A Sore Winner

Hungover after far too big a weeknight for men of their age, Richard Tice and Lee Anderson took to the airwaves this morning to call Essex Police liars. Will they be treated as Zack Polanski was earlier in the year? And what would have been the reaction from Reform UK if Nigel Farage had lost? Robert Hutton writes:

The thinnest material in the world is graphene, a honeycomb lattice of carbon that is a single atom thick. The second thinnest, we learned on Friday morning, is Nigel Farage’s skin.

Seriously. How fragile do you have to be to sulk through your own election victory? There are peaches that bruise less easily than Farage’s ego. Had not enough people voted for him? Watching the rolling news in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un could be heard muttering “mate, get over yourself”.

We had risen early, or stayed up through the night, for the result of the Clacton by-election, called by Farage a month ago to settle the vital democratic question “should I be able to keep my gifts and support from a fraudster secret?” The outcome had never been in doubt, partly because none of the other parties were standing, preferring to await the outcome of the parliamentary investigation that the Reform leader insists he isn’t worried about, and also insists is rigged.

Nigel The Very Brave And Honest, though, had already declared that he wouldn’t be there. “I am damned if I am going to stand on a stage, having won a resounding victory,” he announced hours earlier at a rally, “and be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies.” This was, in the first place, a little harsh on Laurence Fox, who appeared in 42 episodes of Lewis, making him a better-known figure than 99 per cent of by-election candidates. But it also raises the question of which “somebodies” Farage had been hoping to face in the election. Taylor Swift? William Gladstone? Cicero?

So Farage became the first MP not to attend the declaration of his victory since … let me check this … Bobby Sands. The IRA man was in prison at the time, an excuse that isn’t available to Farage.

That led to the surreal experience of a count in which the announcement of the winner was greeted with total silence. Even the Everyone Is God Party, with their 10 votes, got a cheer. (Perhaps this was the candidate that Farage couldn’t bear to meet. Reform is very clear that we shall have no gods beside Nigel.)

Even Reform’s press officers sensed that this strop was making their fearless leader look a little bit of a whiny baby, so they let it be known that the police had warned of a “credible threat” to Farage’s safety if he attended the count. Not another one!

Obviously there are people out there who wish Farage ill, some of them seriously unhinged, and several of them not Robert Jenrick. And yet it’s hard to escape the thought that a lot of Farage’s security threats arrive at convenient moments, like when he’s being asked to explain how that five million quid got into his bank account, or when the bins need putting out. Essex Police, unhelpfully, denied having warned Farage of this. Perhaps the police force that issued the warning goes to a different school.

Over on GB News, The Channel That Backs Our Nige, the hosts were doing their best to take all this seriously. “He’s got more votes than he got in 2024!” one of them enthused. Triumph! Was it, though? Is 63 per cent a good number in the most Reform-friendly seat in the country, when your only rival is a man with a bin on his head?

Farage’s disappearance suggested that he at least didn’t think so. The word came down that he’d cancelled a speech he’d planned for mid-morning, too. The result, GB News told us, “shows that Reform has matured”. Which was odd, because you could hear the toys being thrown out of Farage’s pram from a hundred miles away.

Instead we heard from Richard Tice, who described the decision of other parties not to fight in Clacton as “cowardice, pure cowardice”, an interesting way to go when your leader has just dashed back into hiding.

Is Farage really too peevish to celebrate his own success? There’s another possibility. A couple of weeks ago, he mentioned having had abdominal surgery at the start of the campaign. His habit of only speaking to journalists who can be sure not to ask tricky questions means this revelation has gone uninterrogated, but the Reform leader may still be recovering, which would explain a restricted schedule.

Britain’s smaller parties usually complain that the broadcasters won’t give them airtime. But on Friday, we had the sight of a by-election winner refusing to speak to anyone. Things were so desperate that the party put Lee Anderson up. “What we should be doing today is celebrating Nigel’s stunning victory in Clacton,” he told the BBC. Though if Nigel himself can’t be bothered, it’s not clear why the rest of us should.

“Nigel is a great man of principle,” Anderson went on. The principle in question being Nigel Should Be Very Rich. Farage, in fairness, does speak for sections of the public who are often unheard in our democracy: people who are concealing their income, for instance.

Why, the BBC asked, was everyone in Reform so cross, when the party had just won? “I’m not angry,” Anderson snarled. “We’re really happy.” It was the saddest thing I’d heard all morning.

And what about the disputed claim about the threat to Farage’s safety? “I believe Nigel above the police,” Anderson replied. That, at least, is a line that may come in handy again.

Henry Hill writes:

So, that was the Clacton by-election. The first one, anyway, perhaps — depending on the findings of the now-resumed parliamentary investigation into Nigel Farage’s financial dealings. Provided he’s legally able to keep his campaign data, Jonathan David “Count Binface” Harvey probably has the contact list to get a recall petition over the line if the option arises.

Nobody really emerges from the contest with much credit. Farage didn’t perform especially strongly, has done nothing to derail the inquiries into his financial affairs, and has seen his party slip in the polls as Andy Burnham enjoyed an all but uncontested spotlight for his honeymoon. Tactically, it was probably wise for the other parties to stand aside and leave him to Harvey.

For my part, however, I can’t help but think it a little insulting to the voters of Clacton. Whatever one thinks of Farage’s decision to precipitate a needless by-election, it is something our system allows MPs to do and the election itself isn’t fake; the stakes are still who represents Clacton in Parliament, just the same as a general election, and if the good burghers of Clacton have to turn out for the political process it is not unreasonable to expect those who do it for a living to do them the courtesy of turning up.

Regardless, Farage now cuts a diminished and yet-diminishing figure. The joie de vivre which was once such an essential element of his public persona has all but disappeared, and the public face of Reform UK is increasingly the snarling countenance of Zia Yusuf. Like Richard Tice, who used to talk about the need to ‘destroy’ the Conservative Party, Yusuf represents a very real strain of Reform sentiment. But it is not an approach likely to grow the party’s share of the vote.

However, we should be careful before over-interpreting Reform’s recent difficulties. If journalists can write about what a bad time it’s having, it’s only because of how quickly we have adjusted to grading Reform on a completely new curve. Until recently, the party had a year and a half in first place in the polls, and it remains for now in second place.

Moreover, the most recent swing against it looks to have been voters defecting to Labour, which means two things. First, that these voters could well be won back, either in this parliament or the next, as and when the Burnham Government starts disappointing people, as governments inevitably do. Second, that the Tories are not making much headway in re-consolidating their traditional grip on the Right.

The relative stickiness of Reform’s numbers in its present trying circumstances also suggests that Farage has not only moved his party’s ceiling, but its floor; that there are now simply more people who consider themselves “Reform voters”. This is an important step in establishing Reform as an enduring national force — the difference between 120 seats being an historic achievement, as it would be for Reform in 2029, and an historic disaster, as it was for the Conservatives in 2024.

One important question is what exactly “Reform voters” means. It seems very unlikely, in today’s political climate, that any party could build the sort of institutional allegiance which Labour and the Conservatives achieved in the mid-20th Century. These voters could be “Farage voters”, loyal to him and activated by his particular talents but not generally available to the Right; others could be “radical right voters”, currently choosing Reform as their best bet but happy to be wooed by alternatives, be that Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain or, hypothetically, a revivified and suitably right-wing Conservative Party.

Personally, I remain very bear-ish on Reform as a party and suspect it would struggle to maintain itself without Farage, whose departure from politics feels a much more concrete prospect than it did eighteen months ago even if it isn’t necessarily imminent.

There is a cruel irony to it, but it is a tribute to Farage’s extraordinary success that he has managed to grow the non-Conservative Right to the point where it needs someone else. For a long time, UKIP’s marginal electoral position made it the perfect berth for someone of Farage’s campaigning talent, who recognised that the way to effect change was to induce the major parties to try and deal with him. His authoritarian leadership style did more good than harm, and his personal foibles mattered less, or at least were less often noticed.

When you have ten per cent of the voters, that’s exactly the sort of leadership you need. When you have 25 per cent, you need something quite different. You need someone who can build institutions, attract talent, take seriously the prospect of governing the nation — and possessed of enough self-awareness and self-restraint to conduct their personal and financial affairs as if they were a high-profile public figure with lots of enemies.

Farage has never shown any sign of being that person, and it may be that no suitable candidate ever emerges. But looking at the condition of British politics in the wake of Clacton, one can perceive what may end up being Farage’s legacy: a world in which he fades away, but the voting bloc he built does not fade with him.

Jonny Ball writes:

In news that will surprise few, Nigel Farage has retained his seat in the Clacton by-election. His chief opponent, the tiresomely twee Count Binface, whose satirical electioneering seems to have superseded the traditional joke candidatures of the Monster Raving Loony Party, somehow came to consolidate much of the anti-Farage bloc behind him in the pensioner-friendly Essex seaside town, earning a respectable second place with 27%. But there is not much of an anti-Farage bloc to speak of in pensioner-friendly Essex seaside towns.

Farage himself managed to secure 63% of the vote, up from 46% in the general election two years ago. But that’s only because none of Britain’s main parties chose to stand in Clacton, much to Reform UK’s annoyance, in what soon became a pointless, shoddy and farcical episode in British electoral history. Instead of high drama, we have seen a carousel of the weird, the mad and the inane, with a three-foot-long ballot paper that includes the Everyone Is God party focused on promoting good sex, along with 20 independents.

Reform’s leader hoped to dominate the summer’s discourse with news from a by-election campaign pitting the People against the Establishment. But nobody had reckoned with the Establishment simply refusing to play ball, at which point a Reform victory in the populist party’s safest seat went from a foregone conclusion to a blindingly obvious nullity. This denied Farage any bragging rights when his core supporters turned out to back him in spite of accusations of impropriety and investigations by the parliamentary standards committee. So as the other main parties weren’t on the pitch to play the role, there was some muted commentary that tried to position the man inside the bin, Jonathan Harvey, as the real Establishment-in-disguise, the liberal elite by proxy and in costume. He is a former BBC comedy writer, after all.

But what the whole episode has revealed is less a grand conspiracy against the march of the Right, and more that Farage, a savvy, guerrilla political operator, and perhaps the most able political communicator of his generation, can be guilty of missteps. The standards inquiry into his donations row will now continue, potentially leading to yet another by-election if he is found in breach of the rules. This victory will not put a stop to awkward questions about crypto grifting, criminal associates and undeclared funds. Farage may have hoped to create a victorious Battle of Clacton finale to draw a line under the saga, but it will instead be little more than a limp subplot.

To be sure, Farage has demonstrated that he has a core base of support that will stick with him, come what may. He’s a fan club politician. A little under a third of the country likes him. And the people who like him often love him, and can be unswervingly loyal to him, even if all the evidence shows large majorities of the rest of the country would prefer just about anyone else in Westminster to be PM (save for Zack Polanski).

Clacton wasn’t the People versus the Establishment, and Farage is little but a renegade member of the elite he so vocally and viscerally despises. He has been embedded within the upper echelons of City trading, the broadcast media, the MAGA circuit and the weirder edges of the fintech scene, as well as the shabby worlds of Brussels, Washington and Westminster politics, for several decades, and he has been remunerated handsomely for efforts in his field. He had hoped the by-election might allow him to chalk up another success on his long political journey, but this victory will feel pyrrhic, and particularly hollow.

Sonia Sodha writes:

Nigel Farage’s by-election victory against a candidate dressed as a bin was so resounding he failed to turn up at the count. A Reform UK spokesperson claimed it was because Essex Police advised him not to attend due to a credible threat against him. But that doesn’t square either with the police’s statement that they had a robust security operation in order to ensure the safety of everyone at the count, or Farage’s own statement that he’d be “damned if I’m going to stand on a stage … and be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies”.

The truth is likely that Farage didn’t bother showing because any victory speech on a platform devoid of any other mainstream candidates would only further underline what a farcical stunt this by-election was. Farage’s political strategy in calling it was to evade scrutiny by the parliamentary standards commissioner over the £5m gift he received before the election, which he failed to declare as a new MP, and to show that the voters of Clacton backed him despite huge question marks hanging over him on this and other undeclared donations. He would say job done: he increased his vote by just over 1,000 votes on the 2024 general election. But this was in a by-election where no party ran against him in order to avoid legitimising his stunt, and where his main rival was Count Binface, who managed to score a respectable 27 per cent of the vote.

So the voters of Clacton re-elected him. So what? Clacton is one of the most pro-Reform constituencies in the country. What matters to Farage’s stated ambition of being prime minister is what voters right across the UK make of him and Reform UK. And all the evidence suggests he and his party are in trouble.

Reform UK peaked in the polls last autumn; its support has trailed off since then, and since Andy Burnham took over as prime minister, it has lost its poll lead altogether. Even at its peak, the party was not garnering enough support from voters to deliver it a majority at a general election. The challenge for Farage was always going to be whether he could broaden Reform’s appeal to capture more voters who would otherwise vote for the Conservatives or for Labour.

At this, Farage is failing miserably. In fact, he is now the most disliked political leader in the UK: in one recent YouGov poll, 65 per cent of voters said they don’t like him, compared to just 24 per cent who said they do. Yes, he can energise his base. But there are not enough of them to win him the election, and because he is so widely disliked, he also motivates people to vote for whichever candidate they think is best placed to beat Reform.

These levels of voter dislike are not surprising. Farage and other Reform leaders are increasingly coming across as petulant and whingy. He has morphed from the classic populist framing that posits the ordinary person as the victim of the establishment, into a framing where it is poor Reform MPs who are the injured party. But voters don’t want self-pitying victims as their leaders. Even as Reform politicians called for people to moderate their language in the wake of the horrific killing of Reform spokesperson Anne Widdecombe, Zia Yusuf labelled former Conservative defence secretary and soldier Ben Wallace a “traitor” on social media. Reform politicians constantly moan about being subject to the same levels of media scrutiny, for example on undeclared political donations, as other parties, and react angrily to tough questions in interviews. This schtick can only take them so far.

It is true that Labour is enjoying a honeymoon bounce as a result of Andy Burnham’s ascent to the premiership that may not last into the next few months. But there is no guarantee that Reform would be the beneficiary were Labour to slip in the polls. In fact, analysing Lord Ashcroft’s polling, the polling expert Peter Kellner says he believes that Reform’s support as measured in most polls is softer than that of other parties and may naturally dissipate somewhat ahead of an actual election when people are making a real choice about the next government.

And Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party could manoeuvre itself into mopping up wavering Reform UK voters ahead of a general election. There are those who believe talk of a “Keminaissance” is to exaggerate how the Conservatives are doing: they comfortably lag in third place in the vast majority of polls. Voters are not yet ready to forgive the Tories the terrible governing record that saw many desert them in 2024. But Badenoch is significantly outperforming the Conservative brand. Almost 40 per cent of the British public now think she is doing well as leader – up from just 15 per cent last October – and 53 per cent of Reform voters have a favourable view of her, up 20 points from then. If the Conservatives manage to overtake Reform in the run-up to the next election, Farage’s dreams of becoming prime minister are highly likely to be all but over.

Farage isn’t stupid. He knows this. And he also knows he may well face another Clacton by-election if the parliamentary standards commissioner finds against him, and he is suspended from the Commons for more than the 10 days that would trigger a recall petition. The word in Westminster is that he had to be persuaded to return to frontline British politics as the Reform UK leader before the 2024 election, and that he may not be enjoying the role; his bad-tempered outings in recent weeks would certainly hint at that. So perhaps another by-election would be the moment we see him flounce out of politics, and not for the first time. In the meantime, we can leave him to enjoy his glorious victory against a bin.

And the Morning Star puts things in perspective:

Petulant, self-pitying and dishonest: Nigel Farage’s reaction to his victory in the Clacton by-election suggests his gamble has backfired on him.

He talks airily of his “resounding victory,” but avoided the count with a resentful sneer (he was not going to stand on a stage and be “humiliated by nobodies”) and an apparent untruth (that he was advised by Essex Police not to attend for his own safety, a claim the force appears to contradict). Reform also cancelled a planned speech by its leader in the town.

He forced this election, and now he wants no association with it. He used the voters of Clacton as a prop in a stunt designed to take the heat off over investigations into his murky finances, and cannot even be bothered to address them on the result. If he really believed this showed an “overwhelming” endorsement of him personally (as he says) he would be standing with the people who elected him and defying Westminster from some sort of victory rally, not scurrying away.

Farage’s sulk is linked to the gloomy knowledge that his re-election proves nothing and solves nothing, since he was not up against any serious candidates. 

He returns to Parliament and its investigation into whether he should have declared the £5 million gifted him by Thai-based millionaire Christopher Harborne, while other probes rumble on into his receipt of hundreds of thousands of pounds linked to convicted fraudster George Cottrell and his mother. The stench of dodgy donors may cling to Farage from now on, and it seriously undermines his self-presentation as a man of the people taking on the Establishment.

So far so good. But it is also true that the Clacton by-election “proves nothing and solves nothing” for the socialist and anti-racist left. 

Yes, Count Binface winning nearly 10,000 votes is mildly embarrassing for Farage, but given the comedy candidate became the sole high-profile anti-Reform option it is not a huge surprise either.

Farage’s comfortable majority of 63 per cent was on a relatively high turnout for a by-election, and the number of votes cast for him was slightly higher than at the general election: there is no indication that support for Reform in the constituency has shrunk.

Nationally, while Reform has lost some ground in opinion polls and Labour has gained some since installing Andy Burnham as PM, the shifts are not dramatic and Burnham’s failure to match promises of change with serious policy shifts will begin to tell unless the labour movement can force the government in a more radical direction.

The Tories have also gained as Reform has retreated, and the two right-wing parties combined on current polling dwarf the Labour vote.

Most of what passes as political analysis in Establishment media focuses purely on electoral outcomes, and is likely to ponder the likelihood or not of a pact between the big right-wing parties.

That’s a potential threat, but the serious left needs to face deeper problems.

The scale of support for a political right whose main calling cards are xenophobia and racism — witness the Conservatives’ recent pledge to bar foreign nationals from council housing, the shortage of which is overwhelmingly their own party’s fault — is already having toxic political and social effects.

It sets the tone on all immigration debate, with Labour not showing any sign of retreating from Shabana Mahmood’s attacks on immigrant workers or refugees.

And it is normalising the racism we are increasingly seeing expressed in abuse and assaults, including on people at work doing their jobs, from retail to transport to the NHS.

So there is no room for complacency. The hard right has not been defeated in Clacton — in fact it was never even taken on.