PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, was at Reform UK's "preparing for government" press conference this week. Here are his thoughts. 

Just over 44 years ago, Liberal Party leader David Steel ended his conference speech by exhorting the assembled throng to go back to their constituencies and prepare for government.

He claimed to be the first Liberal leader since Lloyd George to be able to give such a rallying cry with any credibility. At the time, this didn’t seem as farcical as it does in retrospect. The creation of the SDP and their partnership with the Liberals coincided with support for both the Conservatives and Labour tanking. For a fleeting moment, it did look like Steel could lead his party all the way to Number 10.

Of course, it didn’t quite work out as he had intended or hoped. In the subsequent general election, Margaret Thatcher won by a landslide and the SDP-Liberal Alliance came third in vote share and a distant third in Parliamentary seats.

If the Liberals and the Social Democrats believed they could break the mould of electoral politics back in the 1980s, it is Nigel Farage’s Reform UK who claim to be on the verge of realigning the party system today.

So, earlier this week I was intrigued to watch Reform’s press conference with Danny Kruger and Zia Yousuf on “preparing for government”. I have to confess that I was both impressed and encouraged by what they had to say – and for more details, please see our summary below.

First, Reform usually manage to avoid sounding hubristic and this is particularly true of Danny Kruger. They must surely be delighted with the way they have built and sustained an opinion poll lead but they have avoided the temptation to slip into celebratory mode. The next election is likely to be three or four years away. If there’s as much change in our politics in the next few years as there has been in the last few, who knows what the polls like in 2028? The tone is “we have a chance” not a more crowing “we are sure to win”.

Second, Reform have embraced the fact that Britain’s government doesn’t just need a change of personnel, it needs a full reboot. This insight is vital. I believe it has taken root in Reform, but it needs to flourish further. There must be a great temptation to simply say, “The Tories were a shambles, Labour are even worse. Isn’t it time to take a chance on us?”. That might even be enough to secure electoral success. But it wouldn’t secure a mandate for the wholesale change that Britain needs. Imagine a Reform government that fails. Or - like Starmer - has only said what it won’t do not what it will. The consequences are too grim to contemplate.

Third, Danny Kruger is unrolling his “preparing for government” work as an iterative process. He makes no claim that he is in possession of all the answers just yet but merely that he has most of the right questions. I’m expecting him to roll out a series of ideas and concepts (initially in private and then in public) not just to paint a picture of what a Reform government might do but also to stress test them. So the aim isn’t so much to be eye-catching to secure a load of headlines on a given day (although last Tuesday’s press conference succeeded in doing just that), it is rather to build credibility and to establish Reform as a new model army not a new rabble army.

My overall impression of how Reform has changed since the general election is not based on the excitement it’s generating in the opinion polls or in by-elections. There are some impressive scores on the doors certainly but that isn’t the most significant change. It’s that Reform is now actively and openly engaging in the battle of ideas. Sure, it ran on a manifesto (or “contract” as they called it) at the last election but its main proposition was that there were a huge number of problems in Britain that the Conservatives have failed to fix. Now they are mapping out a deeper plan about how such problems need to be tackled at a fundamental level. That – more than the upswing in the opinion polls – is a sign of seriousness.

If Danny Kruger is successful in his “preparing for government” project it probably won’t make much difference to Reform’s vote share in the polls. But it would mean that if Reform does prevail at the next election then they’d have a credible blueprint as to what they actually have to do. For that reason, I think all patriots and conservatives should wish him well in his endeavours.

Keep the flag of freedom flying!