Nigel Farage looks trapped and rattled – now the nationalist tide can be turned

Nigel Farage can be confident of victory against a man posing as an ennobled space traveller with a dustbin on his head. At least, in Clacton he can.

The refusal of major parties to contest this week’s byelection sets the bar low. But even if the competition were more serious than Count Binface, the Reform UK leader would be the favourite to win on his chosen turf. He picked the constituency as his safest shot for a parliamentary seat in the 2024 general election for a reason. Now he is betting that the stench of scandal around his personal and party finances, pungent in Westminster, won’t sicken his fans on the Essex coast.

He’s probably right, which is why Labour and the Conservatives sensibly denied him the spectacle he craved – a “people versus the establishment” prize fight. The plan was to put the question of his failure to declare a £5m donation to the electoral court of Clacton. It would be settled not by adjudication of the parliamentary standards authority but with a knockout blow from the fist of Furious Farage.

Unfortunately for the crypto-billionaires’ champion, the investigation hasn’t disappeared and could resume if he wins his pantomime bout with a bin.

If a subsequent decision goes against him, a second byelection could follow. That twist could easily be written into Farage’s script as further proof that the system was rigged against him; that the acclamation of his innocence by his loyal Essex jury was not sufficient and they must vindicate him again, louder.

The shape of the argument is textbook populism. A candidate’s virtue is measured by the volume of clamour he can summon from a crowd. Institutions of established democracy are valued only as ladders aiding his ascent. If they hold him accountable in any way, they are dismissed as tools of the elite that conspires against the will of the people.

It is a sign of vulnerability that Farage’s definition of “the people” has shrunk to whatever portion of Clacton constituents turns out for him on Thursday. When his cause was Brexit, he could wield a national referendum mandate to denigrate dissent. When opinion polls and council ballots showed Reform on course to win a general election, the party leader had a putative prime ministerial swagger in his step. He has slipped.

For now, Reform strategists are not too anxious about losing their headline lead to Labour. Second place, after a period of unusually hostile media coverage, while a new Downing Street regime enjoys a (probably brief) honeymoon is not a calamitous position. It could be proof of resilience as much as weakness. More worrying for Farage are his tanking personal ratings and evidence from recent Greater Manchester byelections (two for parliamentary seats; one for the mayoralty vacated by Andy Burnham) that aversion to Reform is coalescing into an effective tactical bloc vote.

That sentiment is resolute. Farage has been a prominent British public figure for two decades. People who see his multiple, rebranded parties as one metastatic malignancy in the body politic are not open to persuasion that he can be something more benign. He used to curate his brand with feinted moderation. That is harder now that Reform faces competition from Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party in the far-right zone where hostility to immigrants dispenses with non-racist euphemism.

Lowe is more anchor of a social media channel than leader of a party. He harvests clicks in the field of digital paranoia, irrigated by extreme content on Elon Musk’s X platform, where it is axiomatic that “indigenous” Europeans face systematic replacement in their homelands by dark-skinned aliens.

Restore took almost 9% of the vote in the first round of the Manchester mayoral byelection, ahead of the Tories and Liberal Democrats. Lowe, elected to parliament in 2024 as a Reform MP, has offered to form an alliance with his old party, but with conditions attached, including the insistence that Tory defectors be barred from any future role in government.

A less-rattled Farage would heap derision on his former comrade. He might even have exploited the schism to confect a new boundary between “mainstream” and “far” right. He could highlight tonal differences between his and Lowe’s politics and apply them as camouflage of respectability.

That he doesn’t suggests lack of confidence in the loyalty of Reform’s hardcore vote. More disturbingly, it implies openness to the idea that, where immigration is concerned, British politics is not yet maxed-out at the furthest limits of rightward expansion.

The shift is stark enough already. Parliament has passed a new act tightening border control or limiting migrants’ rights every year since 2022. Such assiduous attention to the issue has done nothing to satisfy demands for harsher measures. Nor has it refuted the absurd suggestion that mainstream politics and media, constrained by timorous liberalism, refuse to address a question that has, in reality, dominated the agenda for a generation.

The legislative ratchet is also a rhetorical dial, turning public debate more shrill. The language of invasion, once the metaphorical preserve of extremists, has been normalised. Gangs of masked marauders who go on racist rampages through UK towns are cast as protesters manifesting legitimate concerns. The articulation of their grievance in terms that make foreignness synonymous with parasitic consumption of benefits, criminality and sexual predation goes unchallenged.

Meanwhile, net migration has fallen dramatically from its peak earlier this decade. Instead of welcoming the turning tide, the anti-immigrant right has shifted its focus from resisting new arrivals to undermining the status of legally settled communities, denying their entitlement to public services, blocking paths to naturalisation and building a case for mass deportations. This used to be the stuff of skinhead rallies and crank byelection candidates who lost their deposits. Now resistance depends on the guy with the bin on his head. Or at least, in Clacton it does.

Elsewhere the picture is less bleak. Farage retreated to his coastal haven for an electoral comfort break, getting relief from scrutiny in a place where he can still enjoy unchallenged status as the man of the people. But his people are fewer than they were and never as many as he claims. If he has hit the ceiling of his national support and feels part of his base wobbling beneath him, he will try to consolidate by further radicalisation. That will then give more urgency to the anti-Reform voter coalition.

He is trapped. But only if other parties refuse to follow him a single step further down the road to ethno-nationalism, where immigration policy degenerates into sinister fantasies of demographic engineering, and instead push back.

It isn’t a hard choice. There are many more people in Britain who like to live happily alongside their neighbours, regardless of skin colour and country of origin, than want to burn them out of their homes. It doesn’t take a great leap of political courage to draw a line between rigorous migration control and racist demagoguery.

There were good reasons for major parties to sit out this Thursday’s byelection. But from Friday onwards, the task of fighting Farage can’t be delegated to a man with a bin on his head. Not even in Clacton.

• Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.