"We're not going to get caught up with lunatics and maniacs again"

He's a back-to-back guy these days," says Nigel Farage's press aide, Ed Sumner, as he takes me up in the lift to the new Reform UK HQ on Millbank.

- Nigel Farage

"He's very busy." Isn't he just. Farage now shares a building with both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss - "failed prime ministers everywhere I look," says Farage himself. "Boris is always on the lookout for the latest focus group to follow" - which must make for some interesting small talk in the lobby. Reform UK have only been in their new offices for four weeks, and the place feels like a start-up, with the party's small staff - there are only 18 of them - answering phones, fielding media, vetting applicants and trying to drum up sponsorship (the ever-rising membership numbers certainly help fill the coffers).

Sitting at the head of a gigantic table in the office boardroom, the 60-year-old politician is as personable as ever, smiling, full of Reform-friendly stats, and proudly brandishing his Carnaby Street Union Jack socks. "It's been a crazy time," says Farage, laughing his cartoon smoker's-cough laugh. "There is great change afoot. The increase in productivity since we've been here has been incredible. Anyone who tells you they're more productive working from home is talking cobblers.

A lot of our team are young, and the only way you learn in life is by being together. People are here till midnight - on Christmas Day we had people here until 10 in the evening. We're on a mission." Farage is still buzzing from the recent US inauguration, during which he hosted a big party for 750 in Washington, full of the great, the good and the politically curious. "I lasted 17 days of dry January until I went to the inauguration! The positivity was amazing, and not just among political operatives. Bartenders, cab drivers. It felt great.