British far-right leader Nigel Farage has, as expected, been re-elected as the member for Clacton in yesterday’s by-election, which he prompted by resigning a little over a month ago. His objective was to draw attention away from an investigation of his financial affairs, although it was never quite clear how that was supposed to work.
In any case it quickly came to grief (as anyone with some nous should have anticipated) when the other serious parties all declined to run against him, leaving Farage to fight for re-election against a large range of joke candidates – and especially Count Binface, who soon captured the public imagination as his leading opponent.
It was somewhat reminiscent of the 2012 primary season in the United States, when Mitt Romney, distrusted by the Republican base, had to fight unexpectedly hard for the nomination. As one commentator put it, “running around the country in a long twilight struggle with Rick Santorum is just … how to put it? inherently demeaning and diminishing. It’s like struggling to land a one pound fish or searching for the way out of a paper bag.”
That meant that there was really no good outcome for Farage. Even a big win would be nothing to boast about: “I beat a man with a rubbish bin on his head by three to one” doesn’t sound impressive, it just sounds silly. And of course a close result would be even worse. Farage therefore took the unusual decision to not show up for the announcement of the result, leaving the state to his less-than-serious rivals.
In the end he roughly met expectations, winning with 63.3% of the vote against Binface’s 26.9%. John Stevens of Rejoin EU was a very distant third with 1.4%, while another 31 candidates shared the remaining 8.3%. The turnout of 44.4% (fairly normal for a by-election) meant that although Farage was up 21 points on the 2024 result, that represented only about an extra thousand votes, despite the absence of major party candidates.
The fact that the other parties sat out the by-election means that if Farage receives an adverse finding from the parliamentary investigation and faces a recall petition as a result, they will have no qualms about opposing him. Given the general downward trend in Reform’s polling it’s quite possible they could beat him, although division of their vote between the Conservatives (who were runners-up in Clacton at the last election) and the left could easily be fatal.
In any case, it’s important to remember that Clacton is not representative of Britain as a whole; Farage chose it as his best electoral prospect in 2024. Rafael Behr in the Guardian expresses it well:
Farage retreated to his coastal haven for an electoral comfort break, getting relief from scrutiny in a place where he can still enjoy unchallenged status as the man of the people. But his people are fewer than they were and never as many as he claims. …
There were good reasons for major parties to sit out this Thursday’s byelection. But from Friday onwards, the task of fighting Farage can’t be delegated to a man with a bin on his head. Not even in Clacton.
The World is Not Enough 