When Zia Yusuf first walked into the headquarters of Reform UK, he gestured at the empty room and asked: ‘Where’s the office?’ Ed Sumner, the party’s director of communications, replied: ‘This is it. It’s empty. This is the party.’ That was not even two years ago.

Since then, Nigel Farage and Yusuf have built a party from scratch and expect to be the biggest winners in the local elections on 7 May. With more than 270,000 members, their grassroots base is the largest in Britain, bigger than both Labour and the Tories. ‘I would argue no party has built political infrastructure and established itself more quickly in British history than Reform,’ Yusuf says.

This marriage of Farage’s campaigning ability with Yusuf’s professionalism and ‘Goldman Sachs approach’ (he founded a start-up and sold it for $300 million) led to Reform fielding a full slate of council candidates last May, the first time in a century that a third party has contested more seats than Labour and the Tories. Reform has led every national opinion poll for 12 months.

‘I think we will wake up on 8 May and realise that the Conservative party’s gone’

‘I think we will wake up on 8 May and realise that the Conservative party’s gone’

Yet over the past few months a slight dip in Reform’s polling numbers has raised questions about whether the party has peaked. The defection of several senior Tories has tempered its appearance as an insurgent force and many wonder if Farage can make Reform look like a government in waiting. But the party’s most senior figures argue that in the story of Reform’s rise lie the answers to how they can regain momentum, permanently shatter the political mould and replace the Tories as the party of the centre right.

Their goal is to repeat the magic of 1 May last year, when Reform gained more than 600 council seats and won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election in a previously rock-solid Labour seat. ‘We established ourselves properly as a political party that could actually fight campaigns on a broad level,’ says Farage now. ‘Big, big moment.’

Farage and Yusuf campaigned on the day in Runcorn, and came across a family who were out in their garden – father, wife, two sons, one arriving on a motorbike mid-conversation. They were on the fence about how to vote. Yusuf watched Farage ‘go into full campaign mode for about 20 minutes’. That evening, Labour were briefing that they had won. ‘I was told afterwards that betting markets were moving based on my facial expressions,’ Yusuf recalls. Reform won by six votes. ‘There’s every chance that conversation was decisive. I’ll take those memories with me to my grave. I felt like that was a moment of destiny.’

For others, the breakthrough came when the council results were announced. Farage and his closest aides, who had gone 36 delirious hours without sleep, were in the green room in Kent waiting. Sumner, sustained only by gin and tonic, glanced at his phone and declared: ‘We won Northamptonshire West!’ The council was far down the party’s list of targets. ‘We’d put no money into those seats,’ a party official says. ‘Suddenly we’d won both Northamptonshire councils. That was the moment I thought: this is magical.’

Can they recapture that lightning in a bottle? Over the next six weeks they will focus on three issues: crime, immigration and the cost of living. In a mega poll conducted by Reform last month, 72 per cent of Reform-curious voters said energy bills are the expense they’d most like politicians to address.

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On Wednesday, Farage was in Essex, the only place where he is campaigning twice. He sees it as ground zero in the battle to destroy the Conservatives. ‘What do we have in Essex?’ he asks. ‘We have Priti Patel, we have the inappropriately named James Cleverly, we have Kemi Badenoch, we have rising star Alex........

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