We’re scarcely into the new year and already luminaries on the liberal left have resumed one of their favourite pastimes: issuing alarmist forebodings about the threat posed by populism, and imploring everyone that Reform UK must be stopped.

That is why Starmer and those on the left will always invoke the bogeyman of Reform and forever diabolise its brand of ‘populism’

Just as the final days of 2025 saw Gillian Tett of the Financial Times warn on Newsnight about ‘the rise of “The Three Ps”: populism, protectionism and extreme patriotism’, this year had barely got started before Sir Chris Powell, the New Labour former advertising strategist, chimed in to remind us of a great peril facing this country: the ‘existential’ and ‘new and terrifying threat’ embodied by Reform.

As Powell writes in the Guardian: ‘We are at a very dangerous moment. We simply cannot afford to allow Reform UK to have a free run, and become established and entrenched as a credible potential government in the minds of disenchanted voters.’ He concludes by urging Keir Starmer to undertake a ‘fundamental reset’ to see off this danger.

Leaving aside the reality that most people think the most ‘terrifying threat’ facing........

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