Nigel Farage asks the crudest question: are you with me or against me?
Calling a by-election in Clacton is a new tactic but Nigel Farage’s strategy is the same: simplify, polarise, demonise, says Eliot Wilson
Whatever your opinion of Nigel Farage – and there’s a broad spectrum – he knows how to put on a show. The Reform UK leader has always been more Barnum than Bismarck, and on Tuesday he informed the media that he would be making a statement at 2pm about his “future in public life”. It would be transmitted by Reform UK and no journalists would be present; literally “no questions asked”.
The masterstroke, the detail a lesser performer might have overlooked, was to heighten the drama by starting 10 minutes late.
No-one quite knew what Farage was going to say. It was clearly related to mounting questions about gifts and donations he has received and whether they should have been declared on the . There is a wider issue with Farage and his attitude to money, which boils down to transparency and the perception of influence.
He began by rehearsing Reform UK’s successes since he resumed the leadership. He insisted he had “done nothing wrong” and that he had “not broken the law in any way at all” nor “misused public money”. He is not accused of either of those charges.
Farage then hurled himself headlong into a swirling mixture of self-congratulation, the importance of “leaders that know how to make money” and a heavy dash of victimhood and martyrdom at the hands of “the Establishment”.
“Frankly, it is like living in a communist country.”
(As far as I am aware, he has never done so, though surely impenetrable borders, a nomenklatura with legally obtained privileges and widespread disinformation would give him some comfort.)
Some had speculated that the announcement about Farage’s “future in public life” would be that he was walking away from politics to pursue one of the very many lucrative commercial offers he claims to have had. I was never convinced. He gave up the leadership of UKIP twice and the Brexit Party/Reform UK once, yet here he remains, 62 years old, leading the polls, always on camera. This is his lifeblood.
Still he teased the audience.
“I’ve thought about it hard, and I’ve decided today, today I will resign as a member of Parliament for Clacton-on-Sea, thereby forcing a by-election.”
Always wait for the pay-off.
“It’s a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire Establishment, to frankly tell them where to go, and that is why I will be putting my name forward to stand in this by-election.”
Perhaps unwittingly, Farage revealed his essence, the root of his party’s success and maybe of its ultimate limits. There was nothing about policy or making a better Britain; when the mask was torn away, there was blind, bilious, visceral rage. Not politics but primal scream therapy.
David Davis has been here before
Farage’s plan is not new. In June 2008, David Davis, then Shadow Home Secretary, resigned his Haltemprice and Howden seat to force a by-election in which he was a candidate, protesting at “the insidious and relentless erosion of civil liberties in Britain”. (When the Director of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, called the move “very brave”, a Cabinet minister slyly mentioned “late-night, hand-wringing, heart-melting phone calls” between the two, and was forced formally to apologise. This foolish innuendo came from one Andy Burnham.)
Davis was re-elected with 72 per cent of the vote; but the main parties refused to participate and he faced only the Greens, the hard-right English Democrats and a straggle of no-hopers. Likewise Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens will not field candidates in Clacton, and Farage will be re-elected by a huge majority. It is worth remembering that Davis’s 2008 victory affected civil liberties not a jot, and he did not return to the front bench for eight years.
Farage’s situation is slightly different. There is no point of high principle, just a carnival barker sharpening a tribal feeling of “them” v “us”. He has also said that “the people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions”. If he scores a win like Davis did in 2008, he will claim the mandate of the voters of Clacton and use it as a shield.
He is currently being investigated by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Daniel Greenberg, over potential breaches of Rule 5 of the Code of Conduct for MPs, that “Members must fulfil conscientiously the requirements of the House in respect of the registration of interests”. That investigation will be suspended while Farage is not a Member of Parliament, but if, as seems almost certain, he is re-elected, it will then resume.
If the Commissioner judges that Farage breached the Code of Conduct, he can recommend an appropriate sanction to the Committee on Standards, which would then seek an order from the House to enforce it. If Farage was suspended from the House for at least 10 sitting days or 14 calendar days, the Recall of MPs Act 2015 would trigger a recall petition in his constituency, which, if successful, would unseat him and cause a by-election in which he would be entitled to stand.
Procedurally and legally, it would make no difference that there had already been a by-election. But Farage would undoubtedly point to a resounding recent re-election, the blessing of the people – vox populi, vox Dei – to discredit a second by-election as unnecessary.
Farage is kicking up dust. He wants to appear the victim of treasons, stratagems and spoils, seeking the absolution of his constituents before the Commissioner’s investigation has even concluded: a by-election victory as vaccination against future sanctions.
His tactics are new here, but the strategy is not: simplify, polarise, demonise. Farage does not want a by-election about regulations and propriety, the judgement of a neutral arbiter on whether he followed the rules. His terms are broader and cruder: elites and the people, knee-jerk instincts, bureaucracy and a free-for-all, good intentions and sinister manipulation. His question, at its crudest, is: are you with me, or against me?
Eliot Wilson is a writer and historian