The Clacton By-Election Has Entered Peak Binface
With no major parties standing, a standards investigation paused, and Count Binface waiting in Clacton, Farage’s grand reckoning is quickly something much funnier and much dodgier.
Yesterday was… a lot.
It started with Farage losing his rag at the airport on his way back from the States when approached by Sky News, led to his bombshell, somewhat pompous grievance-fest dressed as a press release, and then to that bombshell turning right around and blowing up directly in his face.
The political atmosphere in the country, rather nicely matching the now third heatwave for this summer, is febrile.
It is then worth unpicking a few bits and pieces that have come up over the past 24 hours or so, because there are a lot of moving parts to this, probably the most important one being figuring out the rationale of the by-election to begin with.
Because as mentioned in my post yesterday, it was already very likely that Farage would have had to stand in a by-election anyway.
The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Daniel Greenberg, has been busily squirrelling away in the background with his initial investigation into the Harborne bung that was exposed late April, and by all accounts, was likely to deliver his verdict in September.
If, for any reason, that verdict reads “Farage is dodgy as fuck”, and the MP for Clacton gets suspended from parliament for more than ten days, then in all likelihood, a recall petition would go out, which has the full potential to then, you guessed it, lead to a by-election.
In essence, Farage had a gander at that timeline, decided he wasn’t going to bother waiting his turn, and rather huffily called one himself. Which means there is now a genuine possibility of two by-elections in Clacton inside the same year.
As a quick by-the-by, because I’ve seen a few people asking whether Rachel Reeves can simply block Farage from resigning. Technically, kind of, sort of. MPs cannot directly resign their seats, because Westminster is obviously a normal country and definitely not three Tudor ghosts in a trench coat.
Instead, they have to apply to the Chancellor to be appointed to one of two antique Crown offices, usually the Chiltern Hundreds or the Manor of Northstead, which then disqualifies them from being an MP.
In theory, Rachel Reeves could refuse to make the appointment, in practice, however, this simply won’t happen. The modern convention is that the appointment is granted as a procedural formality, and Reeves blocking it would instantly turn Farage’s stunt into an even bigger martyrdom machine.
So yes, technically possible, politically, absolutely not happening.
But back to the potential two by-elections:
By-election one: PCS investigation pauses and Farage versus Count Binface, as there will in this election be no Labour, no Conservatives, no Lib Dems, no Greens, no Restore. He wins that one uncontested, in all likelihood, and goes back to Westminster1. On completion of this melodrama, we then instantly move on to…
Possible By-election two: the investigation by the PCS un-pauses the moment he’s back in his seat. If the investigation into the £5m ends up with “guilty”, possible suspension follows, the recall petition goes out, and Clacton does this whole thing again. Same seat, same man, second verse.
One seat. One bloke. Two possible by-elections within the same calendar year, and he personally arranged the timing of the first. Eish. Say that sentence out loud and tell me it sounds like a functioning democracy.
This is all before we even get to the weapons-grade cognitive dissonance that Farage and Reform are living through when it comes to who should be paying for what, and the definition of “this looks shady”, because somehow Farage decided to offer to personally cover the roughly £200k cost of this by-election. His by-election. The one he triggered. The one he is currently standing in.
Just mull this over for a hot second, because I genuinely don’t think they realise just how insanely corrupt that sounds.
A candidate funding the very election he’s contesting belongs in a novel about a collapsing democracy, the kind where somebody skips the subtext and goes straight for the actual event.
The government confirmed almost immediately that it would be illegal for him to pay for his own election, so the offer was always going to be refused.
The outcome of this is that he gets to look generous for five minutes for offering it, then gets a fresh grievance the moment it’s turned down. Two outcomes, both useful to him, and neither one requires him to answer a single question about where the £5m came from. Questions which we know make Nige terribly tetchy.
Speaking of, this is also where the whole strategy, to my mind is properly batshit when you consider the fact that Farage has spent the past few months doing absolutely everything in his power to avoid exactly this.
Since early May, since the first reporting on the Harborne money, the man has developed a hitherto unknown bashfulness when it comes to the media. Zero Monday morning press-conferences. Sky News catches him at an airport and he loses his rag on the spot. Any interviewer who so much as raises the £5m gets treated like they’ve broken into his house. He has been, by any honest reading, dodging.
Yesterday, he effectively manufactured a situation where he has to stand on a stage, repeatedly, over six weeks, opposite a man with nothing to lose and everything to gain from asking about it.
By-elections like this one get hustings, local radio, and, given the profile of this one, probably at least one televised debate. Binface doesn’t need a serious platform to ask a serious question. The only thing he needs is a microphone and about eight seconds of nerve, and by all accounts he seems to have veritable bins full of both.
So sometime in the next few weeks, in a hall in Clacton, on camera, there is a version of Farage sat next to a man in a bin costume, being asked, on the record, what the money was for, with no spokesperson to hide behind and no process to blame.
His absolute best-case scenario is GB News being the only outlet in the room, and even then someone will have it clipped and circulating within the hour.
Keeping all this in mind, this is a situation he has 100% built himself.
No one forced his hand on the timing - he took one look at a slow, containable investigation and a September verdict, and chose a six-week sprint under maximum scrutiny instead, apparently because waiting for a standards committee to set the terms didn’t suit him.
Whatever you want to call that, it’s a man so incensed about being questioned that he’s engineered himself several more months of exactly that, on a stage he can’t fully control, with a bloke in a cape stood next to him the whole time.
This discussion would also not be complete without discussing the framing that he’s depending on in this, which is that he’s simply letting the people of Clacton decide his fate, the same move Donald Trump leaned on back in the 2024 election.
This sounds humble on paper, but spectacularly collapses in on itself after about ten seconds of actual thought.
The most obvious issue with this approach is that the UK isn’t the post-apocalyptic dystopia previously known as the United States. Farage isn’t running for anything resembling a presidency, and treating a self-initiated Essex by-election as a national referendum on his character stretches a mandate a terribly long way past what roughly seventy thousand Clacton voters are actually being asked to do.
There’s also the small matter of actual evidence. He is basically asking Clacton-on-Sea to clear his name before the standards investigation has even reported, without any of the details of the Harborne gift being public, without anyone outside a small committee having seen the paperwork.
All of this feels like a weird modern day trial-by-combat, Farage throwing himself at the feet of fate and asking us all to suspend reality for a bit while replacing an evidentiary process with what is, in all honesty, a glorified popularity contest triggered on the back of a massive fannywobble because he was uncomfortable with the media in this country finally turning their gaze on him not in admiration, but in scepticism.
A majority won on this basis is just not any sort of verdict on suspected financial impropriety. Winning a seat proves a candidate is more popular than whoever else is on the ballot, in this case a man dressed as a bin. It proves nothing about where £5m came from.
So that’s really where we find ourselves.
A man under investigation for undeclared money offers undeclared-adjacent money to run the election he’s contesting, unopposed by anyone serious, with a second by-election sitting in reserve depending on how September goes. It’s farcical from every conceivable angle, and it’s happening in broad daylight, to general shrugs.
Given the state of all of this, I have one humble request.
Please, someone, anyone - bring back the dolphin.
Some of you will remember the legend who turned up to one of Farage’s earlier counts in a full dolphin costume, and who left that count with more dignity intact than Farage did.
Get the wetsuit out of storage. Collect all the animals. Maybe even add a damned Bear while we’re looking for animals. If Clacton’s getting a Count in a cape as the only opposition on offer, it may as well get the full menagerie while it’s at it.
Lekker.
There is, of course, precedent for this in the UK - kind of. David Davis did his own version back in 2008, resigning as an MP to force a by-election over 42-day detention without charge. Labour didn’t field a candidate, called it a stunt, and Davis strolled back into Haltemprice and Howden against a field of independents and minor parties winning around 72% of the vote, the same kind of walkover Farage is about to enjoy in Clacton.
What if the bin man wins?
Farage is thick. He didn’t war game potential responses to his announcement.
He just assumed everybody else would behave as he expected.
Not just thick. Arrogant as well, only held upright by a few shreds of low cunning.