Poll position  Richard Tice is the brains behind Reform’s rise

Reform consistently leads the opinion polls – and Tice thinks the election could be as early as next year. “Spending is out of control, receipts are not meeting expectations,” he says. “You never quite know what will trigger it, but at some point the markets will not be as sanguine as they are now. Something will tip and they will say, ‘Hang on, there’s a problem here.’ We need to be ready for a general election in 2027, because that becomes a moment where you get utter herd instinct. Bond investors run for the hills. Sterling becomes a one-way bet that triggers another bout of inflation. And the government response has to be to go through a major austerity programme.” He references the House of Commons. “This place won’t tolerate that,” he says. “And then it becomes ungovernable.”

The mechanism for an early poll, Tice argues, is that Labour will turn in on itself, its huge majority in parliament no longer a firewall but an open floodgate. “Lay out the evidence!” he says. “Last summer, they were trying to make a modest £5 billion of savings through the welfare bill. The backbenchers said, ‘no’, and [Rachel] Reeves at that moment … realised that her job was impossible – because the party was ungovernable. That was a defining moment.”

A snap, surprise election notwithstanding, much of Reform’s parliamentary life is spent managing the contradiction of a high profile and low representation. Even with its serial defections (Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick are recent acquisitions from the Conservatives), it has just eight MPs, at the time of writing. Aides tell of the juggling required to ensure that MPs attend votes they cannot win; and appear in parliamentary debates where they are hopelessly outnumbered. “Otherwise,” says one staffer, “the Tories just say, ‘Where are Reform?’”

The short answer is… everywhere. Many of the public might struggle to reconcile Reform’s relative invisibility inside parliament to its prominence outside it. Its consistently high polling scores; the sporadic unguarded outbursts from current and former members; and the drip, drip, drip of defections keep the party in the news. Its hardline policies on immigration are well-versed and well-known – Reform advocates the mass deportation of illegal migrants and would make any future illegal immigrants ineligible for asylum. Less renowned are the party’s business policies and its plans for economic growth, a brief that sits squarely in Tice’s hands.

Reform’s biggest challenge might be to reconcile the apparently competing worldviews of the two sides of its coalition. The party has drawn support from opposite factions. One wing is former Old Labour supporters in the industrial north and Midlands, with its tradition of unionisation, statism and nationalisation. The other faction is former free-market Thatcherites and sundry economic right-wingers. The two groups’ mutual dislike of open borders aside, little appears to unite them. Yet Tice rejects suggestions of incompatibility. “We reconciled it very simply,” he says. “Our supporters are people who set their alarm clock early in the morning and go to work. Whether they work for a business – or whether they run a business, small, medium or large – we are very focused on doers.”

Tice doesn’t mention immigration once during our interview. Rather, seated in his corner office high in the Houses of Parliament, he warms to his economic theme. “SMEs are the lifeblood of the UK economy,” he says. “So, we use simple slogans. Economically, we’ve got to make work pay. We’ve got to make risk-taking pay. That means people want to work harder, and want to be rewarded for working harder. At the moment, we’ve lost both of those things. Lots of entrepreneurs say it’s no longer worth it.” He recalls a tradesman he met who ran a business of 15 roofers in the Cotswolds: “It just became too difficult. He basically said, ‘Sod it, I’m going back down to two.’ That sort of thing has consequences. We’ve got to change it.”

Reform’s rumbustious frontman, Nigel Farage, is most often pictured in the pub. Working men’s clubs are more the style of former miner and trade unionist Lee Anderson, a double-defector from Labour and the Tories. Tice’s world is rather different. “In the last six months, I’ve done 40 business breakfasts,” he says. “They range between ten and 20 businesspeople.” The meetings aim to mine the brains of business for policy ideas. “I say to them, ‘I want your three-pager,’” says Tice. “‘You know your industry better than I do. So, three pages of your problems – and your solutions. There is no point just giving us the problems!”

Tice will turn his findings into a programme of deregulation, a topic that exercises him. “Tell us the problems and tell us the solutions, then we can work out what to deregulate,” he says. This, he stresses, is no scorched-earth policy. “I’m very energised about deregulating, but I need businesses to write in and tell us, ‘That’s good, we need to keep that, but we don’t need this and that.’ But, obviously, keep it sane.”

This appeal to sanity is a notable theme of our interview – after all, his party is better known for off-the-cuff popularism. Tice hit the headlines recently when he shifted the party’s fiscal policy from one of immediate tax cuts to that of economic realism. Why the volte face? “We were slightly misrepresented,” he argues. But, the tax-cutting policy was from a different era, he admits – one in which a Reform administration was a distant dream rather than a live possibility. “We were never going to form a government,” he recalls. “What we set out was a series of principles. And the first page of our contract was about savings. We are businesspeople. We’re not daft muppets. Of course we are going to make it align.” But the prospect of government focuses minds. “The finances of this country are in an even worse state [than they were then],” he says. “People don’t believe you can find the savings. So, all the more important to find the savings while you are deregulating – which is almost cost-free, give or take.”

That red tape frustrates Tice is clear. But he relies very heavily on his planned programme of deregulation to deliver the fiscal headroom he needs. Planning regulations, he says, remain bloated and obstructive. “There’s a whole bunch of stuff you just shouldn’t need planning for,” he says. “You don’t need planning for a single-storey granny annex at the back of a suburban home, for example, and a bunch of other stuff. You can simplify it all.”

Financial regulations, too, are in his crosshairs. ‘Know your customer’ – the anti-money-laundering duty to identify clients – is too blunt an instrument, he says. “Why do you need to do KYC to list a house with an estate agent in a small market town out in the rural counties? You don’t. It’s bonkers, particularly when we’ve got raw money-laundering, illegality and criminality on every high street in the country. We have got to scrap all that bullshit.”

There is much green-tape ripe for slashing, he adds. Net Zero, he contends, is pointless given the heft of the UK’s competitor economies. “Net Zero will have no effect on the global climate whatsoever,” he says. “We represent less than 1% of global CO₂ emissions, and the growth in Chinese emissions every year outweighs our total emissions. It’s a complete irrelevance. We’ve been lied to. We’ve been conned. We will scrap it in its entirety… it’s a colossal waste of money.”

The savings born of deregulation will open the door to future tax cuts, he claims: “We can prove the savings. We will deregulate alongside. Having done that, we can say to the bond markets, ‘Now we can afford performance-related tax cuts.’ The growth starts when you start deregulating and motivating investment.”

A Reformer by name. A reformer by nature. Yet Tice hardly fits the archetype of a Reform voter. He is a multimillionaire businessman; a semi-fluent French speaker who spent much of his early career in Paris: “I’m rusty,” he says, “but if I’m there two or three days the ear comes back very quickly.” He is a eurosceptic who thinks international trade should be rationalised. “The smart bit around it is – sensibly – having common trading standards,” he says. “What you don’t need is all the paraphernalia, costs, the waste, the corruption – and you don’t need freedom of movement of people to have common standards. The thickness of a tube of toothpaste doesn’t need to vary between France, Germany and the UK. You should be able to agree that. You don’t need a protectionist trade bloc.”

Does he get on with any of his opponents? “This place is a theatre,” he says. “Some of it is a performance. But it’s also a place of work. People are very civil, very courteous, very professional – from all parties. And that’s great.” When we meet, just after Christmas, Tice had recently become betrothed to the journalist Isabel Oakeshott. “I just got engaged, and people from all parties have been so kind – just remarkable.”

What does he do to relax? He hopes to head soon to the French Alps – albeit to ski, not bobsleigh. But simpler pleasures work too. “This job has become slightly all-consuming and quite hard to switch off,” he admits. “But Christmas was actually very good. We got engaged sitting in a cosy Cotswolds pub drinking mulled wine on Boxing Day.” Switching off proved possible for the erstwhile adrenalin junkie, after all. “I was quite good at staying off social media,” he says, “and chilling out.”