Could Nigel Farage lead Reform to victory and save our jobs and inheritance? Why not, says Lady McAlpine

I said: "Well clearly you are not going to win enough seats this time round to achieve that so why don't you join forces with the four break-away Conservative groups whose aims are the same as yours? You all want back-to-basics "Conservative" values and to clean out Central Office, sort out the Civil Service and the NHS. Get together and you have a strong voice."

His response was that he wanted to destroy the Conservative Party and lead his own.

I believe that this naive and perhaps very masculine attitude may have cost him the leadership of his party. He is an interesting and charismatic man: but he is not Nigel, he is not Boris. Had Nigel not come riding to the rescue, Reform would have simply stolen a few votes from other parties but not enough to really affect the result.

NOW: the whole game has changed. Nigel is fascinating and charismatic and has to be taken seriously. We all believed he would go and work with Trump.. but he has chosen to try to "save" Britain. That's a vote-winner to start with. I WISH he and Boris could work together but perhaps too much like a pair of prize bulls in the same field. They have the same beliefs. They want the same for the country.

So are Nigel and Reform a credible opposition to Labour? I believe they are. So many genuine Conservative MPs are leaving the sinking ship that has been destroyed by its own Central Office that, if they all stood as good old-fashioned Conservatives under the "Reform" banner; I believe their constituents would get the message and if only from fear of what another Labour Government could do to the lives and incomes of hard-working voters, we could see a miraculous result.

I hear life-long Conservative voters all around me saying: "I've had enough, I'm voting Reform." Initially, my response was: "Please don't: it is just wasting your vote" and the reaction often was: "Well either that or I don't vote at all."

So - Nigel could win "by default". A slightly insulting reflection that, now he is actually "in the ring" and fighting, will gradually alter. He will be seen as a very credible contender. Whatever various Conservative MPs may claim. Nigel "Got Brexit done" in that he drove us to the point where it became inevitable despite "Dave's" obdurate opposition.

What people are going to increasingly like about him is his ability to surprise, to think outside the box and not appear to care what others think if he truly believes what he is saying. Another analogy with Boris.

They are remarkably similar for two such seemingly different people. It is my fervent hope that they might settle whatever their differences are and work together. As a team, they would be invincible.

I realise that this is coming out of my head not either of theirs. They would read this and laugh. Time, as we have seen, has a way of making the impossible perfectly reasonable. My late husband used to say when I felt frustrated by lack of time to achieve something: "When God made time: he made plenty of it" and, being a bit younger, I would invariably say: "But not enough for us, right now."

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Most of us who really care about this country must have wanted to do unmentionable damage to Rishi when, hearing that the knives were out, and the "Letters" about to come in demanding his resignation, he decided, like a petulant schoolboy, to call an election.

I really hope he never stops having nightmares about what he has done, but believe he lacks the imagination for that to happen.

So - here we are - plunged into an abyss with the spectre of Starmer and all he appears to stand for looming over us... and "Nigel" appears in a faint glow on the horizon.. coming closer.. no sign of the traditional white stallion.

But, has he come to save us from taxation worse than death, from a sort of pseudo-socialism that has no place in Great Britain, even in the death throes of this ridiculous Conservative government? Could Nigel save our sanity, our jobs and our inheritance? Why not?