The funniest election in recent British politics (other than the Makerfield one, where Andy Burnham not only won that local battle but became PM a few days later when Keir Starmer finally resigned) has, alas, ended in the way we should’ve known it would, namely, Nigel Farage winning the Clacton-on-Sea by-election. To be perfectly honest, I remain unsure exactly what this was even supposed to achieve, and I’ll just quote the Guardian’s analyst to sum it up:
Farage forced the byelection at the start of last July in an attempt take control of a narrative tide that had turned against him. After the Guardian revealed he had received a £5m personal gift from Christopher Harborne, a Thailand-based crypto billionaire, in April 2024 he had been dogged by questions about his financial backing. Other revelations followed and questions mounted.
The parliamentary standards watchdog announced it was opening a formal investigation into gifts received by Farage, and the long, regular press conferences headed by the Reform UK leader abruptly stopped. When he did a very limited number of interviews, the normally performatively affable politician was testy and defensive.
He resigned as the MP for the Clacton constituency at the start of July, saying the “people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions”, and billing the fight as “a people versus the establishment byelection”. The establishment, however, chose not to play. All of the major parties declined to field candidates and take part in what they called a “media circus” and “vanity project”.
This was the bit I never understood. I mean, I also don’t understand how Farage is somehow not part of the establishment after over 30 years of political activity, but what else was going to happen if the other big parties refused to do anything to stop him? What was the point?
Enter Count Binface at this point…
…the hero we all needed, cos he took an already stupid situation and raised the absurdity level to something quite magnificent. Having just stood against Andy Burnham at Makerfield a few months ago, the good count now stood up again to make this battle even more ridiculous. The Scottish writer James Oswald, who I follow on Bluesky, arghed a bit at the development:
And I understand where he’s coming from (I was quite interested to discover we actually have laws against this sort of thing here in Australia), but at the same I think the bigger problem is the serious candidates, or at any rate the ones being taken seriously enough by voters to get into government. Farage is, in his way, at least as unserious as Binface. You know, man who hates Europe but who stood repeatedly for the European parliament, of which he wound up being a member for 20 years. That sort of thing isn’t based in a serious desire to serve people, just to serve himself (he gets a big pension for having been an MEP from next year; just watch him not turn down European money). Binface is at least transparent with his own ridiculousness.
So by the time voting day came around, there were actually nearly three dozen candidates on the ballot—apparently the largest ever number of candidates for an election like this—including at least three Monster Raving Loonies (hello Nick the Incredible Flying Brick), and, as already noted, it ended with Farage winning; much as we relished the idea of Binface actually pulling it off, I didn’t seriously think he would do so. But, to quote that Guardian analyst again:
And while the people of Clacton did back Farage again, this was no overwhelming victory. The Reform UK leader won 22,239 votes, 63.34% of the vote on a 44.37% turnout. Convincing, yes, but significantly short of the 72% won by David Davis in 2008 when he resigned his seat and stood again as a protest over the issue of civil liberties.
With no other mainstream options, the parody candidate Count Binface, Farage’s nearest competitor, attracted 9,455 votes, 26.93% of the total. In his “victory speech” posted on X, he noted that this was a 10,000% increase on the 95 votes he managed against Andy Burnham in the Makerfield byelection. “A new dawn has broken, has it not?” he wrote, echoing Tony Blair’s 1997 victory speech. “Literally, because it’s past 6.30 in the morning here in Clacton-on-Sea.” […]
Labour said the result was “no victory” for Farage, with the party’s chair, Bridget Phillipson, saying “the mountain of sleaze and scandal he and Reform are now engulfed in has grown and grown while he’s been trying to distract the public by fighting a byelection against a bin”. The Liberal Democrats said Farage had come away from the byelection “looking daft”. Farage himself was atypically restrained, writing on X: “The result in Clacton speaks for itself.”
Unfortunately for him, it really does. That turnout was abysmal (Australia’s compulsory voting system means we don’t get such minority numbers fucking things up for everyone else), and Binface still got a substantial amount of votes (his best result ever):
Put in those terms, yeah, Nigel has piss all mandate after all this nonsense; this is a sign of how much of his electorate is tired of his shit. But the funniest outcome is that the parliamentary standards investigation has now resumed, almost immediately upon the end of the spectacle, and some are saying Farage wasn’t expecting that. I don’t know what they base that on, but apparently if the investigation does find against Farage, he could be suspended from parliament… and thus trigger ANOTHER by-election. And if that happens, I feel the electorate will be even more done with. Maybe the major parties will even be part of the show then…
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