When Starmer was leading Labour, Farage was effectively the PM-in-waiting, the owners’ and right-wing media’s anointed viceroy. Now he suddenly doesn’t want to play this game any more and calls a byelection that only a joke candidate stands against him in (and looks to beat him). Given that Farage was UKIP and that all but disintegrated into a small group of angry cranks when he left, there probably isn’t much hope for a post-Farage Reform UK. The most viable candidates will jump back to the Conservative Party (which, for its fortunes, is a huge, old institution with the inherent buoyancy that that brings), and others may merge into another right-wing fringe party (the Tice mob, the one Morrissey was bigging up, some actual blood-and-soil Nazi death cult Elon Musk donates a few hundred million to, or whatever).