Welcome to The i Paper’s new opinion series exploring the extraordinary ascent of a growing power in British politics: the Rise of Reform.

• Nigel Farage is supremely effective. But he’s not done yet

It is interesting to watch a party attempt to move from the fringe to the mainstream. Nobody, including presumably its leader, expected Reform to form the government after last year’s election.

We should certainly be grateful that it did not get the chance to implement its manifesto commitments. The Labour Party might be struggling to avoid breaking its tax commitments, but Reform’s manifesto included vast, and obviously implausible, promises of tax cuts.

Any attempt to implement them would have made the market response to the Liz Truss mini-Budget look mild, if not downright ecstatic.

As the Institute for Fiscal Studies summarised it at the time: “Reform UK proposes tax cuts that it estimates would cost nearly £90bn per year, and spending increases of £50bn per year.

“It claims that it would pay for these through £150bn per year of reductions in other spending, covering public services, debt interest and working-age benefits.” Those supposed spending cuts were never identified. The manifesto was not serious.

More recently the party has got more serious. Most of Nigel Farage’s early November speech on the party’s economic policy could have been given by any right of centre party leader or economics spokesperson over recent decades. The focus was on fiscal prudence to be achieved through reducing the size of the state, getting welfare spending down, cutting civil service headcount, making public services more efficient. All intentions as familiar as the lack of any detail which accompanied them.

Only once this had been achieved could big tax cuts be contemplated. Spending tens of billions on raising income tax thresholds is now no more than an aspiration, to be achieved when economic circumstances allow. This change in tack has been dressed up in claims that economic circumstances have changed. They haven’t in any meaningful way. It is the polls that have changed. And with them has come a need for more plausible policy positions.

The hard work, of course, will have to start now. As Reform........

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