Children left to drown in the Channel – is this where Britain’s drift to the right is taking us? | John Harris

A Reform UK spokesperson soon insisted that any suggestion that these views were shared by its party leader, Richard Tice, was “ridiculous”, and that its answer to the small boats issue was “clear and simple: pick up and safely take back to France”.

But by then, his words had been loudly celebrated online (“If someone is threatening to drown themselves as a way to be let in illegally … let them,” was a typical comment under TalkTV’s YouTube clip), and reported in a spurt of news coverage that died down surprisingly quickly.

It is also clever enough to combine its hardcore policy platform – built around the idea of “ net zero immigration ” – with the very modern sense of lols and bantz once summed up by Arron Banks, the longstanding ally and benefactor of Reform’s “honorary president” and majority shareholder, Nigel Farage: “The more outrageous we are, the more attention we’ll get.

People attempt to cross Channel hours after passing of UK's Rwanda legislation – videoAbout 15 years ago, our politics was briefly unsettled by a surge in support for the neofascist British National party.

As well as pulling Britain out of the EU, it said it would repeal “far-leftist social engineering projects, such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission, aimed at enforcing multiculturalism”, and that it rejected the “theory” of climate change.

We now know that Ofcom has no issue with Farage presenting his nightly show on GB News during the forthcoming election campaign; and with Reform’s paranoid, parochial mindset also echoed by the Mail and Telegraph and soaked up by scores of Tory MPs, the party may well have a level of clout out of all proportion to whatever share of the vote it manages to attract.