Imagine a classroom with almost nothing in it, save some hard wooden benches and a stack of Bibles. Imagine the school it is in has only one loo, no canteen, gets freezing cold in winter – oh, and the playground is full of gravestones.

If this sounds to you like the perfect setting to teach the country’s most vulnerable children, then you’re going to love Reform UK’s new Send policy, which involves cutting the bill for taxiing children to far-flung special schools by repurposing nearby “empty churches” (a term that in itself may surprise vicars) as schools on weekdays. But if you have actually met any children, and therefore suspect this idea isn’t going to fly, then read on to find out why Reform looks more beatable at the end of what has undeniably been its breakthrough year than it did at the beginning.

This time last year, I was booking my place at a new year Reform rally that turned out to be a short, sharp lesson in just how fast old norms and taboos were collapsing on the right. Yet in retrospect, the most surprising thing about the young men I interviewed that night was how ordinary they were: no different, really, to all the ambitious young Tory turks I’ve met, except for the palpable sense that the energy on the right was elsewhere now. They did not seem unrecoverable, at least not to a Conservative party that could be bothered actually talking to them.

It’s fair to say that optimism has wavered a few times over the past year, which has taken me from interviewing teenage Nigel Farage fans at one end of the spectrum to making a BBC Radio 4 documentary about the far less widely examined surge in young women voting Green (which airs this Sunday night, thanks for asking) at the other. But........

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