There are two words you will hear endlessly today: ‘hollow victory’. Nigel Farage is back as MP for Clacton, but by doing battle with a bin, he has achieved nothing but embarrassed himself. Look, his refusal to attend his own count just proves it.
That is what we will be told by many political commentators, but is it true? I would say the people who have been most embarrassed by this bizarre by-election were those on the liberal left who had this fantasy that Count Binface would win and put an end to Farage’s political career. By thinking that they have exposed the narrowness of their world. In their minds, most of the country, deep inside, possesses the values of Islington; it is just that all those dim, old people who live by the seaside get easily led along by populists. Now that Farage has been exposed as being in the pocket of a dodgy crypto millionaire and the like, even they will come round to realising where their interests lie and will unite behind a protest candidate.
I would be wary of anyone claiming that Farage has been weakened by it
Except that they didn’t. The not-Farage candidate – which is what Count Binface was – failed miserably. His 27 per cent of the vote will go down on the record as the highest ever received by a joke candidate, but in this instance he wasn’t a joke candidate. He was the deadly serious candidate of ‘decency’ put up against the ‘far right’. And he fell flat on his face. Farage, meanwhile, showed that his personal support is every bit as strong as it was before, by winning more votes than he did in the 2024 general election in spite of the turnout collapsing.
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The LibDems were first out of the blocks this morning demanding that the Commons investigation into Farage’s finances continue, and so presumably it will. But it will be much harder now for the LibDems or anyone else to claim that Farage’s donations put him beyond the political pale. The people of Clacton have re-elected him in spite of knowing all about them. If Farage gets skewered by some parliamentary rule, it will look all the more like the establishment plot that he asserts it is. It will be like one of those legal cases where the judge thinks one thing and the jury quite another.
It is possible to argue, of course, that the people of Clacton are not the same thing as the people of Britain, and that their views on the financial probity of public figures differs from those of the country as a whole. But that argument will only serve to expose another political figure who has taken personal approval from one constituency as a proxy for support from the country as a whole: yes, Andy Burnham, who has no personal mandate other than from the people of Makerfield. The Prime Minister is going to be reminded endlessly about that this autumn, but especially every time he floats a proposal to diverge from the 2024 manifesto.
Kemi Badenoch comes out a loser from Clacton, too. She gains the award for the most absurd thing said during the by-election campaign. The people of Clacton, she said a week ago, deserve better than Farage. In which case, why did she decline to put up a candidate?
On the face of it, Clacton tells us nothing about the state of political play in Britain at the moment, because it wasn’t a proper contest. But I would be wary of anyone claiming that Farage has been weakened by it. Look at this week’s polls, showing Labour only just about notching up a national lead over Reform in spite of Burnham’s honeymoon. They also show the Conservatives failing to make any capital from Farage’s personal troubles. If there is a winner from Clacton, it is pretty clearly Reform UK and its leader.
