Nigel Farage, battling to keep his seat in Clacton, has already set a new record.

Voters on Thursday will have a choice of no fewer than 34 candidates – the highest number ever in a by-election.

As well as the Reform UK leader, they include three Official Monster Raving Loony candidates, 20 independents and representatives from a variety of tiny parties.

But with the major parties choosing to sit this one out, there are only two candidates that matter. One is Mr Farage and the other is “Count Binface” – comedy writer Jonathan Harvey – who has become the local focus of opposition to the Reform UK leader.

Mr Farage will win the August 13 election. A poll by Survation suggested Binface will get around 20% of the vote, while 73% of local voters surveyed said they will back Mr Farage.

And the survey found Reform would still get 57% of the vote even if other parties were standing, with Conservatives a distant second on just 11%.

But the question facing Mr Farage is whether his decision to resign from Parliament and make the by-election happen has enhanced his reputation, or hurt it.

He claims to have faced an unprecedented barrage of false allegations designed to drive him out of politics.

The Reform UK leader hopes to return to Parliament claiming the people who really matter – his constituents – have rejected attempts by the “establishment” to bring him down.

Mr Farage has not met Binface, who he says is “an extreme left-wing BBC comedy writer” rather than the joke he might appear.

But he told me that Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch had made a massive error in judgment by refusing to stand a candidate in the constituency, where Tories won 72.3% of the vote in the 2019 general election.

He said: “A lot of voters on the door say they are deeply insulted there is not a Conservative candidate.

“The Conservatives don’t want a general election, and they haven’t put a candidate up here. So I think long term, they’ve made a really bad error.”

Traditional parties had attempted to turn the by-election into a joke by promoting Count Binface, he said.

“I mean, Ed Davey, of the Lib Dems, officially endorsed Count Binface, and Kemi virtually did.

“And so a lot of voters say to me, hang on, this isn’t a joke. Whether you agree with Nigel’s reasons for calling the by-election or disagree, it is an election.

“There are 80,000 people here who pay their council tax, who’ve paid their income tax, who have a chance to vote for a Member of Parliament, and the established parties are trying to turn it into a joke.”

His decision to force the by-election followed controversy surrounding a £5 million gift from British cryptocurrency investor Christopher Harborne.

Mr Farage did not declare the gift in the register of MPs’ interests, because it was received before he entered Parliament in the 2024 general election. Some critics say that under House of Commons rules, he should have declared it anyway.

The Parliamentary Standards Commissioner is investigating whether he broke the rules, and while the inquiry has been paused during the by-election – as Mr Farage is not currently an MP – it will resume once he is re-elected.

The danger for Mr Farage, perhaps, is that he has drawn more attention to the row over his finances.

But when I visited Clacton, I found the vast majority of voters couldn’t care less. Some argued that he needed funding to pay for security, while others said that all politicians accepted gifts.

In fact, a survey by Survation found Clacton voters who backed Reform in 2024 were even more likely to vote for Mr Farage now, perhaps because they share his belief that he is the victim of an establishment plot.

This by-election sees the return of Nigel Farage the maverick, taking on the establishment and saying “to hell with them all”.

It’s a return to what made him popular in the first place, with his charisma, his straight-talking and a willingness to say things other politicians shy away from (for example, that it’s crazy to provide free housing to people who cross the Channel illegally instead of deporting them).

Mr Farage’s goal for much of the past 18 months has been to make Reform look like a government-in-waiting. He built an experienced “shadow cabinet” team, including a number of former Conservative politicians, and delivered carefully-worded policy statements.

He felt that to win a general election, Reform needed to look less like a pressure group and more like a traditional party.

And it worked, to an extent. Opinion polls showed Reform consistently in the lead when voters are asked who they will back in a general election.

But staying on top isn’t easy. More recent polling shows Reform is now neck and neck with Labour.

This could prove to be a temporary blip, as the novelty of new Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham wears off. Perhaps more worrying, however, is the suggestion that the Conservatives may also be catching up.

One survey by YouGov at the end of July found 21% of voters said they would back the Conservatives if an election was held today, while 22% would back Reform.

So Mr Farage has returned to what made him a political mega-star – the no-nonsense, take it or leave it approach that worked so well in the past.

A good example is the dramatic announcement this week that a Reform government would employ the Royal Navy to send cross-Channel migrants back to France.

The French government is having none of it, and said the plan “would be a violation of French sovereignty as well as a violation of maritime law and international law”. But Reform is sticking to its guns.

And Mr Farage appears to hope right-winger Marine Le Pen, the favourite to win France’s Presidential election next May, will do a deal with a future Reform government.

The old Farage is back, and the Clacton by-election is one manifestation of that.

Once next week’s vote is out of the way, the battle to win a general election resumes. Mr Farage is looking forward to September’s party conference in Birmingham, which he promises will be “by far the biggest party conference that any party in Britain is capable of putting on”. And he plans to talk a lot more about defence, foreign policy and policing in the months to come.

“You’ll see us weathering the onslaught and the storm and getting ourselves ready for the future,” he said.

“Taking a party that almost doesn’t exist and turning it into a full professional machine is not an overnight thing. We’ve made huge progress over the course of the last two years. There is further to go. And within the next few months, you’ll see the next steps.”