We knew we could never do what we wanted without him.’ As we spoke outside the main auditorium at Reform’s conference earlier this month, three middle-aged men walked past. But it also felt different from any party conference I’d attended before. Lee, an IT contractor from Kent, had taken the day off work to come to his first party conference. Reform – ‘the party that stands up for decent working people’ – needed to be ready to win a general election in 2027. Preston Manning, who founded the Reform Party of Canada in 1987, was Farage’s surprise guest speaker on the opening night.