Clacton: where politics goes to die

Nigel Farage has been in hot water.

A lot. And now he’s in it again. The Reform UK leader has resigned as MP for Clacton following investigations into donations he has received and is now running in the by-election, declaring that it’s up to the voters to absolve him of his sins. Really, though, he’s probably doomed either way. If he wins, he’ll still be investigated by Parliament. If he loses, his political career and, probably, Reform’s electoral chances will be destroyed. So, what’s really going on? Let’s explore this hellscape together.

The background

Nigel Farage’s electoral record is well documented. He has led three different parties and unsuccessfully stood for election to Parliament seven times before finally winning Clacton as leader of Reform UK in the 2024 general election. He made his career by successfully campaigning for the UK to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum as part of the group Leave.EU. You might think he’d have left it there, but that’s not the way Farage operates. Never content to be out of the headlines, he created the Brexit Party to push for a harder Brexit, then stood aside in 2019 for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives to sweep back into power. Nige then proceeded to quit as Brexit Party leader, oversaw its transition into Reform UK, then barrelled back into the leadership ahead of the 2024 election to offer an anti-establishment option to the British electorate that blamed the country’s problems on immigration and the globalist elite. There are two ways of assessing Reform’s performance in that election. One is the simplistic way, to say that Reform are irrelevant as they only saw five MPs enter Parliament; the other is to acknowledge that they secured four million votes, the third-most at that election, and were shafted by first past the post. A detailed breakdown of Reform’s electoral performance is not the point of this piece; suffice it to say that they performed well for a new party at their first election, spoke to genuine grievances experienced by millions of people, and Farage was finally where he had always wanted to be.

Or so we thought. It quickly became clear that Nige was less than interested in actually doing his job as an MP. He spent more time jetting off across the pond to fraternise with the aristocracy of the American right, the sort of people who think Labour are communists and want to topple European democracies and replace them with regimes of their choosing, and pulling off ridiculous stunts like watching an October 2025 session of PMQs from the Commons gallery in protest at not having a right of reply after Keir Starmer attacked him, apparently unaware that MPs have to enter what is essentially a lottery in order to ask the Prime Minister a question. I’ve never been convinced that Farage is motivated by public service. His declaration that Reform would enter Parliament like foxes in a henhouse after 2024 turned out to be another hollow statement from him, one of many that leads me to conclude that he is, rather, motivated by personal ambition and a desire for attention.

And this brings us onto the reason we’re enduring this farce of a by-election now. It was revealed earlier this year that prior to his election as an MP, Farage had received a £5 million donation from the Thai-based crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne, which he is alleged to have failed to declare upon his election as an MP. The Guardian has reported that some of this money was not given to Farage until he declared that he would be standing. Harborne’s lawyers have stated that the donation was unconditional, but Farage is quite supportive of cryptocurrency: Reform are the only British political party to accept donations in crypto, and Farage has been referred to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner over claims, reported by The Guardian, that he lobbied the Bank of England to drop plans for a state-run ‘Britcoin’ that would negatively impact Harborne’s crypto investments. But Harborne isn’t the only controversial billionaire that Farage has got into bed with. Enter stage right George Cottrell. Cottrell is a man with a rather murky background, according to the BBC. He comes from aristocratic stock, threw his lot in with UKIP and rose to become part of Nigel’s inner circle. He’s also been imprisoned in the US, having been arrested on suspicion of money laundering and served time for wire fraud. He’s also been involved in the same cryptocurrency endeavours as Harborne and has provided Farage with security, which Nige claims the gift from Harborne was to pay for, and drivers. All this has led Farage to resign as an MP and fight the ensuing by-election, screaming that this is all an establishment stitch-up and that only the people can determine his fate. So let’s look at how that’s going.

The candidates

The most important thing to note is that none of the established parties in this country are playing along with Nige’s little game. Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens have all refused to stand a candidate in this election. Even Restore Britain, the far-far-right party created to feed leader Rupert Lowe’s grudge against Farage, aren’t standing a candidate. So, what options has that left the good people of Clacton with? Farage’s principal opponent is Count Binface, the intergalactic space warrior who promises to force MPs who switch parties to hold a by-election, abolish the House of Lords, nationalise Adele, and force oil and gas companies to pay for everyone to install solar panels on their houses. Personally, I’d vote for him. The Monster Raving Loony Party are here, which is always fun. They’re even standing two candidates. There’s the usual list of independent candidates who we’ve never heard of before and will never hear from again. Laurence Fox, part-time actor and full-time Twitter edgelord, has decided to throw his hat into the ring, because he’s had so much success in elections before. Given the quality of opposition, Farage should easily win, but it’s not exactly a competitive crowd he’s up against, so when he wins, it won’t exactly be the vindication he hopes for.

What’s at stake?

This brings me to my main point. Whether he wins or loses, Farage’s career as a frontline politician is probably over. Let’s assume he wins, which I believe he will. The parliamentary investigation into his affairs will continue as before. The people of Clacton will not have absolved him; by holding this by-election, he’s merely stalling the verdict. If he’s cleared of wrongdoing, then he’s discredited himself by throwing his toys out the pram and holding the by-election in the first place. If he is found to have broken the rules, it could result in a ten-day suspension, after which voters in Clacton can sign a recall petition and another by-election will be held. In that case, Farage will have wasted money and time by triggering the first by-election. He and Reform will probably be discredited, and his venture will end in ignominy. The same will be true on the off chance that Farage loses. It will probably be the most embarrassing loss in British political history, to have lost to a bloke with a bin on his head, and it will more than likely end his career and Reform’s chances of ever achieving government.

Now, that is a scary prospect in its own right. Either the Conservatives will return to prominence in the absence of Reform or something even uglier will rise to replace it. At the time of writing, Restore Britain have offered Reform an electoral alliance – a far-right SDP-Liberal-type affair in which two groupings that don’t really like each other because they’re competing on the same field get into bed together out of self-interest. In the short term, though, Farage is, I hope, screwed either way, and that’s a comforting thought.

Conclusion

The 2026 Clacton by-election will go down as one of the most farcical episodes in British electoral history. It is being fought against the backdrop of, I believe, one man’s arrogance in thinking that the rules don’t apply to him and he can just dodge scrutiny whenever he’s accused of doing something shady. It is a lesson that you can’t pull off any old nonsense you feel like and get away with it. Farage claims to want to be Prime Minister, but he’s apparently uninterested in even doing his job as an MP. To me, the man has always been motivated by greed and self-interest, and having finally become an MP on his eighth time of trying, he’s squandered it all and limboed under the very low bar already set by generations of sleazy elected officials before him, all to advance the interests of the super-rich. This looks to me like the beginning of the end of his parliamentary career, and if it is, then good riddance to him, quite frankly.