What is now common ground – Richard Tice MP originally swore a statement to the contrary which he then admitted was wrong – is that Reform uses a powerful voter targeting tool called NationBuilder. It can be used to ‘micro-target’ voters by scraping social media and commercial databases and building deep profiles of voters.

So what happened to the data?

In his submissions to the High Court Philip Coppel KC for Reform mooted his client was entitled to delete data it held at the time a subject access request was made and provide only the data it held at the time of compliance. If this is Reform’s position it would be remarkable – and almost certainly wrong. However, we believe the truth is likely to be otherwise.

The case will now proceed to trial