The day before the voters of Makerfield chose their new MP, I stood with my camera-wielding colleague John Domokos on the main road through the post-industrial town of Hindley. Every two or three minutes, a van or small truck drew level with us, and there it was again: a honked horn, and a full-throated shout of “Reform!”

But on our side of the street was an augury of the news to come: the house of a man called Les, who had views most Guardian readers would find deeply problematic, and no less than seven placards adorned with the logo of Rupert Lowe MP’s new mega-right outfit, Restore Britain. “Farage has lost it,” Les told us. In at least one sense, the result – Labour’s Andy Burnham triumphing with 55% of the vote, Reform on 35%, and Restore managing 7% – proved he was spot on.

So have we passed “peak Farage”, yet again? The first mention of the term may well have come back in 2014, when the UK Independence party won the most votes at that year’s elections to the European parliament – remember those? – and some deluded members of the political establishment wondered if it was all downhill from there. More recently, Reform UK’s average poll rating has fallen by around five percentage points from its late-2025 high and prompted the return of the same wishful phrase, amid suggestions that, this time, something is definitely up. Take your pick: the decisive arrival of Lowe’s proudly obnoxious party, more violence on the UK’s streets, or simple Farage fatigue: as a matter of political gravity, you cannot style yourself as the insurgent outsider for ever.

And now there is Burnham’s big win, and a vote tally that put him 6,100 votes ahead of Reform and Restore combined. On the face of it, Farage’s party was in with what its deputy leader this week called a “cracking chance”: Makerfield is reckoned to be 97% white British and replete with the kind of grievances that Reform feasts on. Back in May, with the usual caveats about low turnout, when eight council wards in the constituency voted in the local elections, the party managed a vote-share of 50.4%, with Labour trailing miserably on 22.7%. Without doubt, the Labour win was both a feat of tireless mass campaigning, and testament to Burnham’s extremely rare standing as a politician whom – and I choose my words carefully here – a lot of people quite like. For Nigel Farage and his people, by contrast, the result ought to be the cause of real worry: it is, after all, his party’s third byelection anticlimax in less than a year. Reform is visibly losing momentum – in the course of this contest, it looked disoriented and incompetent.

Back in October, I watched its charisma-free candidate fail to take the Welsh Senedd seat of Caerphilly: tactical voting gave Plaid Cymru the edge. In February, the same idea spread among voters in the Mancunian seat of Gorton and Denton, and Reform’s fate was sealed by its bizarre choice of the completely un-folksy academic turned activist Matt Goodwin. But even more questions should be asked about what happened to the party in Makerfield, where the paltry votes won by the Greens and Liberal Democrats proved that people once again chose the best-placed candidate to send Reform packing. Why did Farage’s party decide to once again hurl a hopeless candidate into such a hugely important contest? Robert Kenyon may have been the party’s candidate at the general election, but he had not only a history of utterly stupid social media output (women “can’t ref, drive or give instructions”; “I’m sexist, sorry, but I am”), but none of the requisite political skills.

Beyond Reform’s compact group in the Commons, how wide and deep is its talent pool? Its often fractious state in local government highlights the drawbacks of what is effectively a pop-up party, and therefore a sudden assembly of political waifs and strays.

There are also tactical and strategic quandaries that the party seems to have botched. Maybe 99% of British voters hold no romanticised ideas about the glories of street violence, and most will have disliked Farage’s call for a burst of “pure, cold rage” in response to the awful video of how Hampshire police treated the murder victim Henry Nowak.

Many will also be put off by some of the other language he is now using, seemingly to try to see off his new rivals on the right: “Britain is a two-tier state – against white people” was the headline of his recent 5,000-word ramblefest on Substack, which was strikingly redolent not only of Lowe’s outfit, but the kind of political forces – Tommy Robinson, the BNP – that Farage has always tended to define himself against. The consequence: his party risks weakening its claims to be part of the new mainstream, while losing a chunk of its hardcore base to Restore, who will never be outbid from the right.

There is a kind of female voter who has partly powered Reform’s rise to the top of the polls, but is still often overlooked. I have encountered plenty of these people: incensed by the grooming gangs scandal, and deeply concerned about crime and the safety of our streets. I have sometimes found them a bit standoffish about Farage, tending to see him as too macho and full of himself – one should always remember that undying bit of folk-wisdom, “Nobody likes a smartarse” – and also wary of his leaning into the ultra-right. This forms one half of Farage’s essential dilemma: as one Reform MP quoted in the Times reportedly said of Makerfield voters’ reaction on the doorstep: “We were either too racist or not racist enough.”

And then there is the matter of class. “They’re not for people like us – they’re posh,” one thirtysomething woman told me in the Makerfield neighbourhood of Platt Bridge. Clearly, £5m personal donations from crypto tycoons and a fundraising drive led by one of Britain’s richest men – Nick Candy, the famous property developer – have more cut-through than some people would like to think. So does a Labour attack line that I often suspected bounced off Reform: the idea that a Farage-led government would privatise the NHS.

And yet. Anyone who gets too carried away by the Makerfield result should remind themselves of those recent local elections, and the political rubble Reform left in its wake. In South Tyneside, the large Midlands town of Walsall and Wakefield in Yorkshire – all places where Reform made huge gains – the local authorities now each contain a single Labour councillor. In Thurrock, Reform won 45 seats, while Labour lost 15; in Sandwell, the respective figures were 41 and 37. As any halfway competent political organiser will tell you, without a councillor base, a traditional party such as Labour will wither at the roots: it is difficult to rebuild from virtually nothing.

Nonetheless, what Keir Starmer – remember him? – used to call “a battle for the soul of this country” will now ramp up. Makerfield is cause for hope, but this story will be long, arduous and tense: Burnham’s overnight insistence that “there will be no second chance” was exactly right. A politician whom Farage reveres, but who would probably loathe him and his party, left us the perfect quote for this stage of the political war. It is now a hoary cliche, but too perfect not to use, not least to annoy Reform types. “Now this is not the end,” said Winston Churchill, after the allied breakthrough at El Alamein in 1942. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” And the next year or so will be one of the most crucial and fascinating political periods that the UK has ever seen.

• John Harris is a Guardian columnist