There are two words you will hear endlessly today: ‘hollow victory’. Nigel Farage is back as MP for Clacton, but by doing battle with a bin, he has achieved nothing but embarrassed himself. Look, his refusal to attend his own count just proves it.
That is what we will be told by many political commentators, but is it true? I would say the people who have been most embarrassed by this bizarre by-election were those on the liberal left who had this fantasy that Count Binface would win and put an end to Farage’s political career. By thinking that they have exposed the narrowness of their world. In their minds, most of the country, deep inside, possesses the values of Islington; it is just that all those dim, old people who live by the seaside get easily led along by populists. Now that Farage has been exposed as being in the pocket of a dodgy crypto millionaire and the like, even they will come round to realising where their interests lie and will unite behind a protest candidate.
I would be wary of anyone claiming that Farage has been weakened by it
Except that they didn’t. The not-Farage candidate – which is what Count Binface was – failed miserably. His 27 per cent of the vote will go down on the record as the highest ever received by a joke candidate, but in this instance he wasn’t a joke candidate. He was the deadly serious candidate of ‘decency’ put up against the ‘far right’. And he fell flat on his face. Farage, meanwhile, showed that his personal support is every bit as strong as it was before, by winning more votes than he did in the 2024 general election in spite of the turnout collapsing.
