Nigel Farage may have triumphed in Clacton for the second time in two years, but his victory was pyrrhic.

Farage manufactured the by-election to kick up dust around his £5m gift from a crypto billionaire. He tried to grab a thin veneer of democratic legitimacy for him and his now stuttering party. In reality, what he achieved was a crude demonstration of democracy at the service of personal convenience and vanity.

No one really knows what’s next for Farage or Reform, or indeed for UK party politics as a whole. But perhaps, overall, the biggest losers of the by-election were the people of Clacton, whose town was turned into a circus at a time when heat and high prices are playing havoc with their lives.

So, what would it take for the people of Clacton to be given a better electoral offer than the one presented to them yesterday? And could a different candidate offer any realistic hope at the next election?

In a sense it is Andy Burnham who has already shown what is possible.

His by-election win in Makerfield looked eye wateringly tough when it was first mooted. It was one of Reform’s top targets with an electorate that voted 65 per cent in favour of Brexit, not far off the Clacton vote. But Burnham won it, paving the way for him to take on Sir Keir Starmer for the party leadership.

Burnham set out some big ideas then, and we need the same again. The people of Clacton voted for Reform because politics (and by extension the economy) simply hasn’t been working for them.

What they care about is more jobs, better housing and improved public services. Good jobs and decent pay are distant memories. Affordable housing and small occasional luxuries have gone too. Life is a struggle, and people know it’s going to be worse for their children.

This is why Burnham is right to say that we need to do politics differently. A start would be to set get public ownership of everyday essentials like water and energy. A new tax on the ultra-rich could also help pay for better public services and houses and would help bind society back together.

We must also address immigration and asylum, which are major issues on the streets of Clacton, as they are in forgotten places across the country. Here being realistic and honest about what could be done about boat crossings would be a start, as would the long haul of addressing the causes of mass migration. The processing and housing of asylum seekers must also get better. This is all possible.

But even if these issues are addressed, we must not ignore what the troubled electoral politics of Clacton, and places like it, reveals about our political system.

Many politicians with big ideas on housing, jobs and public services gave up on the people struggling in Clacton. That meant the only ‘viable’ alternative to Farage was a comedian with a bucket on his head.

And not for the first time. At the last election, Labour told its candidate not to campaign in the seat and go to a target miles away. This is what happens under our first past the post voting system, in which the candidate with the most votes wins. That can make parties target a few voters in a few seats and abandon everyone else.

What we need instead is proportional representation in which everyone’s vote counts in every election, every time. Under this system, the voters of Clacton and elsewhere would feel powerful come the general election.

Bizarrely, the decision by some politicians not to contest the seat shows us another way to this better future.

If they can decide not to stand once, they can do it again. Instead of splitting the vote, they could work out who is best placed to beat Reform and win a cross-party mandate for the economic and democratic reforms needed in the UK.

This time they stood aside to let Reform win. Next time, they should stand aside so they lose.

And while they mull over the prospects of doing so, they should recall the way the then Brexit party withdrew the bulk of its candidates in the 2019 general election and handed Boris Johnson a landslide. The right has done it before, and they can do it again.

Targeting Clacton in this way would drive a politics which doesn’t just look to defeat Reform at the ballot box, but also defeat its causes in our economy and society.