Nigel Farage has spent the last two years trying to portray himself as a genius atop British politics and the UK’s likeliest next prime minister. Now, he is set to spend the summer fighting for his political life against a man dressed as a bin. Politics can be a cruel game indeed.
In reality, Farage has no one but himself to blame for this situation. He has been mired in a compounding scandal around his apparent inability to refuse a quick buck. Farage has long been criticised for the outside financial interests he runs alongside his political career – other party leaders don’t tend to have sidelines promoting gold bullion, or recording cameo videos. Farage does.
But the story was propelled to another level following the Guardian’s revelation that Farage had accepted a supposedly “personal” and “unconditional” gift of £5 million from a crypto billionaire who is also one of his party’s major donors – and didn’t bother to declare it.
Farage’s story about the donation constantly changed, and so reporters dug further, finding new questions every time they did: the Reform leader now also stands accused of accepting undeclared gifts and political support from 32-year-old convicted criminal George Cottrell, ranging from the use of a London townhouse, to paying for someone to do Farage’s social media.
Fresh stories seem to appear every few days, something Farage is attributing to an establishment witch hunt – while being oddly unable or unwilling to say the stories aren’t actually true. Similarly, it is hard to accuse the outlets concerned – the Guardian and the Sunday Times – of going easy on the Conservatives and Labour. The Guardian revealed Boris Johnson’s partygate, and the ST was instrumental in uncovering the Labour Together scandal.
Depressingly, it seems like the freebies, payments and donations accepted by Farage would almost certainly have been within parliamentary rules, if only he had bothered to declare them. It’s just that, for whatever reason, he didn’t. That’s a colossal miscalculation of his own making, and one that’s left him open to multiple parliamentary investigations.
On Tuesday, Farage finally lost his temper. In what was surely intended as a furious broadside at the establishment, Farage gave a speech in which he likened his gift from Christopher Harborne to a “lottery win”, defended his right to trouser in hundreds of thousands of pounds extra income while being paid as an MP, and decried an establishment stitch-up against him.
Perhaps his fans were cheering on his every word. But to anyone else, Farage’s lengthy and rambling diatribe was unlikely to be convincing. The man who would be prime minister looked tired, irritable, and self-obsessed. But eventually, he got to the point: parliament wouldn’t get to decide his fate, he said. The people of Clacton would. He was resigning and triggering a by-election.
Farage’s plan made very little sense on his own terms. When parliament’s standards committee investigates an MP, they present their report to parliament and recommend a range of sanctions, which the whole House then votes on. If MPs suspend an MP for ten days or more, that triggers a right for voters in that MP’s seat to trigger a by-election to recall that MP.
So, looking at it one way, Nigel Farage was right: it was always going to be up to the voters of Clacton whether or not he was removed. No one disagrees with him on that. He was elected, and that can’t simply be overturned.
What Farage has done by skipping the process and triggering a by-election now is akin to a criminal defendant wandering into a random courtroom and demanding the jury there convict or acquit him. There’s no prosecution to make the case, no one knows what he’s doing there, and he’s fundamentally misunderstood how any of this works – or he’s hoping his fan base does.
Suggested Reading
SPECIAL: Farage fighting for his political life
The problem for Farage is that he seems to have just assumed that everyone else would play along with his harebrained scheme, and so far they’re refusing to do so. Just like a judge and jury might not play along with a defendant storming the court, the UK’s other political parties are refusing to contest Farage’s pointless by-election.
A battle Farage was determined to frame as himself versus Britain’s political establishment is instead likely to be dominated by his efforts to defeat serial comedy candidate Count Binface, who is campaigning on introducing a £1 maximum price on croissants and a bridge to space. When you want to be PM, you should generally avoid getting caught in political battles with men dressed as bins.
There is no way to win such a fight. Farage must surely hope that he can emerge victorious in an election where no major parties field candidates, but such a victory looks entirely hollow, and the contest totally pointless. Given that, Farage might even be tempted to u-turn on his idea to resign as an MP in the first place – but then he would forever be the man who ran scared of a bin.
Whatever happens, the coverage of his financial scandals will continue, but Reform’s ambitious MPs and those eyeing up seats will surely be alarmed. Reform’s senior team were already whispering about whether Farage was losing his touch. Those murmurings will inevitably grow louder now.
Farage very obviously lost his temper, didn’t think things through, and is now making everyone around him look stupid as they try to explain his decision to the public and the media. It was this that spelled the downfall first of Boris Johnson, then of Keir Starmer – when loyalists have to publicly abase themselves defending the indefensible, their thoughts soon turn to ideas of regicide.
Soon, Nigel Farage could easily find that a bin is the least of his problems.
Most popular
The Reform guide to climate change
The unravelling of Nigel Farage
Farage’s meltdown was the worst speech in modern British political history
17 ways Nigel Farage could get himself out of this mess
