Nigel Farage has already lost, no matter the result in Clacton - Alistair Carmichael

As I write this column, voters are still on their way to the polls in Clacton-on-Sea to decide whether they will return Nigel Farage to the House of Commons – or an intergalactic refuse container.

By the time you read this column, the result will be known. Predicting an election before it has happened is a good way to end up with egg on your face (or eating your hat, as my former party leader Paddy Ashdown once learned to his cost). It is fair to say, however, that anything other than a comfortable win for Farage will be a shock beyond almost anything ever seen in British politics.

Even so – and whatever the result is in simple votes cast in Clacton – by calling this unnecessary by-election and exposing his fragile popularity and thin-skinned nature, Nigel Farage has already lost where it counts.

The first loss has been in the perception of Farage’s political judgement. Calling a by-election may have seemed to be a chance for him to grab control of the political narrative – but the moment the major parties chose to leave the field to Reform, he found himself left only with joke candidates and extremists to compete with.

If that were not enough, it has been suggested that Farage himself did not realise that the by-election would not wipe clean the slate of parliamentary investigations into his behaviour. The moment he is re-elected, those investigations begin again. That would raise questions about his competence – as well as exposing the utter cynicism by which he was attempting to dodge scrutiny.

Then there are the central questions around Farage’s personal finances and party funding – the basis for the growing number of investigations. To borrow an old joke, half a million here, five million there – soon it starts to add up to real money. There are reasonable queries about where funds have been given, for what reasons and with what level of transparency – and they are not going away, whatever the result in Clacton.

Whether specific rules have been broken (and to what extent) will be a matter for the various authorities involved, but the by-election has demonstrably intensified media coverage of Farage and Reform’s finances. Each allegation has brought more details to light – and emboldened reporters and investigators to dig ever deeper. When it came to media scrutiny, Farage once seemed to be Teflon – now he is Velcro.

All of which brings us back to the outcome of this by-election. Farage will almost certainly win comfortably in Clacton, but across the rest of the country these past weeks of scrutiny and mockery have seen his already-mixed personal poll ratings drop off a cliff. That is bad enough for any party leader – just ask Keir Starmer – but it is even worse for a party like Reform which has been built as a near-personality cult around Farage.

With a new Labour leader and a shift in the political mood, Nigel Farage looks vulnerable in a way he has not for years. Reform may yet turn the tide back in their favour – but if they cannot, we will look to this by-election as the moment the far right lost their chance at power.

Alistair Carmichael is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland