Nigel Farage has properly lost his touch. Once upon a time, he’d have known how to play this. He’d have gone along with the joke, turned up alongside Count Binface and forced himself to grin away for the cameras, no matter how he felt underneath. He’d have known that Brits don’t like whiners. He’d have known that he has to always maintain a look of good-hearted bonhomie.
But the old magic is gone. That mojo he had, the innate ability to read the room, has deserted him. Now the inner personality persistently breaks through the outer facade: entitled, pompous, thin-skinned, quick to anger.
The Reform leader won this by-election, securing a modest increase in his 2024 showing to land 22,239 votes next to Count Binface’s 9,455. But even as he wins the battle he loses the war.
Farage’s aim was to create a narrative of one man taking on the establishment and use this to deflect and ultimately neutralise the standards inquiry in parliament over his murky financial affairs. Triggering a by-election was a tolerable risk because his Clacton constituency is perhaps the most right-wing in the country. No matter what happens, they’ll probably vote for him.
But while his campaign may have retained Clacton, it has undermined him outside of it. I can’t quite believe I’m writing this, but Binface is a kind of Kryptonite. He is so ludicrous that he made Farage’s storytelling untenable.
Farage told GB News: “I have managed to beat the establishment candidate.” To be clear, he is talking about a man dressed as a bin. He sounds mad. There’s no other word for it. If someone in the pub said this to you, you would think they were unwell. And that is the most sensible approach in this scenario too.
The idea that he would have to stand alongside Binface at the count clearly haunted Farage so much that he suggested Essex police warned him of a security threat. He avoided the count and stayed with supporters nearby – the first time a winning candidate has done this since the IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands in 1981.
Essex police quickly disabused journalists of that idea. The acting returning officer said: “I want to reassure people we have no reason not to proceed with the count process at this time.” Farage later himself revealed his true motivation to his supporters, perhaps by accident. “I’m damned if I’m going to stand on a stage… and be demeaned and humiliated by nobodies,” he said.
Farage’s nervousness over Binface meant that Reform was now embroiled in a war of words with the police. When MP Lee Anderson was asked about it on BBC morning television, he ended up calling the police liars. “Sometimes some of these police forces that we’ve been dealing with recently are about as honest as you lot at the BBC,” he said.
Morally, there’s something quite repugnant about a politician using security issues to conceal his own embarrassment. Two MPs have been murdered in terror attacks over the last decade. This isn’t something to be deployed at a whim, to avoid political inconvenience.
But politically the implications are much severe. The old vision of Farage – big smile, pint in one hand, cig in the other – is gone, replaced by this perpetually whining man-baby. It might not bother his core supporters, but it alienates those he needs to get on board around the country.
His sudden attack of nerves cost him his election coverage. By any right, the headlines today should have been about the Clacton result, but most were actually about his refusal to attend the count. The whole thing was so weird, and his clash with the police so vivid, that this was obviously what reporters were going to hone in on.
If the Reform leader had only been able to play along with the gag, none of this would have happened and he’d be in a better place. But he can’t do that. He’s too affected. He’s become too used to things going his own way and he is unable to emotionally deal with anything else.
The result itself was actually pretty poor. Binface secured 27 per cent of the vote – an unprecedented showing for a joke candidate. Even in Reform’s safest seat, a quarter of voters will evidently back anyone to stop Farage. Binface now joins Plaid Cymru in Caerphilly, the Greens in Gorton and Denton and Labour in Manchester as a symbol of how eagerly voters flock to the best placed candidate to stop Reform.
Nationally, the campaign has cost Farage badly. YouGov have Farage on -46 favourability. BMG Research polling for this newspaper saw his net approval rating collapse by ten percentage points in the last month, to -49. More in Common saw his approval rating fall ten points to -32 per cent.
What happens next? The standards inquiries which Farage launched this campaign to neutralise have already restarted. They were briefly suspended for the duration of the by-election, then quietly switched back on again shortly after the results were announced. If they find against him, it is likely that Farage will face a recall petition in his constituency. The Binface support numbers suggest there are more than enough voters to trigger another by-election.
Who knows what that will be like, after all the details are made plain by the standards investigations? Who knows how things will go for him if the Conservatives – the only other party which can realistically win in this seat – field a Martin Bell type candidate who left wingers and liberals can get behind?
But even if Farage wins again, which remains the most likely outcome, the process will demean him further in the country at large. It is all so absurd: the nonsense rhetoric, the seething anger, the joke candidates, the sleaze allegations, the endless byelections, the sheer pointlessness of it all.
Not so long ago, Farage was prime minister in waiting. Now he is a man who makes disputed claims about security advice because he is scared of a bin. And things will only go downhill from here.
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