Ben Bradley was once a Conservative superstar who blazed the trail for Boris Johnson’s Red Wall revolution but now he is at the heart of the project to make Nigel Farage Britain’s next Prime Minister. He ended 94 years of Labour reign in the Nottinghamshire seat of Mansfield when he won it for the Conservatives in 2017 at the age of just 27. His victory was the trailer for Mr Johnson’s blockbuster “get Brexit done” election in 2019 which saw swathes of Labour’s traditional heartland turn from red to blue.

Serious-minded yet quietly charismatic, this former supermarket shelf-stacker and landscape gardener chaired the Blue Collar Conservatism group and worked to make the Tories the go-to party for working people. He served in Westminster with leading Nottinghamshire County Council – he personified Tory ambitions end the North-South divide. Today, this 36-year-old son of a policeman is no less determined to bring radical change to the nation but the former Kemi Badenoch-supporter is now on Mr Farage’s team. He describes the Reform leader as “arguably the most influential politician in Britain for the last decade” and wants to put the veteran Brexiteer in control of the levers of power.

His reason for defecting is simple: “My view is that Reform are the people with the radical approach that can actually deliver on the stuff that the Conservative Party has talked about but failed to do.”

Mr Bradley now admits the possibility of joining Reform crossed his mind when his former parliamentary neighbour, Ashfield MP Lee Anderson, joined the party in March 2024. Mr Anderson, a former Labour activist who became a Tory MP, had been suspended from the Conservatives after claiming Mayor of London Sadiq Khan was in the “control” of Islamists.

“I thought that was a real own goal, a real kind of unforced error from the Government at the time,” Mr Bradley remembers. “People had said things a lot worse than he’d said… It felt like they were kind of trying to make an example of him.”

Joining Reform then would have made his Conservative “friends and colleagues’ lives much harder” and he stuck with the Conservtives.

He stood in the contest to be the first East Midlands Mayor in May 2024 but by now the Tory brand was tarnished by years of scandal and chaos in Westminster and he won just short of 29% of the vote, and in July Labour won back Mansfield.

Looking back, Mr Mansfield says: “I do honestly think if I’d have joined Reform at that time I’d probably still be an MP.”

The dad of two has now spent time off the political frontline and worked on a project to create a “prototype fusion power plant”. The potential for limitless clean energy still “blows his mind”, but watching a succession Reform policy announcements convinced him the party has the chance to bring historic and urgent change to Britain.

“That’s probably the thing that pushed me over the edge,” he says.

Boris Johnson’s Conservatives made “levelling-up” the left behind regions of the country a priority but Mr Bradley argues “not enough of that money actually made it to the places and for the things that it was meant to do”.

Arguing that a new approach is needed which won’t be wrecked by Whitehall micro-managing, he says: “I think it’ll take something really radical. They say the first sign of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

In his new role as Reform’s “head of local government action” he works on projects to cut waste and help leaders on the ground deliver services. In the run-up to the 2029 Westminster election, the party needs to earn voters’ trust by showing it can change communities for the better.

Mr Bradley is appalled that Labour has allowed a raft of local authorities to request that elections that were due in May are postponed. Contests for 29 of the 136 English councils which were supposed to have votes on May 7 will be delayed.

He blasts Labour as a Government that is “cancelling elections and taking away jury trials”, comparing the situation in Britain today to the dystopia described in George Orwell’s classic 1984.

However, his new party has grand ambitions to make major inroads in the elections, which will also give voters the chance to send Reform members to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments. With Labour on course for electoral disaster, he expects Sir Keir will be gone soon.

“I cannot see how he’s still there at the end of this year,” he says. “I think increasingly that’s obvious.”

He has a vision for a thriving Britain which goes far beyond “numbers on spreadsheets”.

Family breakdown, youth unemployment and the modern phenomenon of people not knowing their neighbours has, he argues, “fundamentally damaged people’ happiness and sense of belonging”.

He says: “If people are happier and more productive and families stay together and children are in good schools and all that kind of stuff, it also feeds into your economic performance as well.”

In contrast with the panic and pessimism which defines much of the discourse about climate change, he speaks with excitement about the potential of new technology – such as small nuclear reactors and, one day, fusion power – to meet the nation’s energy needs without desecrating the countryside.

“The idea that we have this urgent need to plaster all of the fields around Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire with glass and metal to be able to survive is for the birds,” he says.

Confident that a “pragmatic middle ground” on energy is possible, he says: “We can protect the environment and save the planet without having to make life harder for everybody.”

Mr Bradley was not a pre-2016 Brexiteer but was converted to the cause while in Parliament. Theresa May made the rising star a vice-chair of the party with responsibility for engaging with youth but he quit the post in protest at her “Chequers” deal, which would have maintained a common rulebook on goods with the EU.

Today, he argues it is “massively important” the promise of Brexit is rediscovered and defended. It would be “absolutely appalling”, he says, to stage a referendum on rejoining the EU “because the outcomes of the first one still haven’t been delivered’.

He is alarmed at Labour’s efforts to forge a closer relationship with the bloc, stating: “Anything that Starmer does to sign us back into European agreements or markets or whatever, I think just would be a huge betrayal of everything that has happened over the last decade.”

Will we see Mr Bradley standing for election again?

“I’m not sure,” he says, before adding: “I think I’d like to get back in frontline politics at some point.”

He admits it “could be really, really exciting to ride into parliament on that huge Reform wave” that could be heading for Westminster but he also “very much enjoyed being a local authority leader”.

If Reform can hold its lead in the polls in the years leading up to the next election there is a high chance Mr Bradley will get a shot a delivering the change he believes Britain needs.

He shows no sign of being intimidated by the hard knocks of politics – which may have something to do with his years spent playing hockey in goal. The main thing he took from the sport into politics is “probably being able to withstand a beating”, he says, laughing at the memory of people “smashing” balls in his direction and him somehow “surviving”.

He may be out of the Commons but he is at the heart of the Reform revolution and he is playing to win.