Nigel Farage’s success is good news for one reason. He has killed off those who are even loonier than him

It comes to something when one of the few encouraging developments in British politics is that a chap styling himself as Sargon of Akkad will not be representing the people of South West England in the European parliament. You can imagine the bemused Belgian TV reporters trying to make sense of that guy, like something out of Monty Python but with added hate.

Real name Carl Benjamin, Sargs is the Ukip candidate who thinks cracking gags about rape and threatening violence on Jess Phillips MP is funny – a “free speech merchant” according to his leader, Gerard Batten. Electing Benjamin, though, was to be just too embarrassing for the voters. Instead, they plumped for the Brexit Party’s Ann Widdecombe, who is also an embarrassment, and whose views on LGBT+ issues are, shall we say, disappointing. But at least she doesn’t threaten violence. (Can you imagine?)

Much the same can be said about the rest of the Brexit Party campaign: challenging and defeating people even more unhinged than they are. So thanks, I suppose.

You may think Nigel Farage a nasty piece of work, and you’d be right, but he has finished off his old mates in Ukip, who are even more dangerous than his new mob, which is now a one-issue pressure group.

Thus we have Farage to thank (as well as plucky Lib Dem, SNP, Plaid Cymru and Green campaigns) for making sure that Mark Meechan, better known as Count Dankula and “Nazi pug yob”, is not now booking his ticket to Brussels on the Eurostar as a Ukip MEP for Scotland. He will not be in the Euro parliament bar with his party trick, able to show fellow parliamentarians from Germany and Poland how he taught his girlfriend’s pet pug to give the Nazi salute on mention of the words “gas the Jews”. I don’t think poor old Guy Verhofstadt would have been able to take that final trashing of the European dream.

Most pleasingly of all, the absurd Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, trading as Tommy Robinson – too toxic even for Ukip to have as an official candidate – lost his deposit in the North West England. They may be a bit Eurosceptic in Lancashire, but they’re not neo-Nazis. Yaxley-Lennon was engaged by Batten as a “personal special adviser” on grooming gangs. Now the pair of them have been humiliated in the polls. Again, you may compare Robinson with Annunziata Rees-Mogg, of the Brexit Party (real name: Annunziata Rees-Mogg – only unintentional satire works here).

She is as much an upper-class twit of the year as her fogeyish brother Jacob, but most likely wouldn’t get involved in a brawl with Newport County supporters chanting “I’m EDL till I die”, and receiving a three-year ban from attending football matches, as Yaxley-Lennon, overexcited Luton Town fan, did in 2011. Or potentially wrecking a crucial grooming trial. It isn’t just that she is more genteel than Tommy Robinson; but that she is closer to being a genuine democrat.

When Batten turned Ukip from being a party of loons, fruitcakes and closet racists into a party of loons, fruitcakes and open Islamophobes it was too much even for Farage.

Ukip’s desperate lurch to the right, mimicking Le Pen in France, Orban in Hungary and Salvini in Italy has failed. That is important. The far right in the UK has to a degree been contained. Had the Brexit Party and Farage not turned up, Ukip might very well have picked up more momentum in this election, as it has been doing in recent weeks. It wouldn’t have have romped it like the Brexit Party, but it’d be back on double figures in the polls, with a racist agenda and a few MEPs rather than a wipe-out. Ukip would still be in business.

I know the arguments about Farage, the pound-shop Enoch Powell. He is the man who posed proudly in front of the “breaking point” anti-immigrant poster. I know he made xenophobic remarks about foreign voices on the train home. I’ve read Bad Boys of Brexit, his friend Arron Banks’ self-condemnatory memoir of the 2016 referendum campaign. I also realise that many people see him as just a smarter version of Batten, and thus more insidious. And that many Brexit Party supporters and voters – some nutters – are ex-Ukip. But that’s my point – they are all now in Farage’s personal vehicle, with little say on policy or strategy.

Farage is mad, bad and dangerous to know. However, he and his brand once beat off the BNP, and has now euthanised Ukip. It would be better if the people attracted to any of those parties switched to supporting Caroline Lucas, Vince Cable or Heidi Allen, but they won’t. Knowingly or not Farage has done us one significant service in annihilating his old party Ukip.