If the press has served the public badly for years by caricaturing politicians’ views, pigeon-holing them into meaningless categories and always looking for the melodrama rather than examining the argument, then it has nothing on the parallel universe which is social media.
I have spent the last week increasingly irritated by a slew of emails accusing me of wanting to put men who “look like women” in female prisons.
Nuance is not allowed: you must be stridently for or against a hard and fast concept. So now the claim is bruited about that Reform is “going soft”. It ain’t. It is merely being realistic as it faces the prospect of actually forming a government.
For example, Farage has said that mass deportation is not the answer to the problem of illegal immigrants, and it isn’t.
Yet that has been distorted into a false claim that Nigel will not deport or that he thinks it is impossible.
Why isn’t it the answer? Because, by definition, if you need to be deported, you are already here. The greater imperative is to stop illegal migrants from coming here in the first place. If you are dealing with a flood, you first turn off the tap rather than try to mop up with the tap in full flow.
Elementary, dear Watson. So turning the boats round, swapping hotels for secure camps and automatically refusing asylum claims from illegal immigrants from safe third countries have all got to be priorities from the earliest days of a Reform administration.
Think Reform has gone soft? Farage's migration blueprint will leave you eating your words - Ann Widdecombe | Getty Images
Deportation plays an essential role in control and is important, but it is not and has never been the silver bullet.
That is but one example. Another is that Reform is often accused of “being in favour of renationalisation”, but there has never been any proposal to return to the old state monopolies with which my generation had the misfortune to grow up, nor is there any proposal to take back into public ownership any high performing UK utility company or industry but there is too much foreign ownership and we can gradually end that.
Anyway, our concept of nationalisation is that 50 per cent should be owned by the pension funds, not 100 per cent by the state.
If Reform wins the next election, as I believe it will, then Nigel Farage will be the Prime Minister, but he will not be a supreme dictator issuing diktats like confetti from No10.
With a parliamentary majority and plenty of will, Reform will get the country back to freedom, common sense and self-sufficiency in basic food and energy, but this is a democracy and there are procedures and safeguards to be negotiated.
To be sure, a Reform parliament can pass emergency legislation, resort to all-night sittings and legislate at as much pace as possible, but it is not going to do everything by Tuesday afternoon.
And if it did, the result would be high chaos because no legislation is ever perfectly drafted from the start.
The challenge is huge, but more than manageable if we plan for it. When Blair won in 1997, he had to form ministerial teams from the front bench, the overwhelming majority of whom had no ministerial experience at even a junior level.
His backbenches were likewise packed with parliamentarians who did not understand the most elementary of parliamentary procedure.
So, Reform will not be swimming in wholly uncharted waters, but it won’t be a smooth sea either. There are still four years to go, and it will soon be imperative that we form a team which looks as if it will be the next Cabinet and which talks like it.
For a start, we should drop the promise to do things on “Day One”, because on Day One, MPs will be taking the oath, finding their way round, locating desks, learning to read Order Papers and looking for the nearest loo. Believe me, I know.
But week two? Oh, yes, that will be the time when Britain realises it has a government focused on delivery - or rather it will if Reform has had the wisdom to plan for actually being in government.