Who can stop Nigel Farage? Which voters would actually dig out their ID and schlep down to the polling booth to fight him?

Over the past year, these two questions have come to shape British politics. From Runcorn and Helsby to Caerphilly and Aberdeen South, via countless flimsy leaflets claiming “Only X can win here”, parties have jostled for the part of his majesty’s opposition to Reform. Those battles have given us Hannah Spencer and Andy Burnham; they have bulldozed Labour in Wales and forced Keir Starmer out of No 10.

Those questions hang over Britain even now, in what is easily Farage’s summer horribilis. He faces a shiny new prime minister and fronts a team that keeps scrapping with itself, while ahead looms a parliamentary investigation into whether he should have declared a £5m gift from a generous crypto billionaire from the other side of the world. Look at these turquoise clowns, chortle the Westminster commentators. Check out that Burnham bounce, marvel analysts.

And despite it all, Farage’s side are almost neck and neck in the polls with Burnham’s. Constituency-level analysis suggests that, were an election called tomorrow, Reform would leap from eight to somewhere between 100 and 200 seats. Among those Labour MPs swept out by a turquoise tide could easily be the party chair, Bridget Phillipson, the chancellor, John Healey, and the justice secretary, who is in charge of the prisoner release programme, Alex Norris.

A hard-right organisation that exerts a mysterious yet reliable pull on former members of the British National party may have a lower electoral ceiling than many feared; but its floor remains high enough to help deny Burnham an outright majority. A party that wants........

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