Farage's gambit

What Reform will really want from Clacton

The consensus formed quickly and will stick hard and fast: Nigel Farage can only make a fool of himself, regardless of the result in the (first?) Clacton by-election of 2026. That might turn out to be right – though I refuse to endorse any analysis which accepts as its starting premise that Count Binface is funny – and it’s clear regardless that no electoral event can put an end to scrutiny of either Reform’s finances or those of its leader.

Notwithstanding all of that, though, I still think this gambit is worth interrogating on its own terms. That’s what I did on our State of It podcast yesterday and I have a piece in this morning’s Times to that effect too. You should subscribe to read the latter in full, but what follows is a brief summary of what I think about Reform think. As I write this just before midnight on Tuesday 7th July, the overwhelming and near-unanimous reaction to Farage’s resignation is one of undisguised relish. No other party has taken his bait – not even the Greens – and the Westminster commentariat has by and large joined this popular front too.

I don’t describe this consensus as a precursor to defining myself against it, but I do nonetheless think it is illustrative of a habit that vindicates rather than undermines Reform’s analysis of the political mainstream. Tonight we have ended up where, frankly, polite opinion always wanted to be. Farage is a “grifter” – one of those wierd online words that has lodged itself unbidden in the vernacular of political professionals – and, more to the point, a loser and a joke who must only be described and analysed as such.

As I write in The Times today, the mass of questions, accusations and uncontested facts that led us to this juncture will not disappear when the writ is moved or when the seemingly inevitable result is declared. But whatever else you want to believe Farage is – whatever else he may or may not be proven to be – he is also a politician with political objectives. He leads what is now a fully functioning, national, mass-membership political party – something Ukip never was – with its own objectives too. So what are they?

Click to read the piece in full

Tuesday’s commentary reminded me of the opening to the excellent Ken Burns documentary on Huey Long – the Lousiana populist of whom I’ve written here before. That film, one of Burns’ first, opens with an epigraph from Robert Penn Warren, who described Long’s governorship as an example of the “drama of ethics and power”. There then follows a series of short interviews with Louisiana voters who lived through the heyday of the Kingfish.

Three old boys from poor parishes say he was great without reservation, and then a posh New Orleans matron breezily admits that her social circle would fantasise about his assassination without fail whenever they met of a Saturday evening. “It didn’t mean you meant to do it,” she says. “It just meant that you wished there was some way to rid the state of this incubus.” Long would have liked that, and taken it as a proof point for his entire worldview. Farage will take the same view of everything that’s been said today.

What Reform are very consciously trying to do – as Long did, with his self-published newspapers and marathon radio broadcasts – is break out of the existing political culture and fashion their own. We saw this in Makerfield, a by-election whose result obscured – or maybe demeaned – the experimentalism of the campaign. Farage’s team defied influential insiders to stand Robert Kenyon as Reform’s candidate and ran an almost entirely digital campaign. Kenyon’s launch video was viewed some 20 million times. Some of Reform’s meatiest fiscal policies yet – on tax breaks for tradesmen and the self-employed, as well as on overtime – were launched on social media, rather than at press conferences for lobby journalists.

And at the end of it they lost – by some margin, too – but they still increased their share of the vote on 2024. Since then, as I write at greater length in The Times, they have devised a list of target seats and a field strategy inspired – they say – by that employed by Morgan McSweeney and Hollie Ridley’s winning Labour campaign at the last general election. Know the seats you can win if you want a majority, divert resources from those you can’t – or rather the seats you probably won’t win, or don’t strictly need to win.

They are now spending a lot of money and hiring a lot of people in pursuit of said strategy. Already they had taken a conscious decision to do so while paying less deference to establishment manners, and spending less time chasing sympathetic coverage from the Westminster media.

The latter is an even harder ask now. But really it is not even yesterday’s question. Indeed, consider yesterday: Reform streamed the speech from their own studio, pushed out the text on Farage’s Substack. The alacrity with which Reform’s leadership abandoned its hostility to Tory defectors in the first quarter of this year is now, in hindsight, seen at the top of the party as a cautionary tale of what happens when Farage is conscripted into a Westminster game he never really wanted to play anyway.

It will suit Andy Burnham and indeed everyone else to treat Clacton as one long non-event – as Reform talking to itself while a man with a bin on his head makes him look silly. What it also is, though, is the first life cycle of a new political ecosystem in which it pursues a strategy of pure populism entirely on its own terms. Sure, we could one day look back on this as the beginning of the end. The core vote to which he is now speaking directly may yet shrink under this new glare of unhelpful scrutiny. But as far as Farage is concerned, all the right people are laughing – and creating the space for a new school of politics.