Jeremy Kyle on the mic, Jenrick's Wolverhampton name-check and a T-shirt cannon sendoff: We went to see Nigel Farage rouse the Reform troops in Birmingham

Even so, when I started work on Monday morning I did not expect to find myself sitting on Reform UK's frontbench by mid-afternoon. 

Turned out the security man had misdirected me, and instead of taking my place in the relative anonymity of the media scrum, I accidentally found myself sitting in a seat reserved for Lee Anderson. Or was it Robert Jenrick? Not sure, all seemed a bit of a blur. 

• Sign up to our free newsletter today

Fortunately one of the Reform UK top brass spotted the error and redirected me before I ended up running the Foreign Office or something. But this was just the start of an afternoon which was going to take a lot of unexpected turns.

For example, when I arrived at Reform's winter conference at the NEC, I never expected to find myself watching Jeremy Kyle questioning Richard Tice about his impending wedding arrangements. It was one of those afternoons when you just have to go with flow and see where it takes you.

By this time the media area was looking pretty packed, so I took a seat behind the stage next to a middle-aged blonde lady sporting a striking array of tattoos. A couple of older men were sat the other side of me, politely muttering in agreement as Kyle fronted the mother of all warm-up acts. Building up the tension to the "Main Man" as Kyle repeatedly referred to him, the former BRMB DJ invited each of the party's eight MPs to join him on a chat show-style set, where they were invited to explain the story that had led to them preparing the crowd for Nigel Farage's great set-piece address.

The tattooed lady jumped to her feet and let out a huge whoop of delight as Jeremy Kyle introduced Andrew Rossindale to the conference - now there's another sentence I never expected to find myself writing - and the crowd sat enthralled by a man they had probably never heard of a few months ago describing how he now felt like a "bird that had been released from its cage".

Lee Anderson had the crowd in stitches when he described the Deputy Prime Minister as "Calamity Lammy". Kyle pointed out that Angela Rayner had recently undergone a makeover: "She's throwing her money away," quipped Lee Boy, to yet more hysterics.

Anderson reckoned there were 2,000 people in the arena - "The Tories couldn't get that many in over a whole week" - and the figure sounded about right. He told the cheering throng that 70 per cent of Reform members had never been involved with politics before. There was certainly a very different demographic to the last party conference I attended, when Robert Jenrick was putting his case for the Tory Party leadership.

Not that many suits, but a fair few turquoise T-shirts and the odd dandy in a dicky-bow, plus a couple of Essex girls draped in the Union Jack - I could tell they were Essex girls because it said it on one of their capes. It almost felt like being at a non-league football match, although the crowd refrained from questioning the compere's parentage.

Robert Jenrick got in the customary name-check for his hometown - "I joined the Conservative Party in 1997, as a 16-year-old in Wolverhampton; there weren't many 16-year-old Conservatives in Wolverhampton back then" - to roars of laughter, and Sarah Pochin wowed the crowds with tales of how prison officers had been replaced by Nigerians who needed cards to tell inmates to get back into their cells. By the time Suella Braverman started berating "Tory lies" it was hard to know what the great leader could do to top the applause.

And then the Main Man took to the podium, only to be enveloped in a jet of smoke, in a show of pyrotechnics that would have seemed a little over the top at Robbie Williams's concert at the Civic. You've got to hand it to the Reform boys and girls, they know how to put on a good show.

Nigel thundered how "Britain was broken", how DEI would be a thing of the past when he was in Downing Street. How net zero targets would be scrapped, nuclear power turbocharged and the North Sea drilled until 2050. 

"Don't let them say we will privatise the NHS," he bellowed. "Not while Labour are outsourcing the NHS, and you can have a Zoom consultation with a doctor on a beach in Barbados." 

He berated Reform-led Worcestershire County Council as a "basket case" after it announced plans for a 10 per cent increase in council tax, pointing out that the party did not have outright control. Rachel Reeves was described as "the most useless Mrime Minister in British history" - a promotion which must surely have come as news to Sir Keir Starmer - a slip of the tongue maybe, but you can imagine the hubbub if the real Prime Minister, or Kemi Badenoch had made it.  

It's certainly true that the people who had turned out of Reform's winter conference got their money's worth, and the atmosphere was certainly upbeat. But as Boris Johnson found out, there is more to governing the country than fun, and only time will tell whether Nigel Farage and his 'people's army' has really broken the mould of two-party politics.

To round it off, the man touted to be in Downing Street before too long ended his performance by firing Reform UK T-shirts into the crowd. Something else I didn't expect to be writing when I started work today.