Nigel Farage has been reelected as the Member of Parliament for Clacton. He resigned last month to force a contest in his seaside constituency following a series of news stories about his financial affairs. The central claim is that before becoming an MP in 2024, Farge received £5 million from a crypto investor and failed to declare it to the parliamentary authorities once he was elected.
The people who have been most embarrassed by this bizarre by-election are the liberal left
The Reform UK leader decided it was better to go to the voters than wait for some anonymous parliamentary inquiry to determine whether he had breached the rules. None of the main political parties ran a candidate against him, attempting to portray his by-election as a vanity project. Farage’s main opponent in the Clacton by-election was therefore a comedian who wears a bin on his head and calls himself Count Binface.
There are two words British readers will see endlessly today: “hollow victory.” The official narrative is that by doing battle with a bin, Farage has achieved nothing but embarrassed himself. He refused to attend the vote count, citing security concerns. That is taken as further evidence of his contempt for the voters.
This is what we are being told by many political commentators, but is it true? I would say the people who have been most embarrassed by this bizarre by-election are the liberal left. They perpetrated this fantasy that Count Binface would win and put an end to Farage’s political career. By suggesting that would happen, they have exposed the narrowness of their world.
In their minds, most of the country, deep inside, possesses the values of North London liberals; it is just that all those dim old people who live by the seaside get easily led along by populists. Now that Farage has been exposed as being in the pocket of a dodgy crypto millionaire and the like, even they must realize where their interests lie and should unite behind a protest candidate.
Except that they didn’t. The not-Farage candidate – which is what Count Binface was – failed miserably. His 27 percent of the vote will go down on the record as the highest ever received by a joke candidate, but in this instance he wasn’t a joke candidate. He became the deadly serious candidate of “decency” put up against the “far right.” And he fell flat on his face. Farage, meanwhile, showed that his personal support is every bit as strong as it was before, by winning more votes than he did in the 2024 general election in spite of the turnout collapsing.
The left-wing Liberal Democrats were first out of the blocks this morning demanding that the House of Commons investigation into Farage’s finances continue, and so presumably it will. But it will be much harder now for the Lib Dems or anyone else to claim that Farage’s donations put him beyond the political pale. The people of Clacton have re-elected him in spite of knowing all about them. If Farage gets skewered by some parliamentary rule, it will look all the more like the establishment plot that he asserts it is. A similar psychology emerged among Trump voters in 2024. The more the establishment tried to prosecute Trump, bringing endless lawsuits and indictments, the more voters felt it was an attempt to disenfranchise them.
It is possible to argue, of course, that the people of Clacton are not the same thing as the people of Britain, and that their views on the financial probity of public figures differs from those of the country as a whole. But that argument will only serve to expose another political figure who has taken personal approval from one constituency as a proxy for support from the country as a whole: Britain’s new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham. He has not been elected by the country. Instead, he forced a by-election in the northern constituency of Makerfield, became an MP and convinced enough of his colleagues to depose Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister will be reminded endlessly of this fact, especially when he tries to diverge from Starmer’s 2024 manifesto, on which the country did vote.
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch comes out a loser from Clacton, too. She gains the award for the most absurd thing said during the by-election campaign. The people of Clacton, she said a week ago, deserve better than Farage. In which case, why did she decline to put up a candidate?
On the face of it, Clacton tells us nothing about the state of political play in Britain at the moment, because it wasn’t a proper contest. But I would be wary of anyone claiming that Farage has been weakened by it. Look at this week’s polls, showing Labour only just about notching up a national lead over Reform in spite of Burnham’s honeymoon. They also show the Conservatives failing to make any capital from Farage’s personal troubles. If there is a winner from Clacton, it is pretty clearly Reform UK and its leader.
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