Nigel Farage isn’t just riding a wave — he’s rewriting the rules, and neither Labour nor the Tories seem ready for what’s coming says Herald columnist Andy Maciver.

There’s a book I read, called Waiting for the Wave, about the Reform party. It focuses on the misconceptions of the party’s leader. The establishment parties, you see, painted him as an extreme right-wing conservative. In fact, outside of the political bubble, he was becoming extremely popular because of his well-timed populism.

The author - a former party strategist - describes how the leader listens to what he calls "the common sense of the common people", and outlines the party’s strategy of "catching waves" of popular discontent to mobilise support. That slowly extended from its traditional base far away from the political capital, and eventually overtook the whole country.

This will sound familiar to us. But Waiting for the Wave is not a new book, nor is it about Nigel Farage or the Reform UK political party. Published more than 15 years ago, it details the rise of the Reform party of Canada. Starting in Alberta, in western Canada, in 1986, Reform’s leader Preston Manning cultivated a growing dissatisfaction with the political classes in the east, aloof, out of touch, and blind to the realities on the ground outside of their Ottawa bubble. His populism appealed to supporters of the Progressive Conservatives (PC), among them a bright young economist named Stephen Harper.

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Starting with a trickle (in the 1988 election the party........

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