Nigel Farage is vulnerable.

He has a commanding lead, yes, but in a race which in all likelihood will not finish until 2029. Charles Moore has recently reminded us that in 1981, the Liberal-SDP Alliance peaked at 52 per cent in the polls, but in the 1983 general election won only 23 seats, having received 25 per cent of the vote.

This analogy can be pushed further than Moore troubled to go. In 1981 the SDP was fashionable. It expressed the discontents of millions of voters who felt let down by Labour and the Conservatives.

But it contained within it the seeds of its own downfall. Roy Jenkins wanted to create a better Liberal Party, while David Owen wanted a better Labour Party.

In 2025 Reform UK is fashionable. Journalists have started to take it seriously, and Tim Montgomerie, who founded ConHome, and Danny Kruger, upholder of Christian conservatism, have actually joined it.

Labour and the Conservatives face defeat if they cannot provide what Farage has promised to provide, most conspicuously an end to the illegal Channel crossings.

Meanwhile commentators compete with each other to see who can be rudest about Sir Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister has become a fashionable object of derision.

So too in 1981 was Margaret Thatcher. In those days the Prime Minister was an absurd, petty-bourgeois housewife, busily destroying what was left of the British economy and throwing millions of people out of work.

Many of her colleagues assumed the wretched woman would soon be replaced with a dignified figure from the traditional ruling class whose prudent, manly, defeatist head was not filled with disastrous theories dreamed up by Austrian economists and expounded by Sir Keith Joseph.

“Starmer is no Thatcher,” the reader may object, which is quite true. He is, however, underestimated by those who yearn to see the back of him, and in his hands he holds, with all their limitations, the reins of government.

We have just watched him welcome, with a degree of success, Donald Trump to these shores. “Trump is no Reagan,” the reader adds.

That too is quite true, but extending the hand of friendship to a derided American President may nevertheless be the right course for a British Prime Minister to take.

Shabana Mahmood, the recently appointed Home Secretary, has a mandate to do whatever it takes to stop the small boats. Her hand is greatly strengthened by Farage, and by the millions of people who at present support him.

Even quite dim Labour MPs can see their survival depends on her success.

They can also see that now is no time to hold a general election. This logic favours Starmer. His first attempt at welfare reform was bungled, and he had to back down.

Another attempt is unavoidable – otherwise we shall go bankrupt – and it is in Starmer’s interest to learn the lessons of the previous debacle, devise a series of measures to which no prudent person, and few supporters of Reform UK, can object, and educate his dimwitted backbenchers by threatening them with a vote of no confidence.

If Labour MPs don’t like welfare reform let them see how they like facing the voters.

A Prime Minister’s position is always precarious. Thatcher could well have gone in 1981, or at any point up to her defenestration in November 1990. We’ll have none of that American nonsense about fixed terms. Freeborn Britons can, by instilling panic in our elected representatives, chuck out a PM whenever we feel like it: ask Boris Johnson or Liz Truss.

But until we dismiss the PM, he or she has considerable powers to get things done, if he or she will only use them, and also commands a vast system of patronage. Here is the indispensable day-to-day means of keeping the parliamentary party in order, for most of them yearn for one or other of the many offices at the disposal of the PM, however derisory those offices may seem to the rest of us.

What patronage does Farage have? None, except the power to promote people within Reform UK, or throw them out when they defy him.

What strength he possesses is as a tribune of the people. He has a genius for voicing the anger of disregarded patriots.

But he also inspires widespread distrust. He could for some unforeseen reason blow himself up, and also has a tendency to fall out with colleagues. Montgomerie and Kruger are men of principle, who yearn to build a better small-c conservative party.

Is this what Farage wants to do, or is he, as some voters snobbishly maintain, a wide boy and a spiv?

If at the next election Farage is still leading Reform UK, millions of votes will be cast against him, as well as millions of votes for.

He is in some ways, as the Vote Leave campaign realised, a liability.

Who will gather in the anti-Farage vote? Sir Ed Davey hopes it will be him. I would be delighted if it were Kemi Badenoch, for whom I have a high regard. All she need do is build a party to which Montgomerie and Kruger would once more be proud to belong.

But Starmer is at present best placed to steal Farage’s clothes. We test our leaders by hurling any amount of vulgar abuse at them, and if they withstand this onslaught, and prove themselves capable of transcending the caricature version of themselves – stupid housewife, treacherous North London human rights lawyer – we may for a time come to regard them as the least bad option on offer.

My guess is that Farage will not become PM. For as the great Lord Salisbury observed, “English popularity, like an English summer, consists of two fine days and a thunderstorm.“

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