Has anyone really won from the Clacton by-election? Count Binface arguably achieved the most: global fame, years of bookings and 27 per cent of the vote as the joke candidate who some of the main parties semi-seriously endorsed. Nigel Farage is back in Parliament – as everyone assumed he would be – but still facing the standards investigation that precipitated this whole farce. His party is still having a rougher time in the polls.

The aftermath of most by-elections is normally characterised by everyone claiming that their pet theory about any bit of politics, local or national, has been proved right by this result. But in this instance, the main parties can’t make any claims about anything, because they sat out this by-election in order to make Farage look more ridiculous – yet the corollary of that is that they can’t say that the electorate of Clacton has spoken in a real contest. Neither, as it happens, can he.

The by-election allowed Farage to talk about something other than how he declared donations and “gifts”, including £5m from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. Reform UK more widely has spent the summer prodding both Labour and the Tories on prison overcrowding, early release and small boat arrivals. But while this has been a welcome breathing space, it hasn’t helped his party’s standing in the polls, and that’s not just because Labour is currently enjoying what is almost certainly going to be a temporary “Burnham bounce”.

The voters of Clacton turned out in higher numbers than you might expect if they’d been genuinely cheesed off that there was a by-election at all: 44 per cent turnout isn’t a bad level – though much lower than in general elections. But the national impact of the by-election has made Reform and Farage look self-indulgent and damaged their overall standing.

The Conservatives are also growing in confidence, and Kemi Badenoch seems much more settled in as leader. The party’s poll rating is now close to Reform’s, rather than several points below. Then there’s Restore Britain, which is still managing to be noisy enough to both chip away at Reform’s vote and make Farage behave a bit like an overstimulated child in a noisy play area.

But that’s not to say that either main party is feeling relaxed about Reform. Both have had to respond to the challenges Reform has set on home affairs. The Conservatives have upped their immigration policy in direct response to Farage’s party, copying much of what he wants to do on housing. Labour is panicking daily about its handling of the prisoner early release scheme because, once again, Reform has a much more colourful and attention-grabbing plan to rent prison spaces overseas in order to keep sentencing tough and criminals behind bars. It is possible for two things to be true at once: Reform is having a rougher time, but it is also still managing to make the political weather.

And, after a messy night in which Farage failed to turn up to the count because of what he described as a “credible threat” – something Essex Police disputed – the Reform leader now has to return to that standards investigation into his finances. He is expected to be interviewed by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards in the next few weeks. And so his party has to return to fending off questions about probity and whether Farage really is so different to the politicians he has made a career from railing against.

Farage knows that a core of Reform’s voters will see both the “credible threat” and the standards investigation as part of the same attempt by the establishment to silence their man from talking about the big issues like immigration and law and order. His colleague Lee Anderson suggested that the threat was an organised attempt by some of the other candidates to “disrupt the result” – which was heard in near silence when announced. But his failure to turn up to the count also works for the main parties, who can paint him as trying to avoid questions and scrutiny.

That’s why by-elections are so handy: they allow everyone to argue their own point without much of a challenge. And if Farage is found to have breached parliamentary standards, he’ll be back contesting yet another by-election. And in that one, he’d have a real fight on his hands.