At the weekend, Zia Yusuf posted: “After 7 May 2026, Reform will accept no more Tories.” In other words: all you failed MPs and councillors have a full three and a half months to decide at your leisure whether or not to leave the sinking ship.

Taking on politicians from the party that governed Britain for more than a decade and broke it is hardly the stuff of a political insurgency. Suddenly, Britain’s newest political force doesn’t look quite so potent or relevant. Instead, it seems old.

And what of their prize new signing Robert Jenrick appearing on our TV screens and declaring that Britain is broken? I would love to know how many screams he prompted in living rooms across the land: “Yes – and you broke it mate!”

It feels as if the overinflated bubble around the new British right could be about to burst. By embracing the dregs of the Tory party, Reform UK is abandoning its claims that it is a friend of the working class and revealing itself to be a full-on Thatcherite force with added Trumpian fervour.

For the British left, this presents an initiative to be seized. If the question at the centre of British politics is “who broke Britain?”, let’s be clear and unequivocal. The four horsemen of Britain’s apocalypse are deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and Brexit.

In my time in politics, there has........

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