Leaving aside the scandals and allegations for a moment, if Reform UK wants to be considered a serious potential party of government, it will need to do much better than its latest attempt at policy, “Operation Fortress”.

This flimsy document advocates using British armed services, particularly the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, to “stop the boats” – Reform’s explicitly stated preferred method of preventing irregular migration across the English Channel.

In the past, perhaps mindful of the many problems associated with militarising a civilian problem, the party leader, Nigel Farage, has tended to downplay the role of HM forces. He has never ruled it out, but mentioned it as a last resort if all other deterrents fail.

Now, perhaps spooked by the party’s recent electoral reverses and the various unhelpful investigations by the authorities, Mr Farage and his associate Zia Yusuf have scuttled back into their comfort zone of blaming migrants for all the ills of the nation and trying to look ever so tough.

It is, at best, single-issue politics, highlighting how little Reform UK actually has to offer elsewhere. As a noisy, inflammatory distraction from all the damaging talk about “dodgy donors”, this new initiative also has its attractions for the party and Mr Farage. It certainly beats arguing with Count Binface, Nick the Incredible Flying Brick and Baron Von Thunderclap in the Clacton by-election.

To be fair to Reform UK, which so often plays the victim of the mainstream media, it should be added that Operation Fortress, despite the martial presentation of a vast battleship bearing down on a dinghy, is supposed to be a more “humanitarian” response. Yes, it is, in the party’s own terms, about “stopping the invasion of Britain”, as if it were 1940 all over again; but this is a kinder, gentler way of defending the border.

The idea is that these refugees or economic migrants – no distinction will be drawn – would be carefully transferred from their unsafe craft or fished out of the water and immediately transported to the nearest French port, and thus safety.

Lives saved, irregular immigration thwarted, job done. As the saying goes, what’s not to like?

Well, there are at least two highly practical and obvious reasons why this policy would not succeed, and to even suggest it as the solution is therefore an insult to the intelligence of the British voter. As the UK knows, Britain doesn’t have sufficient vessels to defend the realm from the real threats posed by Russia and Iran, among others, and the navy has better things to do than stop irregular migrants.

The Royal Navy doesn’t have the kit, the personnel, the expertise, nor the inclination to undertake duties so far removed from its remit when resources are already so stretched. Mr Farage says a few new cutters and the like are all that would be needed, but such is the state of the defence budget that any such extra funding needs to focus on real defence priorities. Immigration is not a defence matter, and never will be.

No matter how many times the extremists use the term “invasion”, it is inaccurate and dangerous to do so. Some of those in these little boats may be criminals, terrorists or otherwise undesirable, but they are not the Wehrmacht or the Red Army, and Mr Farage is decidedly not Winston Churchill. He is not even Captain Mainwaring. Such things are best handled by Border Force and, if needs be, the police and the Secret Intelligence Service.

It won’t do Mr Farage’s blood pressure any good, but another insuperable obstacle to success is that, to put it mildly, the French won’t like it. Mr Yusuf, a man in a state of permanent cold fury, concedes that a Royal Navy vessel entering French waters without permission and depositing so-called illegal immigrants at a French port or on their coastline will provoke “some sort of argument” with the French government.

That is quite the understatement. No French administration, including one led by Mr Farage’s ally Marine Le Pen, could tolerate such an incursion, and would instruct their own navy to defend France from a British invasion. There might not be another battle of Trafalgar, but the French and the European Union would be sure to withdraw all cooperation and impose sanctions on the UK, inflicting vast economic and diplomatic damage, and rupturing Nato even further. This is no way to run British foreign policy.

So even without any consideration of human rights, of the international law of the sea, or invoking the Christian quality of mercy, Reform’s policy is simply unworkable. As it happens, though no one would tell from the lurid language at the Reform presser, small boat immigration is actually down by more than 40 per cent in the past year without any such bellicose interventions by HM forces. As we see from recent events in Ceuta, irregular migration is above all an international issue, and it demands international cooperation, not least with the EU. No wonder Mr Farage would prefer to just send a gunship.