Nigel Farage must be furious with Nigel Farage. After all, the Brexit party leader is forever accusing conventional politicians of settling for grubby compromises when they should have been shooting for the moon. He’s always quick to condemn a sellout, to cry treachery and betrayal.

So we can only imagine what this Nigel Farage, the man who never surrenders, makes of the Nigel Farage who secretly offered the Tories an electoral pact that would mean his party pulling out of all but a few dozen seats – the one who boasts of having told Boris Johnson that he could “win you the general election now”, only to be rebuffed.

Supporters complain Johnson’s offer isn’t real Brexit, but Tory candidates can now retort, 'Well, Farage thinks it is'

But that’s not all. Nigel Farage will not, he informed us, be voting at all in this election because the other Nigel Farage has withdrawn the candidate in his home constituency. Nigel Farage has disenfranchised Nigel Farage. Confused? Imagine how Brexit party voters feel.

Their leader has done his best to bluster his way out of all this, accusing the Tories of not being truly committed to securing a pro-leave parliament. But the fact remains that he blinked first. The man who vowed to stand in every seat in the country has already pulled his candidates out of more than 300 Tory-held seats and was secretly prepared to dump over 200 more in return for a free run at fewer than 40 seats. All that stopped him was the Tories’ refusal to openly remove themselves from the ballot paper in his chosen seats, promising only to covertly down tools and make it easy for his candidates. But for that technicality, he would presumably have hopped happily into bed with them.

No wonder there are reports of confused Brexit party supporters, unsure of what game their leader is playing. They still complain that Johnson’s offer isn’t real Brexit, but Tory candidates can now retort, “Well, Nigel Farage thinks it is.” After all, if the deal is good enough for the huge swathes of the country he is happy not to contest, why isn’t it good enough for the rest?

On paper, it might look as if the impact of Farage retreating from certain seats can be confined to those places, but it’s not necessarily that simple. The surviving Brexit party candidates desperately need voters to keep believing that the Tories can’t be trusted, but now their own leader is cutting the ground from under their feet. (If anyone still wonders why Jo Swinson is being so stubborn about not withdrawing from seats where it seems mad to be fighting a Labour remainer, here’s one answer.)

Meanwhile in Labour’s former heartlands, where there may be little love for Jeremy Corbyn but still a visceral dislike for the Tories, expect Labour candidates to redouble their argument that Farage is just a closet Tory at heart. They’ve always said that a vote for him was really a vote for Boris Johnson in disguise; now he’s publicly making that case on their behalf.

What makes all this particularly resonant is that hard Brexiters tend to be so-called “low trust voters”, always vigilant for any whiff of betrayal. Their greatest fear is that “the establishment” will find a way of getting around the referendum result. They’re suspicious of conventional politicians, which is why they were drawn to an unconventional one in the first place.

The reason Eurosceptic movements tend to regenerate into new forms every few years – from the Referendum party in the 1990s to Ukip under an increasingly eccentric array of leaders and the collective grievance that rapidly crystallised into the Brexit party – is that they’re inherently unstable. If their supporters were happy to swallow their principles for the greater good, or even to be constrained by electoral reality, they wouldn’t have turned their backs on the bigger parties in the first place.

The whole attraction of being outside the mainstream is never having to compromise. The political fringes, on both far left and far right, are full of spiky personalities who didn’t get where they are today by giving in to other people – which helps to explain why the higher reaches of Ukip so often resembled ferrets fighting in a sack.

None of this has stopped Farage’s various vehicles punching wildly above their weight, but he has succeeded chiefly by influencing larger parties who are capable of winning rather than by winning himself. The minute this movement starts making the painful sacrifices required to take power in its own right, it becomes vulnerable to the charge of being just like all the rest. If anything, glorious defeat is its comfort zone.

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It would be deeply foolish to believe that any of this means the election is now sewn up for the Tories, or that unhappy Brexit party voters will slink home to mainstream parties with their tails between their legs. Many of them never supported the bigger parties in the first place, and those who were non-voters in the past may copy their leader and not vote this time. Others will want to stick with Farage to the end – or in constituencies where that’s not an option, to seek out the nearest protest vote and wait. Even if the Brexit party’s bubble bursts this time, history suggests that those behind it will regroup once they find a new grievance to feed off.

But still, there’s something intensely awkward about Farage going out on the stump with candidates who must now be wondering just how close they got to being unceremoniously ditched. The slogan for his campaign, believe it or not, is “Change Politics For Good”. It will hurt if his supporters conclude that all he ultimately offers is more of the same.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist