In the event, dozens of journalists who had trooped to a central London hotel on the off chance the former Ukip leader would appear were disappointed.
Farage, Reform's honorary president and its dominant shareholder, was not among the guests alongside the party's leader, Richard Tice, who mounted an attack on Labour and the Conservatives and dialled up his own anti-immigration rhetoric.
It raised awkward questions for Tice, and led to further speculation about Farage's reluctance to fully commit to Reform. Polling before the event nonetheless confirmed the populist party presented a greater threat to the Tories than had the Brexit party and Ukip in its heyday, experts said.
"They harm the Conservatives more now than Ukip did in 2015 because the post-Brexit Tories have a lot more 'Ukippy' voters who they picked up in 2017 and 2019," said Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester, who is one of Britain's foremost experts on the behaviour of British voters.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats are less threatened by Reform for the same reason, he added. They have far fewer of those voters - inclined towards Brexit and often hostile to immigration - than they did in 2010-15.
Ford said Reform now posed an even bigger threat in Tory seats because its predecessor, the Brexit party, did not stand candidates against sitting Conservative MPs in 2019 in return for commitments made by the then Conservative leader, Boris Johnson.
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