There were 8,000 people at the Reform Conference in Birmingham earlier this month. Interviews conducted in the hall and the reception suggest that not one of them apparently thought any less of Farage for reportedly being prepared to circumvent the law to secure party funding.

JOHN SWEENEY has written about a lot of difficult and unpleasant subjects in his time: Stalin’s Soviet Union, the tyranny of Putin, corruption in Malta, the trade in arms to Iraq, the cult of Scientology, the autocracy of North Korea, of Ceausescu, of Belarus. He revels in his history of reporting wars, revolutions and chaos over a lifetime of jaunty journalism for The Observer and the BBC, and now for a contemporary website called The Nerve.

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