Freedom of speech is a product of confidence. It is embraced by confident cultures, confident institutions and confident people. This helps explain why Reform UK has turned against it so aggressively: because it is a shallow, fragile thing, without intellectual substance, or temperate personalities, or institutional substance.

Yesterday, Reform suspended former Conservative pundit Tim Montgomerie from its ranks, citing a rule against those who are a “public critic of the party”. Even the wording sounds Stalinesque, about two steps away from branding him an “enemy of the people”. Reform has never looked more fragile and insecure, the intellectual equivalent of one of the curled brown leaves now falling from the trees, wafting away in the late summer breeze.

Ideologically, Montgomerie is a true friend of Reform. Even when he served as a Conservative adviser to prime minister Boris Johnson, he pushed British politics towards the sort of extreme right-wing propositions which Reform now eagerly promotes. He praised Hungary’s Viktor Orban, for instance, despite his anti-Muslim hatred, authoritarianism and allegations of corruption that have surrounded his party. Montgomerie is a firm advocate of Reform’s virulent anti-immigrant agenda.

But temperamentally, Montgomerie is quite different beast. He is polite, courteous and gently-spoken. He sounds completely different from the angry, borderline unhinged, utterances you increasingly get from Reform figures like Zia Yusuf and Richard Tice. Instead, he speaks softly, concedes points to........

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