Note to party leaders: let Farage get in your heads and you are doomed

What is Nigel Farage’s superpower? It is not a talent for government, because the old blowhard has never been so much as the parliamentary undersecretary for paper clips.

- Andrew Rawnsley

It is not a record of sustaining support, because his various political startups have risen and fallen as erratically as a dodgy rollercoaster. He has been one of the most consequential politicians of our times, in part because he gets into the heads of mainstream politicians and lives there rent-free while he addles their senses.

The dangers posed to the older parties by Reform’s surge at Thursday's elections include the significant peril that it will scare the wits out of them. We have experience of where this can lead. Fear of Faragism impelled David Cameron to blunder into his reckless and self-immolating promise to stage the Brexit referendum. Farage Derangement Syndrome took a grip on many Tories who should have known better when they put Boris Johnson into No 10, from where he won them an election in 2019, but at the steep price of sowing the seeds of the most abject defeat in their party’s long history in 2024.

Much to the maleficent satisfaction of Reform’s leader, the Conservatives have spent the subsequent 10 months expending all their nervous energy on agonising and squabbling about whether they should seek to ape, embrace or compete with him. This has made them look desperate and divided while bringing the Tories no closer to resolving their crisis of identity or clawing back respect from the electorate. Hundreds of lost council seats have been Kemi Badenoch’s reward for trying to chase his tail on immigration and net zero. The Tories have yet to learn that you don’t beat Nigel Farage by trying to be a tribute act to him.