Populists like Farage promise voters a simpler life. In fact, they produce ever more hassle and chaos | Andy Beckett

In the middle of an election or the early stages of an administration, populist politics can feel like a liberation. Yet the letter also suggests that the Trump administration could become immensely and impractically bureaucratic. For some populist voters, seeing elites being challenged and discomfited is satisfying in itself, whether it leads to concrete change or not. In the last century, far-right movements sometimes managed to combine the unshackled feelings of populist politics, stirred up by a charismatic leader, with strict social control. As with the Trump administration, it appears Reform’s instinctive response to the modern world is to try to ban things.