Laura Kuenssberg: What does Reform UK leader Nigel Farage really want?

“Farage no more wants responsibility than he wants a vegan cigarette,” a long-serving, maybe long-suffering, Brexit campaigner tells me. But the Reform UK leader’s longer-term aim appears to be to smash the Tory Party to bits.

An exasperated senior Conservative says: “It’s all about him, full of anger and problems. Zero solutions.”

But why is a man who has failed to get elected to Parliament seven times causing panic in Tory ranks? Why has a small party become the headline grabber?

This week, a much anticipated “crossover moment” arrived – albeit in a single poll, which put Reform UK one percentage point ahead of the Conservatives. Other polls have Rishi Sunak’s party still ahead.

Even if the first poll was right, it does not mean Reform are on course for more MPs than the Tories.

The most optimistic Reform politicians can’t name more than five or six seats where they reckon they could win. In that best-case scenario, they would have fewer than one in 100 MPs – tiny in Westminster terms.

But as polls suggest, Reform could have a big impact by guzzling up many of the Conservatives’ traditional supporters, making it harder for Tory candidates to hang on.

To give a hypothetical example, if Labour is trying to close a gap of 6,000 votes on the Tories, and 3,000 people who voted Tory last time instead opt for Reform, that’s 3,000 fewer votes Labour has to find to win.

Across the country, Reform could win 10%-20% of the vote in hundreds of seats – not enough to win those seats, but the hit to the Tories could be huge, which is why senior Conservatives have begun shouting about the risk.