Faragian Farce Day 5: Winning Isn’t Enough Anymore

Why Nigel Farage may still win Clacton, but lose the only contest that really matters.

Yesterday I shared this analysis with paid subscribers alongside an audio version. As promised, here’s the full written piece for everyone.

If you did feel the need to listen to a very nearly 40 year old South African speak at his laptop, you can do so at the link below:

Faragian Farce Day 5: Winning Isn’t Enough Anymore

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It appears we now have a date for the Clacton-on-Sea by-election. Tendring Council has announced that the election will be held on the thirteenth of August, which is, by my reckoning, just over a month away. I initially thought it was going to be around the sixth, but another week doesn’t really change the fundamentals. It just gives us another week or so to watch the increasingly surreal political drama that has become the Faragian farce unfolding in public.

And yes, I am still going to be calling it the Faragian Farce, for want of a better title, but do give me some ideas for any other ones, and please feel free to send over any alternatives.

I think I should explain what I’m trying to do here with this series of articles, because to a large extent I am doing this to explain to myself how things are happening and to get an idea of all the different oddities of the UK political system.

I’ve been here for ten years. I would say I’m reasonably well-versed with how things work here, but even so, there is a lot happening, and there is a hell of a lot of noise around this particular election, which everyone will have noticed by now. Surprisingly for me, a lot of the noise, and especially the media noise, is very critical of Farage, which is definitely a new thing, because we have seen him for far too many years being held up high by a media that just loves having him in their green room, waiting to get in and boost their viewership.

Now, obviously, GB News is the exception to that. But considering that Nigel Farage is an actual GB News presenter, that’s not really a massive twist that no one could see coming. But what has changed over the past couple of days is that we are now getting some evidence of how this is being seen beyond Westminster, the reform bubble, and the coastal battlefield of Clacton itself.

And I think that matters; it’s pretty important, because Farage’s biggest problem may no longer be the standards investigation, or even whether he wins the seat.

It may be that people have started laughing at him.

Dan Hodges, this week in a column for the Daily Mail, made the point that the most dangerous thing for a politician isn’t being hated, it’s being laughed at. You see, hatred can be politically useful. It can mobilise supporters, it can sharpen an identity, and it can feed that ever-present, ever-hungry grievance machine.

Politicians built on conflict usually thrive when they treat it as dangerous, outrageous, or threatening. When they become ridiculous, though, they are in a lot of trouble. Now, I don’t agree with Dan Hodges on a great many things, but on this point I think he is absolutely one hundred percent right. Ridicule strips away grandeur, it punctures the mythology, it turns the supposedly dangerous political insurgent into the bloke from the pub who started shouting at a wheelie bin.

Which is why the first national polling on the by-election is so interesting.

Ipsos has asked British adults who they would prefer to win in a hypothetical contest between Nigel Farage and the man of the hour, Count Binface. Count Binface came out ahead, 33% to 21% for Farage.

Source: Ipsos

Now, I just want to clarify what that does not mean. It’s not a constituency poll. It doesn’t tell us how Clacton will vote. It doesn’t mean Count Binface is about to sweep into Parliament on a platform of restoring the 99p flake to its rightful price and capping croissants at a pound. Farage remains the overwhelming favourite locally. What the poll does tell us, however, is that the national mood around him may be shifting, and in quite a big way.

He’s no longer being seen purely as the untouchable populist who can turn every scandal into support. It seems that, increasingly, people see him as the punchline to a stunt of his own making. And that, on its own, is far, far more dangerous than simply being unpopular.

Now, there was also a piece in the Standard this week where they had a discussion with Lord Hayward, the pre-eminent pollster, and he raised another point that really gets to the heart of what Farage has done to himself.

There are now several ways he could technically win this by-election and still come out of it politically diminished. He could retain the seat on a dramatically lower turnout. He could see his personal vote collapse, and Count Binface could perform embarrassingly well. He could win comfortably but still fail to produce anything resembling the triumphant public vindication he has promised us all. And I think that’s the central problem. Farage has framed this as a great democratic reckoning, with the people of Clacton acting as judge and jury over his conduct in Parliament. He’s deliberately turned a local parliamentary contest into a referendum on Nigel Farage, his integrity, and the supposed persecution he faces from the so-called establishment.

But once you set that test to one side, just scraping into a seat is no longer enough. The question isn’t just whether he wins or not. The more interesting question is how many people can actually be asked to turn up on the day and participate in his personal absolution ceremony. Turnout is therefore going to be enormously important. Farage won Clacton in 2024 with more than twenty-one thousand votes on a pretty good turnout of about fifty-eight percent. If he returns with substantially fewer people bothering to vote, even if he increases his majority, that won’t prevent him from winning, but it will say something about the level of enthusiasm behind the whole spectacle. He wants the result to declare that the people have spoken. But what happens if most of the people stay at home?

And to be honest, if I were a Clactonite, I would probably be quite sick of it. And there is a lot of time to cover until polling day arrives. Now, keeping in mind that Clacton is about to be turned into a four-week media circus, it’s going to be a theme park.

Every national broadcaster will want vox pop. Every newspaper will want photographs of locals staring thoughtfully into the middle distance near the pier. Every YouTuber with a microphone will arrive to ask Count Binface whether he can really win. And every politician is going to want a chip shop as a backdrop. It’s going to be relentless. Now, Farage has in a way presented this as an act of respect for Clacton, an opportunity for his constituents to pass judgment. In reality, he’s dragged them into a political drama that exists entirely because he didn’t want to wait for the parliamentary standards process to reach its conclusion.

There is every chance that a sizable number of local residents will conclude that they would like the entire travelling circus to just voetsek. That’s why turnout may tell us far more than the vote share. If Clacton gets irritated or bored or embarrassed by being used as the backdrop for one man’s grievance theatre, it may simply decline to participate at the level Farage expects.

So I think at this point it’s worth reminding ourselves how we got here, because things have really moved on quite a bit from the beginning of the week. More and more is getting exposed. Looking at the financial side of the story, this has now become crowded with donors, fixers, crypto wealth, banks, police, and competing investigations. I want to stop for a second and look at a couple of the details in there.

The original issue, of course, was the five million pound personal gift that Farage received from the cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne, shortly before returning to frontline politics. Farage has variously described it as an unconditional personal gift, a reward for his work on Brexit, and money that would ensure his lifelong security. At the time he received this, he was the chairman and CEO of Reform UK, appearing regularly in the media, campaigning politically, and urging people to vote for the party.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Daniel Greenberg, is examining a relatively straightforward question: was the money genuinely unrelated to Farage’s political activity, or was it a benefit that should have been declared when he became an MP? That process is about parliamentary transparency rules. It requires documents, dates, and evidence. It can’t be settled by asking Clacton to vote on whether it likes Nigel Farage or not, no matter how much he bellows into the night about it.

But that has now only become the first part, or the trailing part, of the story.

We learnt this week that a bank has also reportedly filed suspicious activity reports with the National Crime Agency concerning the five million pound transfer.

I have to be clear here: that doesn’t mean the money was laundered, nor is an SAR proof of any sort of offence. It just means that a regulated financial institution considered the transaction unusual enough to alert law enforcement to possible money laundering concerns. Farage says he didn’t know about the report and has no reason to question the ultimate source of the money. We’ll see how that goes, but this is sort of a nascent part of it.

While this has been happening, there is now also a separate active police investigation involving George, “posh George” Cottrell’s mother, Fiona, the aristocrat, who donated at least £500,000 to Reform.

She donated a lot more than that, actually, but the amount in question is about £500,000. The Met are examining possible breaches of the law on political donations, including whether the true source of donations may have been concealed, or whether false information was applied to the party’s treasurer.

So again, to be clear, these are not all the same case, and none of them by themselves proves any sort of criminal wrongdoing. But once you start taking them together, they start to explain why the story can’t be reduced, as it has been by Nigel Farage, to hostile journalists asking impertinent questions about a harmless personal asset. One process is asking whether parliamentary rules were followed. The second involves financial institutions reporting to the NCA. And the third is a police investigation into donations made to Farage’s party.

That’s not a smear campaign. That’s an expanding web of really legitimate questions about where the money came from, what it funded, how it was recorded, and who ultimately stood behind it. And once again, I have to stress: no by-election can answer those questions. No voter in Clacton has the authority to investigate or audit these things. These things are meant to be done by organisations like the Met and the NCA, and all the people with the actual knowledge and skills to do so.

And I suppose this is sort of where the Reform argument really does collapse, with the insistence that the people of Clacton should decide.

It feels like they’re saying that if this is decided, every other question is settled. But it just isn’t. The people of Clacton can obviously decide who represents them in Parliament. They can’t decide whether a gift was properly declared under parliamentary rules any more than they can vote on whether someone completed a tax return correctly.

Those are very different processes designed to answer very different questions. If Farage wins on 13 August, it only proves that he received more votes than the other candidates. It doesn’t prove that the five million pounds was properly handled. It doesn’t establish whether other financial benefits should have been declared. It doesn’t resolve the separate questions around George Cottrell, private support, accommodation, or campaign infrastructure. It simply means he won the seat. And that’s why Farage may be able to win the election without winning the argument at all.

Farage was desperate for a monumental confrontation with the establishment. He wanted Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, Restore, every other party, standing opposite him so that he could present every attack as proof of a grand conspiracy. He wanted them all standing there, debating him in a local town hall, while he bellowed about the establishment while being obviously of the establishment himself, because it would have made great telly.

Instead, we now all know that they all declined to indulge him. That’s left him in a contest dominated by Count Binface, Laurence Fox, and a couple of other fringe candidates, with every main party standing outside the tent and refusing to provide the villainous establishment chorus he so desperately wanted to be able to point at while gesticulating.

It really is hard to stress enough how difficult it is to stage the supposed battle for the soul of Britain when your principal opponent is wearing a metal bin and campaigning on affordable croissants.

This is a trap that Farage has built for himself. Every joke about Count Binface drains just a little bit more seriousness from the grand moral drama he tried to create. Every meme that gets circulated on X or Blue Sky or Instagram turns his crusade into digestible content. Every headline about Count Binface makes the man who called the actual election look just that much smaller. Farage’s political strength has always depended largely on being treated as historically important, and we have treated him that way.

He is the man who caused Brexit. He admits it himself. The man who terrifies Westminster, and yes, we can see Westminster just clutching their pearls at him. The man who speaks to millions, and again, he does. There are people who would vote for him, who would vote exclusively for him outside Reform. He is the man who cannot be ignored, powerful.

But a a man everyone is laughing at as something else entirely.

So, to bring this to a close, I do still think Nigel Farage is likely to retain Clacton. I am, however, no longer convinced that there’s any result that gives him what he actually wanted from this election.

If turnout is low, his great democratic reckoning looks like public indifference. If Count Binface performs strongly, the stunt becomes a humiliation. If he wins comfortably, the standards investigation resumes and the same financial questions return in full force. If he loses, well, his career may just as well collapse into the North Sea.

Farage called this election because he wanted control over the story. He wanted control over the narrative. Instead, he’s created four weeks in which every camera in the country will be pointed at the money, at the donors, at the excuses, and most importantly, the man in the bin standing beside him.

This may prove to have been Farage’s biggest miscalculation yet. He can still win the seat. What he may no longer be able to win is the meaning of the result. And once the public starts laughing, that is one hell of a difficult sound to drown out, no matter how loudly you shout.