Farage’s Farce, Day 3: The Clacton Clown Car Fills Up
Farage’s grand anti-scrutiny stunt now has Count Binface, Laurence Fox, far-right oddities and the potential to become the weirdest by-election in British history.
I appear to have found a couple of errant hours I didn’t know I had, specifically between 5am and 8am, which I’ll be dedicating this summer to keeping you all informed of the increasingly ridiculous Farage Farce. I’m aiming for at least three to four pieces a week while this nonsense unfolds, so if you’re enjoying the coverage, please do share it, subscribe if you haven’t already, and consider supporting Bearly Politics if you’re in a position to do so.
We have officially reached day three of the new comedy series that has gripped the UK1, “Farage’s Farce”, and the newest developments are, honestly, hilarious.
When we left off yesterday, Farage had very angrily resigned from his position just to… stand for his own position. All the major parties had had a bit of a laugh at him for doing so and told him in no uncertain terms that they were not going to be playing his games and the Reformati have been out on the telly and in the media doing their best to paint good ol’ Nige as a man of deep principles standing on a platform of… wait, what is his platform?
Eish, because thinking about it now, I can’t really pin it down.
When David Davis stood down from his seat just to stand for it again it was in protest to the extension of maximum detention of terror suspect without charge from 28 to 42 days - something, if I’m being honest, is surprisingly not the worst reason in the world, and I can kind-of-sort-of see it being a bit of a protest vote.
Farage, on the other hand, seems to have stood down in protest against, well, scrutiny it would appear. He seems to be running a campaign against transparency in public life, which if we didn’t have Mango Mussolini in the White House who had done much the same, I honestly would have rolled my eyes so hard I would have toppled right over.
It genuinely is a sign of the times that a politician actively being investigated for dodgy donations can resign in protest against these and all of collectively just sigh and mutter to ourselves “yeah, that seems about right.”
And speaking of moments so far that have made this whole saga even more entertaining than it has been so far, Rachel Reeves capped things off yesterday by confirming she’d sign off on Farage’s request to be appointed Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead - that delightfully anachronistic office that lets an MP formally quit their seat.
She didn’t stop there either, calling the whole stunt “a farce and a desperate distraction”, before adding that if Farage wants to spend his summer arguing with a bin, she won’t stop him. It was blunt, it was funny, and watching the Chancellor of the Exchequer throw that much shade was deeply, deeply satisfying.
Now, moving on to the new developments in the active erosion of all sense in our political ecosystem, Nigel Farage will unfortunately not be standing just against Count Binface, as much as I would have loved to see this happen.
Over the past 24 hours, a few new contenders have joined the race for the hearts and minds of the voters of Clacton on Sea, and today I would love to introduce you to two of these absolute nutters.
The first of them is, of course, Laurence Fox.
A man best known for burning a pride flag in his back garden while looking terribly agitated. He was also seen playing bumper cars with buses on London Streets, instantly turning it into content. He’s so misogynistic that even GB News told him to fuck off, and, as a self-styled free speech champion, decided to sue two people for calling him racist only to turn around and accuse them of being paedophiles. In general, he gives off vibes that should raise red flags to anyone with a working moral compass, and has now thrown his beret into the ring.
I want to be explicit about what that amounts to. Laurence Fox is a man that has spent the best part of a decade turning being disliked into a personality, a mid-tier actor who worked out that manufactured outrage travels a lot further than any actual talent ever did. He isn’t standing on principle, he’s auditioning, yet again, for the role of martyr, in a seat he has no real connection to, for a party that exists mainly to give bigotry a rosette.
Fox is, of course, no novice to this campaigning thing, having previously stood for Mayor of London. He did so not once, but twice - in 2021 winning 1.9% of the overall vote and in 2024 winning 0.56% of the overall vote. Ag shame, man.
As we can tell with those performances, Fox is not quite the adept politician, or at least campaigner, that he thinks he is. With that said though, he is standing in what is a genuinely weird by-election, so could this be the first time that he doesn’t throw £5,000 straight into the bin?
He will officially be standing as a candidate for the Reclaim Party founded by Jeremy Hosking and previously known as “Brexit Express2”. The party has a sovereignist, anti-woke and anti-gender platform that it runs on, so really just run of the mill far-right kak.
Which, frankly, makes the two of them a perfect match. Reclaim isn’t really a party so much as a vanity project with a mailing list, built for people who’ve been told “oh, no thank you very much” by every serious outlet and decided the problem was everyone else rather than anything they’d actually said. Fox gets a platform, Reclaim gets a famous (ish) face, and Clacton gets landed with a candidate whose entire politics amounts to being a truly unlikeable mid-forties dickhead.
Next in line we have a Mr Kai Stephens. Now, if you haven’t heard that name before, don’t worry - you have not missed a thing. Stephens is from a party that calls itself The British Democratic party, and as these things do happen, they have thrown that word “Democratic” in their name in the same way that North Korea is the “Democratic People’s Republic.”
The outfit is… sleazy. It’s honestly so dodge, it genuinely makes Reform UK look like the establishment party that it so desperately pretends it’s not. Its ideology appears to be, again, the general far-right fuckery, and includes the now expected anti-immigration (yawn), anti-Islam (no surprise there) and what it describes as “Real Nationalism3.”
Stephens himself barely registers as a personality beyond the branding, which might genuinely be the point. Outfits like this don’t need charisma, they need a clean-cut face willing to read out the same old ethno-nationalist talking points without flinching, and the British Democrats have found exactly that. It’s the same tired hatred as ever, just laundered through a name that sounds like it belongs on a parish council leaflet.
The other two contenders who have now joined this six man race are Adham Alkhatip standing for the Forward Party with some genuinely progressive ideas, and Ollie Granger, described as a “43 year old professional and father” who is standing as an independent and, according to the Clacton Gazette, will have a platform of supporting local communities. Both of these candidates seem like actual borderline serious nominees, and will hopefully add a slight seasoning of seriousness to the proceedings.
In addition to the six candidates so far, the Climate Party has made a statement that they would be standing a candidate, however, no details have been announced just yet.
As a side note here, I do, in general, have a lot of admiration for people who stand for public office, so do wish Alkhatip and Granger, both of whom really do seem serious about standing, the very best. I do not, however, extend that feeling to the far-right crotchgoblins coming out of the undergrowth for what will no doubt be a massive exercise in “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! WHY AREN’T YOU LOOKING AT MEEEEE?!”
Which is where we find ourselves on day three of this series of ridiculous events. Six candidates confirmed, a seventh on the way from the Climate Party, and a genuine full house of far-right oddities all crammed into one seaside constituency alongside a man dressed as a bin, properly hectic stuff. It would be easy to write the whole thing off as pure farce - and, to be clear, it most certainly is - but there’s something almost useful about watching it play out this openly.
The fringe in this by-election isn’t hiding behind vague three-word slogans and a nice if somewhat ill-fitting suit.
Fox, Stephens and their fellow far-right travellers are turning up in Clacton with their actual politics on full display, all fighting each other for the same small slice of the electorate, which means none of them get to pretend they’re the reasonable one in the room. When the whole setup is this high profile and completely exposed, the masks are going to slip fast, and the voters of Clacton, as well as the rest of us obsessively following this nonsense, are getting a genuinely front-row seat to just how deranged, batshit and completely unserious the modern British far-right actually is.
None of this deserves an ounce of respect I would add, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of “balance4”.
Fox is playing dress-up as a serious politician using the same wounded self-pity that’s fuelled his entire post-acting career, and Stephens is fronting a party that’s simply repackaged naked bigotry with a friendlier font and a straighter tie. These aren’t brave outsiders saying the things the mainstream is too scared to say, they’re chancers and true believers alike, banking on enough people mistaking shamelessness for honesty.
Call it Farage’s Farce, act four: a man who quit his own seat rather than face scrutiny is now watching a queue of people even less serious than him try to take it off him anyway. If nothing else, letting the country watch this parody of democracy unfold in full view might end up being the best argument against any of them that anyone could make.
The far-right has been screaming incessantly that they just don’t get the media airtime that they truly believe they deserve. I’m very pleased to tell them that the microscopes are out, the scrutiny levels are on high, and we’re all very keen to see just how big a bunch of fools they make themselves out in the next several weeks.
And by the UK I obviously mean slightly politically obsessed people that have decided to not take holidays abroad this summer.
Another point while writing this piece that I rolled my eyes so hard I nearly injured myself.
Which I presume refers to not being just the thinly veiled ethno-nationalism that has become the mainstay of Reform’s policy platform and regularly just played down as “common sense”.
Your regular reminder that I am not, in fact, the BBC - I am a slightly sweaty man with a MacBook and a penchant for shouting at the internet.
Let's not forget that the only reason Fox didn't stand in the 2024 Mayoral election was that he doesn't understand how to fill in a form.
The good people of Clacton really need to all turn out and deliver a resounding ‘None of the Above’ result