Farage is on the brink but if he goes, Labour can’t rest easy: people still need something worth voting for | Gaby Hinsliff

No politician is greater than their party. However bright you shine, you’re never so indispensable that you couldn’t be replaced tomorrow – or so, at least, convention has it. But there’s one man at Westminster to whom convention rarely applies, and that’s why the multiple funding scandals now engulfing Nigel Farage are such a watershed moment in British politics. For without him – should it ever come to that – what exactly would be left of Reform UK?

We’re getting ahead of ourselves here, obviously. But no further ahead than most of Westminster, now agog with speculation over Farage’s future. The parliamentary standards commissioner has yet to rule on whether the Reform leader should have declared the £5m the Guardian revealed he had taken from the British-Thai crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, never mind the extra wedge he is now alleged to have received from “Posh George” Cottrell, a longstanding sidekick formerly jailed for wire fraud in the US. (For the record, Farage insists he broke no rules because he wasn’t active in politics at the time, though the Cottrell money was allegedly spent in part on staff to beef up Farage’s social media, and MPs are obliged to declare significant benefits of a non-personal nature for a year prior to getting elected.) Perhaps the commissioner’s ruling, when it comes, can help shed some light on whether Farage simply has a lot of rich friends anxious for him to live his best life and perfectly oblivious to what he could do for them in power, or whether something rather seedier might have been going on.

But for now, let’s allow ourselves the indulgence of a thought experiment. What if this really were the beginning of the end for the man who has cast such a long shadow over British politics?

Reform’s millions of voters wouldn’t simply melt away if their leader were forced out in disgrace, or even if he chose to leave and try his luck in Washington instead. True believers don’t really care where the money comes from – or not as much as they care about small boats, anyway – while the anti-establishment rage he has so expertly channelled is deep enough to find another outlet eventually. But without Farage, that anger seems unlikely to take the same electorally coherent shape. Nobody else on the right of British politics can do exactly what he does, and with such dominance comes an unexpected vulnerability.

Having long run his political ventures essentially as personal fiefdoms, at 62 Farage has never groomed a successor, if anything treating possible heirs apparent as a threat. He remains the only hard-right figure capable of drumming up the really big donations – considerably more of them, it turns out, than anyone thought – and inspiring the kind of cult-like devotion that a Robert Jenrick or Zia Yusuf cannot. But most crucially, he’s the only one with the lightness of touch and surface amiability required to sell a project like Reform to people who previously considered themselves respectable Tories. Losing Farage would be Reform’s equivalent of that moment when the lights come on at the end of the night in a sticky-carpeted local nightclub, and the beer goggles abruptly come off.

Though that may be a bittersweet moment for Keir Starmer, left wondering what might have been if he’d only been able to hold on to power long enough to see the bodies of his enemies float down the river, it would be one hell of a lucky time for a box-fresh new Labour leader unburdened by the disappointments of the past two years to arrive in office.

Under any other leadership but Farage’s, Reform would almost certainly be forced into the divisive choice he has fought to avoid, between chasing Rupert Lowe’s hard-right Restore Britain party all the way down a narrow electoral cul-de-sac or trying to become the dominant party of the more mainstream British right. Whoever won, the process would be messy, and liable to cost the victor a chunk of Reform’s support. And while it’s Kemi Badenoch who would really stand to gain from that, given the lion’s share of its new supporters and most of its halfway competent MPs defected originally from her side, the boost to Labour morale isn’t to be underestimated.

What might a Labour government look like, freed from fear of the bogeyman? It would have to make a case for re-election on merit, rather than just for voting Labour to keep Reform out, which isn’t necessarily as easy as it sounds. Andy Burnham, who has heard enough on the doorsteps of Greater Manchester in recent years to recognise the political salience of controlling immigration even among loyal Labour voters, may find his work cut out persuading Labour MPs with more liberal-minded constituencies that the end of Farage doesn’t mean they can just give up on all the stuff they loathe. (He may also have more of a job selling his longstanding commitment to electoral reform, if some Labour MPs were no longer motivated by fear of what Reform getting more than 30% of the vote might mean under first past the post.)

But if nothing else, without Farage on the pitch Burnham would have a clearer shot at goal. Given enough energy, charm and new ideas, he could suck up quite a lot of the political oxygen available to insurgents – at least until the novelty wears off, and all those addicted to the cycle of chewing up and spitting out prime ministers start looking for their next political dopamine hit.

If, if, if. For of course there’s still a more than fighting chance that Farage simply weathers this crisis just as he’s weathered plenty of others, or even that he leaves frontline politics temporarily – as he has done more than once before – only to return when the time is right.

But two things at least are clear. The first is that in politics, things can still turn on a sixpence. Seemingly unstoppable forces can unexpectedly hit immovable objects. Things that seemed gone for good – including a system of two-party politics that for all its faults was undoubtedly easier for Labour to navigate than the current multiparty game of Jenga – do occasionally jerk back to life. Nothing is as set in stone as it looks.

But the second, cheeringly, is that the wheels of democratic accountability may grind slowly in Britain but they haven’t entirely fallen off. We’re not yet the kind of country where populist leaders can feel themselves above the law, or where newspapers can be cowed into looking the other way, or scrutiny counts for nothing. Cherish that, if nothing else, while it lasts.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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