The Reform party, under its leader Richard Tice, invented Trussonomics before Liz Truss – launching an economic recovery plan in June which claimed to explain ‘how to grow our way out of crisis’.

The core policy idea will be familiar to anyone who has followed the disastrous aftermath of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget – a huge stimulus, largely delivered through unfunded tax cuts and higher anticipated borrowing.

Tice has so far been too modest to claim his rightful status as John the Baptist to Truss’s Jesus – which is hardly surprising given that she is being crucified right now. Yet the collapse of her vision of what was ultimately to have been a more lightly-taxed country with a smaller, nimbler state sector nonetheless creates some political room for his party, which emerged from the dying embers of the Brexit party after the UK had left the EU.

During most of the catastrophic Truss premiership, Reform’s poll ratings have refused to budge from a typical 2 or 3 per cent, despite the enormous number of disenchanted former Conservatives in play. That the vast bulk of these voters simply jumped across the political aisle to the Labour Party is perhaps an indication that the immediate consequences of Trussonomics were a bigger motivating factor for them than was its abandonment.

But yesterday a poll was released that finally saw a glimmer of good news for Reform – which remains the most obvious potential destination for anti-Labour, right-wing voters alienated by the Conservative reversion to Treasury orthodoxy and general display of incompetence. The poll, by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, measured support for various parties across the Red Wall seats that proved so crucial at the last general election. While Labour’s spectacular 61 per cent rating – compared to a Conservative score of just 21 per cent – was the top line, Reform bounced along in third place on 8 per cent, up five points and comfortably ahead of the Liberal Democrats.

Given that no other right-wing party – not Laurence Fox’s Reclaim, nor the remnants of UKIP, nor the plethora of other splinter parties formed by former UKIP senior figures in recent years – has any detectable support at all in the polls, this showing suggests that Reform is still the only party in town for those seeking a new revolt on the right.

In recent weeks, Tice has belatedly started making the lax Tory showing on immigration control his party’s primary focus, securing a notable scoop when he revealed the effective takeover of a big chunk of the Channel dinghy racket by Albanian crime gangs.

The party’s economic prospectus of Reaganite tax cuts without the benefit of having the world’s reserve currency at the nation’s disposal has not been dumped and neither has its hostility to the hasty adoption of impractical net zero targets by the Conservatives under Boris Johnson. While the latter position is clearly a bigger potential source of new support than is the former, it would be facile to pretend that Reform’s fortunes are dictated by the minutiae of its policy stances. What matters in this game, as Nigel Farage once demonstrated, is the ability to command attention with simple, broad-brush messages.

If Tice and his troops can continue inching forward in the polls with a political brand that is regarded as being more faithful to the spirit of 1980s Thatcherism than is the current Conservative offering, it will amount to yet more terrible news for Tory high command.

But the obverse of that is that the former Brexit party MEP must cut through and connect with many more voters on the right between now and Christmas if he is ever to do so. ‘If not now, when?’ is a question without a satisfactory answer for him. It simply must be now. This is especially true given the arrival in his neck of the political woods of someone who just might become a dynamic rival force. The new UKIP deputy leader Rebecca Jane has a talent for self-promotion that is already causing a stir. This week she launched a ‘Unite the Right’ campaign that is securing significant coverage on GB News, the TV station most watched by the section of the electorate being targeted by all these parties.

So far, Tice and Reform have ignored Jane’s very direct appeals to come and talk to her – but other right-wing micro-parties appear to be folding in behind her.

Of course, one figure above all others retains the capacity to blow everyone else out of the water should he decide to dip his toes back into it. Farage, with his enormous profile and his four nights a week prime time programme on GB News, is still formally attached to Reform. He is eminently capable of taking it over again – or indeed of launching something else that will immediately become the political home for nearly everyone peeling away from the Conservatives on the right.

Tice must manage his own advance while all the time knowing that the real guv’nor casts a very long shadow. We will know before long whether he is capable of exploiting a situation replete with possibilities. He has first dibs. But if he cannot get it right then others will take their turns soon enough.