The leader of Reform PLC Nigel Farage has today resigned his Parliamentary seat of Clacton and stood down as an MP, forcing a by-election in which he will stand as a candidate for his party.
This has come after many weeks of intense media and Parliamentary scrutiny surrounding multi-million-pound donations Farage received from ultra-wealthy donors which he did not declare after becoming an MP, as all MPs are required to do for any financial interest once elected. Farage has routinely insisted these donations were “personal gifts”, for which the donors expected nothing in return.
In perhaps the most self-pitying resignation speech I have ever seen a British politician make, Farage has framed this election as him vs the major parties, Reform vs the establishment, and that every question being asked of him by the media, the standards commissioner, and the mainstream parties will be for the good people of Clacton-on-Sea alone to answer.
The trouble with this is, the only candidate that has definitively announced their intention to stand against Farage so far is Count Binface of the Count Binface Party. The Tories, Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens, even Rupert Lowe’s ultra-right wing Restore Britain have all boycotted this by-election. So, it won’t be Reform vs the major parties. It’ll be Farage vs Count Binface. A clown-on-clown showdown.
Farage’s attempt to draw the focus away from his dodgy donors and seize control of the narrative with this resignation has speedily, and hilariously, crashed and burned mere hours after his resignation. Not only this, the questions about his donations are still making headlines across the nation, and will continue to make headlines for the duration of this by-election.
Also during the next few weeks, Andy Burnham is expected to be coronated as Labour Leader and Prime Minister, which I expect will occupy the majority of the media’s bandwidth for most of Farage’s campaign. If indeed the only other party standing against Reform will be the Binface Party, the result is a foregone conclusion, and the likes of BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Farage’s loathed Sky News won’t bother showing up until polling day.
Clacton is one of the most right-wing voting seats in the country. For those who remember, it was Douglas Carswell’s seat when he became the first UKIP MP in 2014. Clacton has never returned a left-wing MP in its current form, and in previous iterations the electorate has only returned a left-wing member twice in its history; in 1997 and 1848. Whilst we may be some consolidation of the left-wing and anti-Farage vote behind whoever else will stand against him this time, it won’t come close to enough, as the total right-wing vote in Clacton in 2024 was over 75%.
That being said, if Binface manages to pull off a complete blinder and rob Farage of his seat, I will bask in the ensuing schadenfreude for months, perhaps years.
Due to the lack of other major parties fielding candidates, the nation’s mainstream press will be conspicuously absent from Clacton, apart from a few investigative journalists attempting to dig up dirt on, you guessed it, Farage’s donations.
This is a man who is touted as a potential future Prime Minister of this country, a position where the media spotlight and public scrutiny is bearing down on you every second of every day for years and years. This is the first properly damaging scandal Farage has faced, as is a rite of passage for many seeking to enter Number 10.
And what has he done in the face of it? Thrown a woe-is-me hissy fit on camera and sprinted away from Parliamentary scrutiny as fast as his Union Flag socks will carry him, if only temporarily. If this is how he acts under pressure as a backbench MP, he wouldn’t last one week as Prime Minister.
He’s also used his resignation speech to claim, again, that he is the “most attacked politician in modern Britain”. Whilst political violence or threats are abhorrent and unacceptable in any circumstances and Farage should not have to be subjected to it, he is objectively not the most attacked politician in Britain. For example, I think the families of Sir David Amess and Jo Cox would argue the point better than I could.
Farage will now spend his summer being chased by television cameras around the streets of Clacton, ignoring (or rising to) barked questions about his finances, and forcing his constituents to their polling stations for this ridiculous self-fellating publicity stunt, which won’t even get much publicity once Burnham arrives in Downing Street.
One fact is rather obvious, not just in this case, but throughout British political history; if you resign, you’re guilty, or will shortly be announced as such.
During the course of the standards investigations process in Parliament, a few weeks before any investigation is passed to the Standards Committee, the person who is subject to investigation is contacted and given a summary of the points of the investigation to prepare a rebuttal.
Farage is subject to investigation, and so it is suspected he has recently been provided with this summary. In the face of what I expect will have been overwhelming evidence against him that would certainly have resulted in a recall petition, he has jumped before being pushed to avoid humiliation, and inadvertently belly-flopped into an even deeper septic tank of ignominy.
If he wins this by-election and returns to Parliament, the standards investigation will resume, and it is widely expected to conclude that Farage broke the rules, triggering a likely third by-election in Clacton in as many years. I doubt his fence-sitting voters will thank him for that.
The basis for his cries of innocence is that when he received these donations, he was not “politically active”. However, the man was the Chairman of Reform PLC at the time, honourable member or not, and also a majority shareholder of Reform PLC, actively campaigning for that party on national television and across social media.
I’m not aware of anyone who has been Chairman of a political party with as massive a platform as Farage who has not tried to persuade people to vote for their party. If, as Farage’s loyalists are insisting, he was not making any effort to convince people to vote Reform whilst he was Reform’s Chairman, I would argue he was a rather shitty and negligent Chairman.
He’s also been an objectively shitty MP for an area which desperately needs eager and altruistic representation.
The village of Jaywick is within Farage’s constituency, which has consistently topped national charts as the most deprived community in the UK. In recent years, Jaywick was visited by a United Nations Special Rapporteur as part of a UN investigation into the causes of extreme poverty.
Jaywick suffers unemployment as high as 50%. 62% of adult residents receive benefits, and 40% cannot work due to long-term health issues or disability. Many properties lack basic amenities such as electricity or running water, and the area is prone to flooding from the sea. Crime and drug abuse are rife, and the culmination is repelling any private investment to lift the community out of this situation. All of this in Farage’s own constituency.
And with a population of 96% white British, Jaywick doesn’t exactly fit Farage’s narrative that immigration is the root of all of Britian’s problems. This is a community he is meant to represent and champion. If he truly cared about the people who live there, the same people who helped raise him into Parliament, perhaps he’d use his substantial personal wealth to improve the lives of his constituents, and score a point against the Government that he has achieved Jaywick’s renewal with no help from Labour whilst he’s at it.
But instead, he says he will spend his wealth on Ferraris.
I’ve said before that Reform’s decline has well and truly started, and this latest by-election self-own is certainly the most glaring symptom of that decline. For a party soaring as high in the polls as Reform, they have not managed to translate that into much political success. Of the five by-elections held since 2024, Reform have won just one, by a measly six votes. Their polling share is steadily being eaten away, and they are losing votes from both sides; to Labour, Greens, Lib Dems and Tories to the left, and to Restore Britain to the right.
When Andy Burnham is coronated as PM, his honeymoon period is expected to take further chomps out of Reform’s popularity, and if Andy can translate his popularity into actual policy success and convert a honeymoon into a functioning and happy proverbial marriage, Reform’s polling plateau will start sloping down towards sea level.
On top of this, should Farage lose either of his two upcoming by-elections, or simply hit the fuck-it button and decide frontline politics is too much work for not enough cash, Reform will be without its leader, its figurehead, the only well-known and popular figure in the party. They will be doomed.
If you can’t tell, I am bloody loving this.
stay safe
/e