Nigel Farage loves a gamble. In his 2015 memoir, The Purple Revolution, a whole chapter is dedicated to the then Ukip leader’s appetite for risk, how he indulged it in the City and how that prepared him for a career in politics.

He boasts of the time he “lost a seven-figure sum of money in the course of a morning on the zinc market” before breezing off to the pub. He waxes nostalgic about the halcyon days of freewheeling finance, before “ghastly regulators” spoiled the fun; when “terrible cock-ups” could be written off because “decimal points and all those zeros can be tricky after a three-hour lunch”.

Farage the commodities trader was not a details guy. Farage the politician isn’t famously punctilious either, but the stakes are higher. He’s backing himself to be prime minister and it isn’t going to happen if voters see him as the kind of gambler who might blow the nation’s budget on a boozy bet.

Dispelling that notion was the purpose of a speech by the Reform UK leader on Monday. Farage disposed of his party’s 2024 election manifesto and its promise of tax cuts worth £90bn because it was a tissue of fiscal fantasy. He didn’t put it quite like that. He observed that Britain’s sluggish growth and high debt demand sober management of public finances. He hinted that Treasury savings could one day be made by unpicking the sacred “triple lock” that guarantees perpetual real-terms rises in the state pension.

Liz Truss was not named, but the new, parsimonious Farageonomics has been formulated to silence comparisons between Reform’s agenda and the

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