As he made his way to lunch on Monday, Danny Kruger, the former Tory MP who defected to Reform last year, could be seen clutching a well-thumbed copy of John Campbell’s biography of Lord Haldane, one of the forgotten heroes of British politics.

Most British politicians in search of heroes look to Churchill or Attlee for inspiration. But as a reforming secretary of state for war and lord chancellor in the Liberal government before the first world war, Haldane ‘basically modernised the British state’, says Kruger. ‘He created the War Office and the Imperial Defence Committee, the Admiralty, the modern navy, the LSE and the RAF.’ Add to that the intelligence agencies, Imperial College London and the Territorial Army.

‘If you try to block us, we will use the power of democracy to blow you away if we have to’

With his academic bearing, his shock of silver hair and his heavy three-piece suit, Kruger resembles an Edwardian figure, and he may be the most significant politician the public has barely heard of, rather as Haldane was in his day. In 2026 he has one of the most pivotal jobs in British politics – preparing Reform for government.

Nigel Farage is ‘fixated’ on May’s local elections, another ally says, at which point he hopes to convert his party’s lead in the opinion polls into huge gains in the Welsh and Scottish parliaments and the English councils. After that, attention will be on whether Reform can evolve from an insurgency into a potential majority government.

The task is daunting. Zia Yusuf, the head of policy, says: ‘What we’re having to do is quite unprecedented. We have to select hundreds and hundreds of parliamentary candidates, probably hundreds of peers. We’re going to need a manifesto for how we turn the country around. We’ve got a once in a century chance to do this. It’s many orders of magnitude beyond what’s been done before.’ Looking to America for a comparison, Kruger adds: ‘It’s got to be Trump 2, not Trump 1. We’ve got to have a plan and we’ve got to have the people to implement it.’

Reform is conscious that much of what they want to do – leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, mass detention and deportation of illegal migrants – will be opposed by the Establishment. ‘Half the work is: what are the things that we’re going to need to do?’ says Yusuf. ‘The other half is: how do you get the patient to take the medicine? Most of the non-democratic institutions in this country are going to be at the very least ambivalent, in many cases hostile.’

Working out how to achieve the biggest shake-up in government since Haldane is Kruger’s job. ‘We are prepared to be very ruthless,’ he says, but his preferred approach is ‘polite........

© The Spectator