Dear Britain, do you worry that Team Farage is just a hot mess in power? Or is everyone too angry to care | Marina Hyde

“I’m meant to be on bloody holiday this week, Paul! I don’t want to be having this meeting!” There is much to enjoy about the patriotic revolution in government promised by the leaked footage obtained by the Guardian of the Reform UK group of councillors running Kent county council. Take council leader Linden Kemkaran speaking for all free speech absolutists when she declares: “Paul! Paul! I’m going to mute you in a minute!” Or consider her repeatedly stated vision of the imperfections of representative democracy: “You’re just going to have to fucking suck it up, OK?”

Even so I think the standout bit is when Kemkaran, who acknowledged Kent’s “flagship” status for the party and its leader Nigel Farage, says: “If we can avoid putting up council tax by the full 5%, that is going to be the best thing that we can do to show that Reform can run something as big as Kent council.”

As big as Kent council? The thing about Reform is that it could fairly soon be running something as big as the United Kingdom, with the most recent MRP poll suggesting that if a general election were run right now, with tactical voting, Reform would win a majority with 367 seats. Without tactical voting, they could be on for 445 – the largest majority since the franchise was extended in 1918. (Not to refuse to get swept up in the moment, but I do think we might have to allow for a bit of tactical voting.)

Either way, there are currently two broad schools of thought around Reform. The first one is summed up by Dominic Cummings, who this week emerged to give a full interview explaining that he had absolutely no desire to return to politics, while observing that Farage will be prime minister if he builds the right team around him. The second school of thought is that displays such as Kent Reform’s Teams meltdown will be the thing that eventually implodes Farage’s march towards Downing Street, with people ultimately thinking the party is a too-risky crew of not-gifted amateurs.

For my money, a third way is currently most likely. Namely, that Reform will win, and that beyond a few golden blazers at the top, the Kent councillors – think of them as the loony lightweight tendency – are broadly representative of the team that will run Britain. But enough people will have had enough – have already had enough – that they just won’t care about that bit enough not to vote them in.

When David Cameron blithely called the referendum on Britain’s EU membership, the then-Conservative prime minister may have thought he was offering a sensible we-know-best choice which could be swayed by the remain campaign’s hilarious strategy of coordinating letters to the Times from 100 big business leaders, or coordinating letters to the Times from 100 medium business leaders.

But what Cameron was actually doing was giving the British public a fuck-you button, and asking: “Do you want to press it?” Personally, I didn’t at the time, but it has since become abundantly clear why a lot of people did. Pressing it has not, it must be conceded, made anything any better, although many espouse the view that it is only not better yet.

In any case, things have developed significantly since then. Fuck-you has become the fastest growing and currently biggest tribe in British politics. And instead of being simply adjacent to the fuck-you button, Farage has now fused himself with it. Go on, press him. You know you want to.

A lot of people have been wanting to for really quite some time. It’s just possible this method isn’t psephologically scientific, but I’ve long spent a lot of time reading comments beneath MailOnline articles. A few years ago now, I was struck by just how many upvoted comments, beneath a huge range of different stories, would simply be one word: “Reform”. This was back when Reform was polling at 2%, Farage wasn’t even the party leader, and the popular perception still held that you could never really break the two-party stranglehold on British politics under first past the post. The story could be about potholes or small boats or the BBC or phone theft or whatever, but the comment was as frequent as it was monolithically stark. “Reform”.

Flash forward to today, and in Reform’s dry run for running the world’s sixth largest economy, the party’s councils are finding it a lot harder than they made out. In Nottingham, the Reform council leader banned party engagement with the Nottingham Post after completely wetting his pants over an article in the paper about … local government reorganisation. Elsewhere, Reform have frequently shown themselves to be the free-speech warriors who love the mute button, the anti-snowflake crew who somehow constantly make complaints about bullying – and do so top to bottom. There have reportedly been eight official complaints of bullying to Reform’s south-east regional director in the past three months, while Reform’s top brass actually called the police about the mean words of Rupert Lowe (previously one of their five MPs but now suspended and independent). Meanwhile, having honked endlessly about their Doge knock-off and all the millions in savings they would find just lying on the table when they took control, multiple Reform councils have found there aren’t any and they’re all probably going to have to raise the council tax by the maximum amount allowed.

It’s all chaos and hypocrisy and drama, all of the time – but so what? Could they be worse than what people have weathered for the past decade or more? “Yes” has been the lesson of almost every single successive prime minister in what’s felt like a very long time indeed – but again, so what? Once people have gone fuck-you, it’s quite hard to get them back, and it certainly feels far beyond the limited political gifts of either Keir Starmer or Kemi Badenoch.

There is a surprisingly common affective disorder known as the “high places phenomenon”, which is the irrational impulse to jump when on top of a tall building or precipice or suchlike, despite having absolutely no urge to die. A lot of people get it, and there is, by most accounts, a certain mad thrill to it. The phenomenon arises, apparently, when the brain misinterprets a survival signal, and the instinctive fear of the height is somehow mangled into the momentary possibility of “What if I jumped?” It is sometimes known as the “call of the void”. Typically, the call of the void only lasts a split second – but it’s hard not to feel the UK is going to be experiencing it constantly for the next few years.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist