our policy.

So you can see these tensions are there.

So I think the by-election could really bring those to the fore.

It contributes to an increasingly toxic mainstream political debate, particularly around issues like immigration, cultural difference, identity and so on.

And you've already seen in the last year or two, politicians right in the centre echo some of this language.

And that's partly because they feel threatened by this pressure from the right.

But I think it's also partly because so much of Westminster political culture is still transacted via X.

Seemingly a large part of our Westminster lobby and many, many politicians are comfortable engaging in political debate and letting their ideas and their rhetoric be shaped by a platform run by an overseas billionaire who is trying to interfere in our democratic processes effectively.

On that front, I think Restore are having and are likely to continue having a very damaging effect.

We've talked a lot about how Restore have been attacking reform for being too moderate and too mainstream, perhaps.

But let's not forget what reform stand for and what they're proposing.

Is it self-extreme?

If you have this challenge growing even further to the right of reform, it also risks having this knock-on effect of sanitising reform longer term.

It might cause Nigel Farage problems with the make-a-feel by-election and a tricky challenge to negotiate the fallout from that afterwards.

But a few years down the line, it's possible that with some nimble footwork, reform can turn that to their favour and say, vote for us to keep these extremists out of power.