Nigel Farage has just taken the biggest gamble of his decades-long political career. To try to draw a line on the financial scandals that have dogged him for the past few months, the Reform UK leader has asked the voters to decide his fate. He has resigned as the member of Parliament for Clacton and will face a by-election in August to try to win his job back.
The big gamble here is not really whether Farage will be returned to parliament. Barring some freak event, he can be reasonably confident of victory—his Clacton constituency, on the Essex coastline, is the most Reform-friendly seat in the country, and Reform is now polling even higher than in the 2024 general election. The other main parties have also made victory far easier for him by refusing to take part in the by-election, branding his resignation a "desperate stunt.” Other candidates who have declared they will stand include Count Binface, a satirical candidate who wears a bin on his head and claims to be from outer space; Piers Corbyn, brother of ex-Labour leader Jeremy and noted conspiracy nut; and Laurence Fox, an actor turned politician, leader of Reclaim, a right-wing microparty. Farage should have no trouble.
No, the gamble instead is that the Clacton by-election fails to reset the narrative in Farage and Reform’s favour. Farage has posed the battle to regain his seat as a straightforward contest between “the people versus the establishment.” This is made much harder when the other candidates on the ballot paper are a selection of weirdos and misfits rather than genuine contenders. What’s more, there is every risk that the questions around Farage’s finances start to make him look less like an insurgent, anti-system outsider, and more like the very political class whom voters so despise—as just another politician, in it for himself.
In a just world, these scandals probably wouldn’t come close to derailing Farage’s political ambitions, but they have undoubtedly provided Reform’s critics with plenty of ammunition. The first involves an undeclared donation of £5 million from Christopher Harborne, a cryptocurrency tycoon. Farage says this money has all gone towards his personal security. The tragic necessity of such security was recently brought home by last week’s murder of Ann Widdecombe—a prominent former Conservative MP and, more recently, Reform spokeswoman—in her home in rural Devon.
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