'What happens if Reform actually win in the local elections?'

Millions of ballot papers have been sent out to voters who don't know who they hate the least so won't bother voting at all. Millions more, of course, have gone out to voters who know exactly who they hate, and will be very definitely voting for the other one.

On Thursday Britain will be split between those who can and cannot be arsed to decide whether they will have social care, how often their bins get emptied, and if funding priority will be given to potholes or green spaces.

Local elections are probably the most direct and most important form of democracy, because you pick someone you have a vague chance of actually meeting who can change what happens in your street and will charge you directly for the privilege. Yet they traditionally have low turnouts, and are generally decided based on what's happening in London, which is objectively bonkers. It's like using tide tables to decide whether to have a cheese and pickle sandwich for lunch.

If someone doesn't like the government of the day, they'll vote for the Opposition. That's what cleared out a lot of Tory seats and set Keir Starmer up for government, last time. But he's due a bloody nose for the means-testing of the winter fuel payment, and budgets which have gone down like a vegan smoothie made from tumours.

Kemi Badenoch is leading the Opposition round in circles. That leaves the ground wide open for the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and Reform UK, whose leader Nigel Farage is talking a good war about how they're going to absolutely smash what they've never managed to smash before.

Yet their candidates, as has so often been the case, have been found to include the sort of wingnuts that probably couldn't run a bath without punching themselves in the face and claiming it as anti-white goods discrimination. So what would happen if Reform UK actually managed, for once, to do what Nigel keeps saying it can?

There are local elections which can seize control of local authorities, three local mayoral elections the winners of which can wield wide influence, and a by-election in Runcorn. If Nigel chalks up a win in any of them, his party will be in the ascendant: another MP, another voice on the national stage, or maybe a clutch of councils with which to build his activist base.

The trouble is that such a win would mean responsibility, and if there's one thing Nigel's never had a grasp of it's what that word means. As an MEP with responsibility on the fisheries committee he barely turned up. As an MP he's skipped plenty of votes and still couldn't find his constituency of Clacton-on-Sea if he wasn't being chauffeur-driven. And the councils which his supporters have had a crack at running in the past have since fallen out of their not-very-competent hands.

Being a local councillor is a rotten business - no pay, and having to wrestle high finance and structural disasters which most of the well-intentioned people elected have no qualifications for. Reform currently has 128 local councillors out of a possible 18,740 seats - 0.68% of the total. He'd need to land more than 500 to look like he was moving, which would be almost a third of the seats up for grabs.

The chances of that are slim. Not only does he lack the party machinery to drive a ground war, but campaign group Hope Not Hate has unearthed candidates making favourable posts about Hitler, far Right conspiracy theories and dropping a nuclear bomb on "Islam", wherever that is. And this is AFTER Reform stepped up the vetting process.

If Reform lands another MP, it would merely get their numbers back up to the 5 they had last year before one of them was booted over bullying allegations. If he lands a mayoralty he's in real trouble, because it's a job that comes with a huge profile and the most likely winner, Andrea "Watch The Birdie" Jenkyns, is no wallflower. If Reform's equivalent of Andy Burnham is someone who makes a splash, Nigel will lose some of the spotlight.

And it's that spotlight the entire party relies on. Without Nigel, there is no Reform UK. There's just some millionaires and City boys, teamed up with the perpetually-angry. Nigel brings pub bore charisma, the tobacco-stained, I'll-have-a-pint-and-another-war-please-barman sort of person which other nations think we're all like. If people vote Reform on Thursday, they're not voting for the local bloke - they're voting for Nigel. Having a figure that could eclipse him will end the party as surely as turning on the lights and opening the front door.

There are plenty of people who want to vote based on local housebuilding plans, wind farms, bypasses, jobs, business rates, schools, but Reform's policies on all these things are invisible to the naked eye and absolutely barking if you can read between the microdots on the campaign leaflets. Pinning people's hopes to the unfunded plans of lunatics is nothing but an invitation to long-term failure. Just ask Brexit.

But the biggest risk Nigel runs is that any significant win will move him closer to Downing Street. He'll look like a winner, instead of a whinger. He won't just be in the far right chair on Question Time, but on every news bulletin. And that means just one thing: scrutiny. His finances, his party's bizarre funding habits, his connections with Trump, his past support of Putin, his actual policies, would be topics for every local and national journalist, and every political opponent that needs to kneecap him. He doesn't have the operation that could withstand that, nor the character to enjoy it. It would be disastrous.

He poses a bigger risk. With a tiny mandate he already guides the utterances of government and opposition. Labour and Tories have tacked right to head him off, losing centrist and left-wing support to others and fragmenting the entire political system to the extent no-one can would splinter it further: it would be the Brexit referendum all over again, but for years.

Nigel's the loudmouth at the back of class, with a little band of loyal followers and a girlfriend who goes to a different school. Making him headteacher is the last thing he wants, or is capable of. He quits when the going gets tough, he makes friends with the worst people on the planet, and if he had the voice of Joe Pasquale rather than Sideshow Bob he would never have made it this far. His role in history has been to reactivate a 1,000-year-old gripe about the French for the benefit of himself, and to the detriment of the rest of us. If he was a real estate billionaire he'd be dangerous; thank the Lord he's just a big-mouthed prat in yellow trousers, and the fact they never win is the only reason they exist.