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Farage’s Great Gamble
Politics
Farage’s Great Gamble
A by-election victory will not mean Reform UK’s mastermind is out of the woods.
UK Special Coverage
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.
The other scandal concerns Farage’s long-standing relationship with George Cottrell, a Reform donor and aristocrat who was once convicted of wire fraud. Both are currently being investigated by parliament as possible breaches of transparency rules, although there is no suggestion that Farage has broken any laws, misused public money, or personally benefited from any ill-gotten cash.
The danger for Farage is that instead of silencing the allegations of impropriety, the by-election could place them under a harsher spotlight. Several more weeks of Farage’s financial scandals dominating the headlines could prove damaging in the long run. His personal approval ratings have already slid to their lowest point since the 2024 general election. The parliamentary investigations will also resume should Farage be returned to his seat.
Depending on how serious the investigations deem any breaches of the financial-reporting rules, he could end up being suspended from parliament—and then having to face another by-election to retake his seat. At which point, few would blame Farage if he opted instead for an early retirement. Even if the people of Clacton decide they would rather have him as their MP than a comedian who wears a garbage can for a helmet, this does not mean he is out of the woods.
If Farage were to be taken out of the picture entirely, this could easily represent the biggest setback for the British right since Tony Blair and New Labour cast the Tories out of power for 13 years. The Reform leader may be flawed, but he offers by far the best vehicle for the British people’s desire to overturn the status quo. A Reform party without Farage would not have been ahead in 300 near-consecutive opinion polls—and it would not have romped to victory in two sets of local elections (usually the best guide to success in parliamentary elections). This is not to say there are no other figures in Reform who could prove to be effective leaders—the home-affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf and the Treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick would be the favourites—but none has anything like the name recognition of Nigel Farage.
The Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch will no doubt be pleased by the Farage farragos. Although the Tories are second in most national opinion polls, Reform has been trouncing them in recent electoral contests.
In the Makerfield by-election, which allowed Labour’s Andy Burnham to return to parliament and plot his path to PM, the Conservatives finished in a humiliating fourth place on 2.2 per cent of the vote. The picture was even bleaker in Gorton and Denton, where Reform came second to the Greens, and the Tories floundered on 1.9 per cent of the vote. Britain’s so-called “natural party of government” now struggles to get into double figures in parts of the country where they were recently in contention. But could the political kneecapping of Farage reverse the Tories’ fortunes?
One reason to suspect not is that voters have still not forgiven the Conservatives for their recent stint in government. Despite promising to cut immigration, they allowed legal migration to explode to record numbers, while also surrendering the English Channel to the small-boat people-traffickers. Their (always questionable) reputation for sound economic management has also been left in ruins after years of stagnant growth, tax hikes and mounting public debt. This is why Badenoch’s high personal approval ratings—the best of any UK party leader—have never translated into a recovery for her party. The Conservatives’ natural voters do not merely feel let down; they feel a visceral sense of betrayal that may take many more years to heal. Should Reform stop looking like a party on its path to power, many of its voters would sooner opt for alternatives, like Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, than go back to the Tories.
The danger of a Reform slump leading to a divided, rudderless right can hardly be overstated. For all of Keir Starmer’s manifest flaws, he at least recognized Reform as the biggest threat to Labour maintaining its electoral base. The signs suggest that incoming prime minister Andy Burnham will be far more eager to chase the approval of the left than the country as a whole, which will be music to the ears of Labour party members and MPs. As bizarre as it may sound, many in Labour see Starmer’s real failure as his inability to withstand pressure from the right. In the parallel universe that is Labour land, Starmer would have lasted longer in the job had he flung open the borders even further, raised taxes and welfare, and turned on the public-spending taps.
The upshot of this is that some of the Labour government’s few sensible reforms are likely to be watered down or shelved entirely by the Burnham regime. Most notably, Shabana Mahmood’s plans to make it harder for new migrants to settle and claim welfare are rumoured to be on the chopping block. This would not only be financially ruinous but could also make it legally tricky for a future government to control the border, as more than a million migrants will be moved from temporary visas to having legal settlement rights.
The other trap being sprung on a future government for the right is in Burnham’s obsessive focus on ‘devolution’. The future PM, drawing on his time as mayor of Greater Manchester, is convinced that Britain’s problems stem from too much power being centralized in Westminster. But while handing greater powers to metro mayors and local councils sounds like it is boosting local democracy, the more likely outcome is that it empowers another layer of political apparatchiks—the exact type of activist-cum-bureaucrat who would be eager to frustrate a future government of the right, in whichever party-political form that takes. Reform or the Tories could win a general election promising to remake the country, only to find out they have far fewer means to do so than did any previous government.
The battle between the establishment and the people that Farage wants to set up in Clacton may well be happening right now in Westminster. The unelected Andy Burnham will be making decisions that could reshape the country profoundly, long before anyone can get a mandate to reverse them. That may prove to be the far bigger story of the summer than the by-election against Count Binface.
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