On Monday night, a hundred jubilant Reform UK staff and donors met in a Marylebone pub, where they ran up a five-figure bill toasting the local election results, says James Heale in The Spectator. Opponents will argue that winning is not the same as governing, and that Reform will be “found out in office”. Running a major council, sniffs one Labour MP, is about “serious hard work”. So far, Reform has made plenty of headlines with plans to use its councils to wage a series of campaigns: fighting the Home Office in court to stop asylum seekers being housed in their areas; insisting only national or county flags be flown on authority buildings; and resisting diversity training in all its forms. But what was striking during the election campaign was how much the party focused on delivery rather than dogma: “bin strikes instead of British sovereignty”.

Farage is a far more pragmatic politician than is generally understood, says Jason Cowley in The New Statesman. The standard view on the left is that “Reform profits from despair”, and it’s true that Farage speaks of “societal decline”. But when he does, it’s always “energetically and jauntily”. Consider a typical picture of him: “he will be laughing”. And there’s nothing gloomy about Reform rallies. I recently reported from one that had the “raucous atmosphere of a night at the darts at Ally Pally”. By remodelling his own rhetoric for broader appeal, Farage is deliberately aping Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, who softened some of her more extreme views to win office. “She’s disappointed some of her more radical supporters,” he tells me, but she’s become a “stable prime minister”.

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