As the Clacton by-election dragged on for the past two weeks, one classic football clip from the early 2000s kept coming back to me.

Michael Owen pumps his fists and yells ‘get in there!’ after smashing a penalty kick past a young goalkeeper, prompting Neville Southall to mutter: ‘Well done, he’s 13.’

Nigel Farage chose to trigger a by-election in one of the country’s most Reform-friendly seats. He reportedly spent £10,000 on advertising in the constituency, and pulled volunteers from the Greater Manchester mayoral race to campaign for him.

And he managed to secure a majority of just under 13,000 votes against Count Binface.

After all that fuss, Farage also decided not to turn up for the announcement of the result – a very, very rare occurrence in British politics which doesn’t exactly scream self-confidence.

We can look forward to him having to make that argument every time someone points out that an ‘intergalactic space warrior’ got more than 40% as many votes as he did in his own constituency.

Now, Farage did manage to increase his vote count from the 2024 general election by just over 1,000 – and on a lower turnout.

This is the one bright spot, which we can expect him and his fellow Reformers to hammer home in the days and weeks to come.

But keep in mind he was the only major party candidate, and his top opponent was Count Binface.

It’s not hard to imagine voters who simply didn’t want the indignity of Clacton being represented in Parliament by a parody Star Wars character holding their noses and putting an X beside Farage’s name.

This is all context to keep in mind if – and it is still an if – the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner decides the Reform leader broke the rules when he didn’t declare his pre-election £5 million ‘gift’ from a crypto billionaire.

If that happens, and it triggers another by-election, we may hear Reform arguing that his constituents in Clacton just recently gave Farage their backing and another vote would be a waste of time and money.

You can imagine how the other parties would feel about that, and I’m not sure the line would hold for very long.

There’s every chance that Farage would indeed come out victorious once again if that was to happen – it would take considerable effort to overturn his majority from the 2024 election, and the MP is still very popular in those parts.

But the bigger question is whether the wider UK feels the same. The widespread assumption not long ago was that Farage was almost certain to be the next Prime Minister.

Now, Reform is slipping in the polls and his personal popularity is plunging too.

If a man dressed up as a bin can get more than 26% of the vote in a by-election that Farage triggered purely to prove how popular he is, what chance does he have in the country as a whole?

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