Farage: I'll spend even less time in the House of Commons now

Having returned to the House of Commons following his farcical summer battle with a bin, might a new, reinvigorated Nigel Farage be planning a more vigorous approach to Parliament the second time around? Nope – in fact, the Reform leader has told his bosses at GB News he’s planning to spend even less time in the House of Commons.

“Grilled” on the news channel on which he hosts an evening show by its political editor and Reform fanboy Christopher Hope, Farage explained that, now he has met so many of his Clacton constituents, the best thing for them would be for him to go off and tour the country instead.

Hope asked: “You’ve always been frustrated about the fact that you can’t get called in the House of Commons” – a fact exacerbated by him very rarely being there – “you sit there and sit there and sit there, you’re a busy man, they won’t call you. How will you spend your time differently now as the MP of [sic] Clapton?” Tough questioning, Chris!

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His colleague Farage responded: “It’ll be exactly the same. It’ll be exactly the same.

“One of the good things about the by-election is that I’ve now met a vast number of constituents, I bet more than almost any MP in the country. That’s good. I said to all of them, ‘if I get reelected, here’s the email address. If you want help with something, let me know’.” (Farage has yet to hold a single in-person MP’s surgery since first being elected in July 2024.)

“Look – let’s be honest about it, you know, we’re not a big party in the House of Commons, and size of party is where precedence comes in the big debates, so I’ll be here doing my stuff, but really, you know, it’ll be Richard Tice and the rest of the gang doing more of the work in here as I travel round the country and, in fact, I’m even planning another tour of the country.”

Lucky old Clacton residents!

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Quite how, though, Farage plans to spend less time in the Commons than before is unclear. While there are no figures to show how often an MP is in the building and how long they remain on the estate, or indeed in the chamber, there are for voting and speaking in the House.

Parliament’s own figures show that, since first being elected, Farage has participated in roughly 31% of eligible divisions, casting around 173 votes out of more than 560. The site mpdata.uk, meanwhile, shows that he has made approximately 93 spoken contributions, placing him in the bottom 25% of MPs for spoken participation.

Beating that should be a challenge. Might he become the first MP in history to drop into negative figures?