Reform UK is conducting a forensic examination of whether sexist comments by its candidate in the Makerfield byelection may have slightly dampened the party's already modest chances, after Nigel Farage admitted the result left him feeling a bit meh.

The party's deep dive into its defeat comes after Andy Burnham waltzed away with 55% of the vote share in a contest Reform had optimistically billed as a tight tussle between the Labour leadership hopeful and its own candidate, Robert Kenyon, a local plumber whose social media game turned out to be his undoing.

Canvassers from rival parties reported that voters - particularly women - were put off by sexist and lewd social media posts by Kenyon that surfaced during the campaign. One Reform activist suggested the party had advised the candidate not to apologise for the comments, which is definitely a strategy.

The issue erupted when TV presenter Carol Vorderman posted a video demanding an apology from Kenyon after he joined a graphic discussion about her in since-deleted posts. “I will admit that the Vorderman stuff did not help us,” a Reform source conceded, displaying a talent for understatement.

Farage's party has pointed to the sheer difficulty of taking on a known quantity like Burnham, even in a seat demographically more favourable to Reform than Labour, noting that Kenyon increased his vote share from 2024 by a thrilling 2.7 percentage points. The party was also slightly buoyed by Rupert Lowe's far-right Restore UK taking just under 7% of the vote, which is less than some forecasts had predicted, so that's something.

In a video message posted on X, Farage urged Restore voters to back Reform instead, calling it “the only viable contender on the right of UK politics.” He described the result as “a dramatic, emphatic win for Andy Burnham,” which is one way to put it.

Reform had hoped to win at least 18,000 votes but only managed 15,696, leaving Farage to muse that his party had been “slightly hoist with our own petard” by facing a Labour challenger whose implicit message - a vote for him was a vote to remove Keir Starmer - was the same as Reform's own slogan in May's local election. Awkward.

Burnham's personal standing in Greater Manchester, where he has been mayor since 2017, appeared to be a bigger factor than Kenyon's comments, which the candidate tried to spin as evidence he was an ordinary bloke rather than a professional politician. It didn't work.

Despite Restore's modest showing, Farage will be concerned about losing votes to a party whose talk of mass deportations and openly racist rhetoric has nudged Reform into taking a more hard-right and nativist approach in recent weeks. In his message, Farage addressed Restore voters directly: “I would say directly to them: what do you want? We are the challenger party to the left in this country, and I would urge you to think again, I really, really would.”

Reform is, he insisted, “still the big national party on the centre right,” despite the Conservative win in the Aberdeen South byelection also held on Thursday. He ended his message on a note of grim determination: “A disappointing morning, but we keep going.”

Faced with the threat from Restore Britain - a predominantly online phenomenon amplified by Elon Musk, who supports Restore - Farage has started pushing Reform onto more hard-right turf. He has argued that white people in the UK face the most racism in what he calls a “two-tier state,” and the party's migration policy now targets EU nationals with settled status, some of whom have lived in the UK for decades. Under planned reforms, EU nationals would be barred from social housing and employing them would become notably more expensive for companies. Because nothing says 'challenger party' like making life harder for people who have been here for 30 years.