“I don’t trust Reform,” he says. “They talk the talk but I can’t see them . . . running the country, they’d probably run it down.”

With voters in 23 English local authorities preparing to go to the polls this week, the conventional wisdom is that Labour and the Conservatives are on course for a rude awakening, as fed-up voters from both the left and the right of the political spectrum flock to Reform. 

The potential audience for Farage’s brand of populism is not obviously growing, while the cultural and economic context in Britain is drastically different to the one that helped Donald Trump sweep to power last year in the US. 

There has been an “attitudinal shift” among young people, Farage says. “Patriotism is trendy again, controlling borders — they’re very hot on that.” His insurgent political outfit — which senior figures often compare to a more nimble tech start-up — is proving adept at adapting itself to the ideologically fluid political positions of its target voters, for whom the distinction between left and right in politics is not set in stone. 

In the US, Trump, who was elected for a second time last year with nearly 50 per cent of the 18- to 29-year-old vote, surrounded himself with younger people, including JD Vance, the first millennial vice-president. In France, the RN has been buoyed by Le Pen’s protégé Jordan Bardella, widely seen as the future of the party.

What do the Stackers feel? Hopeful for the old world/Britain, or time to just exit the trashbin altogether?