Lansbury came from a radical family, and he’d been campaigning for women’s rights since the 1880s. Then in the Liberal Party, he’d gone on to join the Social Democratic Federation, the country’s first socialist party, before being elected in December 1910 as the Labour MP for Bow and Bromley, in the East End of London. Once in Parliament, he was infuriated by the Liberal government’s refusal to extend the franchise to women and by its approval of force-feeding Suffragette prisoners on hunger strike. “You are beneath contempt,” he shouted, walking up to the government front bench. “You will go down in history as the men who tortured innocent women.” He was suspended from the chamber for that outburst.

He was equally angered by his own party’s failure to confront the government on the issue. Having exhausted all other tactics, he resigned his seat and called a by-election, asking his constituents “to endorse my policy of making women’s suffrage the beginning and end of my parliamentary fight”. It was a risky move. Bow and Bromley was a marginal constituency, and he’d only been elected in 1910 because the Liberals had declined to field a candidate and had backed him, giving him a clear run against his Conservative opponent. But it was worth the risk for one so committed to the cause. 

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The by-election that followed was noisy and atypical. The Labour Party was incensed by Lansbury’s actions and declined to give him official support, while the Liberals again refused to participate. Women’s groups from around the country campaigned for Lansbury, with public meetings addressed by the constitutionalist Millicent Fawcett, the socialist Ethel Snowden and the extremist Emmeline Pankhurst. Meanwhile, anti-suffrage opponents rallied under the slogan of “No Petticoat Government”, and the Conservatives tried hard to insist that this wasn’t a single-issue election.

The most effective poster read: “Lansbury is sick of Parliament. Bow and Bromley is sick of Lansbury. Vote for Blair and make everybody happy.” And on polling day, that’s what happened. On a 10% swing, the Conservative Reginald Blair took the seat and Lansbury was out of Parliament for a decade.

In the long run, standing on his principles didn’t do him any harm. When he returned to Westminster in 1922, again for Bow and Bromley, the number of votes cast had more than tripled, the electorate swelled by the enfranchisement of the working class and of most — if not yet all — women. It turned out that he’d been, in that curious modern phrase, on the right side of history. And when the Labour government split in 1931, and the party suffered a massive election defeat, he was the only ex-Cabinet minister left in Parliament, becoming leader by default at the age of 73. He held the party together in its darkest hour, his record speaking for him as a veteran campaigner for women, peace and the working class.

Nigel Farage, it hardly needs saying, is no George Lansbury. There is no issue of principle, or even of policy, at stake in today’s by-election in Clacton. And the difference doesn’t speak well of today’s politics. Beneath Farage’s thin-skinned petulance and posturing, there lies the media’s — and perhaps the public’s — fascination with electoral contests, rather than actual policy. Keir Starmer’s premiership was a time of flatlining productivity, of rising unemployment, of an incipient borrowing crisis (bond yields are higher than when Liz Truss “spooked the markets”). But the average voter could be forgiven for not noticing the parlous state of the economy as the drama of Andy Burnham’s by-election victory and unopposed coup played out in the press. This isn’t politics, it’s soap opera, and with the departure of Peter Mandelson, Farage is now the longest-standing character still in the show, in large part because he recognized the direction of travel early on.

It wasn’t always thus. Even if we consider the closest recent parallel to Clacton, that of David Davis in 2008, there was a serious point being made. Davis was the Conservative shadow home secretary and believed that a critical moment had been reached when the Commons voted in favor of the Labour government’s proposal to allow detention without charge for up to 42 days. This came in the midst of an attempt to introduce identity cards, attacks on the jury system, and increased surveillance by councils and quangos. As Davis pointed out, “600 public bodies have the authority to bug phones and emails and intercept the post”. So he resigned both his shadow cabinet job and his seat to fight a by-election in his constituency of Haltemprice and Howden in Yorkshire on the issue of civil liberties.

Then, as now, the other major parties didn’t contest the election. Labour, understandably, had no wish to defend its record, and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said his party supported Davis’s position and wouldn’t therefore stand against him. The whole thing became a farce. There was a record field of candidates — 26 in all — including the likes of David Icke, Mad Cow-Girl and Ronnie Carroll (the man who’d sung “Ring-a-Ding Girl” in the 1962 Eurovision Song Contest). There were so many of them that they weren’t allowed on the platform to hear the result, for fear of breaking the stage. 

Davis won, of course, with an increased share of the vote, but it was a pyrrhic victory, both politically and personally. Gordon Brown’s government paid no attention at all. And Davis’s career suffered. Just three years earlier, he’d fought David Cameron for the Conservative leadership. Now, he looked a much reduced, peripheral figure. “If I was given my job back, I think I’d take it,” he said. “But I don’t think I’ll be offered it.” He wasn’t, and he didn’t serve in the Coalition government of 2010-15.

In retrospect, Davis’s by-election captured the moment when British politics became totally trivial. The question of civil liberties was genuinely important, and has become ever more so. But the chance to challenge the growing power of the state was ducked by the media, which had decided that soap operas were more fun. The Daily Mirror saw Davis’s actions as “a cynically disguised leadership challenge to David Cameron”, while the Daily Telegraph said it was “a challenge to Mr Cameron’s authority”. It wasn’t. It was an attempt to position the Conservatives as the party that would defend the individual. When it was turned into a circus, the opportunity passed and the direction of travel remained unchanged. The era of the police raiding people’s homes in pursuit of social-media rudeness was just about to dawn.

And now comes Farage in Clacton. He may not have distinguished himself in Parliament, he may have struggled with delegation and with running a political party, but he has proved over the last three decades to be a consummate campaigner, and calling a by-election looks like a retreat to his comfort zone. But it’s a path fraught with danger. To start with, he runs the risk of becoming a laughing stock, even more than did David Davis. Breaking the 2008 record, there are 34 candidates, ranging from the SDP through three separate representatives of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, all the way down to Rejoin EU. It’s hard to retain any sense of dignity in these circumstances. Worse still, the focus on Farage’s finances risks giving the impression of him being a spiv, rather than the lovable rogue that has previously been his great selling-point. 

These three self-triggered by-elections tell an unedifying story of political decline. Lansbury’s was an honorable position and it was seen as such. Davis was also a principled man, but he was treated as a joke. And now Farage reduces legitimate concerns about the probity of his funding to a caricatured gimmick of the electoral process.

Oddly, though, that comment from the Suffragette may yet be applicable. The Bow and Bromley by-election in 1912 does not “stand out in history as a great political landmark”. But if Farage is sufficiently damaged, then Clacton in 2026 may do.

It must also be one of the most journalistically picked-over places in Britain. Reporters have been taking the train here from the capital for years, stopping locals on the street to probe and poll their views; dissect their prejudices; stack their takes. White, deprived and elderly, it has become a stand-in for the large hinterland of Britain so remote from our elites. For some, the attention has become maddening. “Over the past few years we have become a joke and a cliche because of Nigel Farage,” says Sarah Elizabeth Cox, who is drinking a glass of JD Wetherspoons wine as her son snoozes in a buggy parked at the table. “I now say I’m from Clacton for my sins.”

Now, Farage is preparing to take a stand here against the establishment, or at least against a former BBC comedian wearing a bin on his head. If Britain has any unifying institutions left, Spoons must be one. Could I, sitting in the pub from sun-up till closing, plumb a little deeper than the psephologists?

When the Royal Hotel was built, it stood alone on a clifftop. Clacton-on-Sea was just an idea then. For a long time, perhaps forever, the area had been nothing but farmland out on the Essex coast. But then, in 1886, the land was bought up by Peter Bruff, a bearded Victorian engineer, who set about building railways and rerouting steamers and diverting capital flows to justify the construction of a new town. His ambitions were high. It would have, Bruff declared, “no slums or any object that could offend the eye”. The lowest type of London daytripper — “men, women and children who only seem to enjoy themselves when revelling in drink and obscenity” — ought to be discouraged from visiting.

Today, much of what was the Royal Hotel is occupied by the Moon and Starfish. Yet sitting in the garden just after 11am, Cox doesn’t want to talk about the pub’s most famous visitor. In fact, she wants to talk about everything but Farage. She wants to talk about Clacton’s problems, and once she starts it’s seemingly hard for her to stop. There is a huge issue with homelessness, she says. Like so many other English seaside towns, the deprived and the lost wash up here in search of help but end up freezing in tents all throughout the winter. Cox’s mortgage has become extortionate, more than her rent had been in London. Potholes are cracking open everywhere. Fires keep breaking out. Train prices render commuting impossible, even to nearby Colchester. She is angry with a broken social settlement that has allowed places such as Clacton to rot. “It is one of the abandoned seaside towns,” she says. “I love living here but I feel sorry for the young people.”

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Clacton has the highest proportion of economically inactive people in Britain. Jaywick, a ramshackle settlement on Clacton’s western border, is the most deprived place in England. What went wrong? The classic account is that once British holidaymakers were lured to Southern Europe by bargain flights, the seaside towns, deprived of tourists, began to slump. It is notable that at the last general election, Reform UK took three such areas among their five seats — Skegness, Great Yarmouth and Clacton.

But as I wander through the pub, everyone I speak to is happy to be there — resident and daytripper alike. They praise a community feel that, perhaps, they think remains stronger here than elsewhere in Britain. Margaret Clayton and Shirley Sizer have come on an over-sixties group outing from Cambridgeshire. Margaret has been coming here since childhood, when she used to visit with her Salvation Army Sunday school. It hasn’t changed much, she says.

Jean and Terry Williams moved down from London 40-odd years ago. They were married in East Ham, East London, but decided they had to leave when their son went to school and, according to Jean, his class swelled with Indian children who could not speak English. There was no time to teach the native pupils, she says, because they had to provide language tuition for the migrants. That was not a problem in Clacton.

But the Essex coast is not immune to England’s demographic shifts. Jean and Terry describe a local street that, to their eyes, is starting to look like Beirut. Terry thinks many of the vape and kebab shops must be money-laundering operations. Jean is relieved their son is in his forties and that she therefore has no need to worry about the ethnic composition of the schools. They have fled one wave of migration, but are being met here by another.

It is the bright peak of the day and the octogenarian couple are drinking in the garden, their skin wrinkled and puckered by decades of seaside living. They like it here, and bat away any suggestion that its population is too old. People need a place to retire, don’t they? Both plan to vote for Farage, despite his recent travails. “Personally, I don’t mind him,” says Jean. “I think all politicians are the same. I’m not being rude, but they’re all crooks. I’m not going to vote for tin man.”

Her attitude is typical. If they’re all crooks, why single out Farage? A grinning man with a missing front tooth, twisting a £20 note furiously below the table, tells me hasn’t followed the story closely but that Nigel is the bollocks and can keep his £5 million for all he cares. “Did he just pocket it and fuck off?” he laughs. “He’s one of us then.”

The man is angry that immigrants arriving on small boats are housed immediately, fed and watered in three-star establishments across the country. He was recently sectioned and then placed into supported accommodation in Clacton, he says, but then kicked out when he was arrested for “something stupid”. Now the council won’t help him.

He is also archetypal of a category of man that can be found at every asylum protest across Britain: unmoored, his life dissolving around him. Then he takes a call on a tiny black mobile, one small enough that it might be smuggled into prison in a cavity, and excuses himself.

I retreat back into the pub, which is as dim and cool as a cave. Tim Martin, who founded and owns JD Wetherspoons, has attempted to construct his empire along the guidelines detailed by George Orwell in 1946. The clientele must consist of regulars, there for the conversation as much as the beer; the architecture should be “uncompromisingly Victorian”; no radio should drown out conversation. Orwell’s preferred pub name was Moon Under Water, hence Clacton’s maritime twist: Moon and Starfish.

And as in the fictional Moon Under Water, the punters do seem to know each other. Around lunchtime, a group of auld fellas congregate around two tables in front of where I am sitting for what seems a regular meeting. People shout greetings across the room. World Cup bunting zig-zags across the ceiling, while England flags are draped from the bar and over a window. There are paintings of ships on the wall and little brass portholes cut into the walls. It is as if we are all visiting the home of a retired admiral with a mania for vexillology.

The lunch crowd gathers, eats, and departs rapidly. For many of Clacton’s older residents, Spoons is effectively just a cut-price restaurant. I watch an old woman in a wheelchair defeat a popadom the size of her head. Beside me, a man and two women in floral dresses are laying into Farage: the by-election is a farce, a waste of money, and he may be forced to stand again anyway. They would like Count Binface to win, but are concerned he’ll have to remove his headgear in Parliament.

Later, I find Paul, back out in the garden. He isn’t a fan of Farage either. “I don’t think he’s done fuck all for Clacton,” he says. Perhaps the strangest aspect of the by-election is that Farage is a constituency MP at all. Nobody I meet makes any connection between their Member of Parliament and local issues. They like him because they want to cut migration, or they oppose him because they do not. Their views do not seem to be shifting either. Farage is baked in.

Paul is drinking Guinness and holding a spindly silver vape that looks like an alien hookah. Until a few years ago, he lived in Brentwood, in London’s eastern commuter orbit. He worked in construction, breaking tarmac. But Brentwood got too posh for him and, for reasons he does not specify, he doesn’t work anymore. But he had an opportunity to move near the sea and he took it.

“Honestly, I spoke to a copper a while ago,” Paul says, “I said, “is Clacton really bad?” He said it’s no worse than any other seaside town. Every single place has its bad people. I’ve never had any trouble.” Paul normally does not vote, but next month he plans to support Count Binface. “Mate,” he says, “if I had one million I’d be set for life and this fucker got…”

For years, Clactonology has described the place as “weary” or “divided”, even as residents have been held to really be the most powerful people in Britain. The most significant work in the canon was written a little over a decade ago by Matthew Parris, the former Tory MP and Times columnist. Clacton-on-Sea, he claimed, was going nowhere. “This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlor Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.”

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UKIP — then standing Douglas Carswell in a by-election here — was a natural fit for such a place, Parris concluded. “Somebody has to represent the static caravans and holiday villages, and the people and places that for no fault of their own are not getting where a 21st-century Britain needs to be going.” The Conservative Party had to abandon the voters of such places, were they not to be dragged down themselves.

His words caused such a furor that UKIP began quoting Parris on their leaflets. But today, 2014 feels like a foreign country. After Brexit and Trump, with Marine Le Pen permitted to stand for the French presidency and the AfD leading the polls in Germany, it is hard to imagine anyone dismissing all-our-yesterdays Britain quite so blithely.

Seagulls wheel and bank over left-over lunches as a new crowd materializes, alongside a bouncer in a white shirt. As it grows dark, I speak to Dave, a neat man with silver hair, who bemoans the unfair reputations of Clacton and Jaywick. He lived and worked in London all his life, before retiring from the civil service to see out his days here. “Living in Clacton is like living in the old East End of London,” he tells me. “People chat to you. These days in London, people won’t even look you in the eye. Here, people stop and chat to you when you walk the dog.”

Dave is amiable and relaxed, smoking a cigarette in the summer air. But he seems angry at the state of Britain. “One phrase I hate,” he says, “is when people say, “I’m entitled to this.”” Benefit claimants feel entitled to money; migrants feel entitled to free housing. He would like Farage to crack down on both.

Though JD Wetherspoon pubs don’t show football, as a rule, they seem to make an exception for the World Cup. And at 8pm, Belgium kicks off against Spain. I sit next to a 20-something window fitter, who thinks Clacton is run down with few opportunities for people his age. He doesn’t like Farage, but will vote for him if the alternative is a man dressed as a bin, for whom he evinces a deep contempt. The crowd is different, now, the punters markedly younger. A clutch of men in tight jeans holding little bottles of beer has formed by the bar. When I leave, shortly after midnight, the pub is almost empty; near me just a few teenagers remain, drinking shots and playing a garage track from a phone.

A Friday in the Moon and Starfish, then, is spent mainly with people who came here from London. They relocated for the cheaper cost of living and the clear air and also, in many cases, for somewhere that is still overwhelmingly white British. They are attempting, consciously or otherwise, to recreate a community that used to dominate much of the capital, along with the pie and mash shops that cluster round the pub.

But this is the end of the line for white flight. You cannot move further east than Clacton-on-Sea. You cannot move anywhere poorer than Jaywick. For those who seek greater ethnic homogeneity, there is only one other option left: to fight. That makes the Clacton by-election essentially meaningless. It is a circus. Farage is almost certain to win, risking only mockery in his campaign against Count Binface. What is more significant is the rage pulsating throughout this town, this country. That will remain, and it will decide our future. All-our-yesterdays Britain will have its revenge.

This was never part of the joke. Harvey has stood against each incumbent prime minister and London mayor since 2017. Like the licensed fool of old, Binface existed to puncture pretension from the safety of the margins, his purpose corrective rather than competitive. Yet in Clacton, the fool finds himself inheriting the responsibilities of a ruling class missing in action. Binface is the establishment. Après Binface: le déluge.

The popular misconception is that the character belongs to that all-too-familiar, dreary, disillusioned British genus of affectionate political nihilism. The nation has a talent for converting disappointment into panel-show persiflage, stretching from That Was the Week That Was to Have I Got News for You. But Harvey is a more interesting figure than that. He is a stand-up and writer with background in television comedy, and credits that include the Westminster satire The Thick of It. But he is, at heart, a defender of democracy; he has spent two decades anatomizing political absurdity without ever surrendering to the fashionable conviction that politics itself is absurd. Astonishingly, he remains a radical. 

Comedy, by Harvey’s own account, was first an escape from a difficult childhood with a bibulous, domineering father, then a way of surviving the sudden death of his diabetic, morbidly obese brother. His memoir, A Fan for All Seasons, chronicles a painful year spent wandering from sporting event to sporting event after discovering Dan’s body in his London flat, searching in the rituals of spectatorship for a way of making grief publicly bearable. One begins to understand why someone so preoccupied with civic ritual should eventually end up standing in elections dressed as a piece of municipal infrastructure.

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It was only after this sporting odyssey that Harvey emerged in the political arena, confronting Theresa May in Maidenhead in 2019. (He initially adopted the “Lord Buckethead” persona which had previously been wheeled out by a rotating cast of performers.) He later recalled: “Thursday night I was in a sports hall in Maidenhead. Sunday morning, I was flown first class to New York to appear on John Oliver. It was the weirdest experience of my life.” It would have been an excellent point at which to become a professional ironist. Harvey chose a more curious vocation instead. 

The easiest posture in our age of institutional exhaustion is cynicism. But it has its costs. As David Foster Wallace observed, “irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage”. Harvey’s bin cosplay has resisted that temptation. And for every daft Binface pledge — nationalize Adele; make Piers Morgan emission-free by 2030, etc — there is an decent one. It’s hard to maintain that British life would not be improved if we were indeed to ban the use of speakerphones on public transport. At one hustings, Harvey remembers a voter saying: “I can’t believe Binface is making the most sense of all the candidates.”  

His gloriously absurd manifestos conceal beneath their delirious surface an unexpectedly coherent political disposition: abolish the House of Lords; clean up Britain’s rivers; build houses; invest in public transport; return the Parthenon Marbles; tie ministers’ salaries to nurses’ pay; house the homeless before the royal family acquires its seventh palace; make Thames Water executives swim in their own excrement-encumbered effluent. Much of this is of course indistinguishable from old fashioned municipal socialism. 

His jokes may be bait. But the politics are earnest. When Harvey promises to build “at least one affordable home”, the punchline is not the number but the implied accusation that every supposedly serious politician’s housing pledge has become less believable than his own. The target is never democracy but bad government. 

But most revealing of all is Harvey’s attitude to elections themselves. Asked by the Big Issue why people should vote, he scarcely mentions Count Binface: “I’m more interested in the idea that people vote at all because democracy is a very precious thing.” Every Brit, he argues, should treasure the right to stand for election, “no matter how idiotic the get-up”. The campaigns raise money for Shelter. Eradicating homelessness is repeatedly described as one of the manifesto’s “key tenets”. The publicity is only a means to that end. This is an almost embarrassingly unfashionable creed. Strip away the “intergalactic space warrior” mythology and what remains is recognizably social-democratic — not revolutionary in the Marxian sense, certainly, but possessed of that civic egalitarianism of a Cromwellian vintage which assumes the commonwealth ought to be run in the interests of its citizens rather than, say, Bangkok-based crypto speculators or someone called “Posh George”.

Confronted with the possibility of becoming Farage’s principal opponent by default, Harvey’s first instinct was not triumphalism but disbelief. He told the Guardian he had been preparing for a relaxing return to his supposed home planet, Sigma IX, before Farage “self-detonated”, forcing “a swift intergalactic handbrake turn”. Asked what he would do if Clacton actually elected him, he merely replied that he would “do my very best to represent them”. He came close to campaigning for the removal of Clacton pier before somebody pointed out that it was by the sea, not in the House of Lords. 

The striking thing here, though, is that Count Binface risks being the the last social democrat standing. Britain’s Overton window, never a particularly capacious aperture by continental standards, has in recent years contracted still further. Labour has shown the Corbynites to the door with the brisk efficiency of a club steward removing a spivvy guest, while the Conservatives have hurriedly buried whatever bizarre ideological enthusiasm it was that briefly animated the Truss interlude.

The dispiriting upshot has been the better part of a decade governed, if not by a formal coalition, then by something rather more insidious: a pensée unique so pervasive that party labels increasingly resemble matters of branding rather than belief. In 2023, the Economist christened its heroine “Ms Heeves”, a composite stitched together from the managerial instincts of Rachel Reeves and Jeremy Hunt, much as an earlier generation spoke of “Butskellism” to describe the comfortable convergence of Rab Butler and Hugh Gaitskell. 

These days, it might be appropriate to speak of Starmenoch or even Burnoch. But the invidious comparison flatters the present settlement. Butskellism at least presided over an argument about the distribution of prosperity; today’s orthodoxy contents itself with administering degrowth more competently than the other chap. SW1 remains as theatrically adversarial as ever — PMQs still proceed with all the decorum of a boxing match — but the ideological chasm between the front benches has narrowed to the width of the despatch box itself.

One may quarrel indefinitely over fiscal rules, denouncing a tax-to-GDP ratio of 35% as Bolshevism and 32% as neoliberalism; or over the precise degree of performative cruelty to be directed at asylum seekers. But anything touching the larger architecture of Britain’s political economy — the distribution of wealth; the ownership of land and capital; the country’s constitutional settlement; even the purpose of the state itself — is ruled out of order.

Increasingly, the electorate has declined to play along. Brexit was one expression of the new peasants’ revolt; Reform is another. Equally eloquent is the subtler protest of abstention. Turnout, a stately 84% in 1950, settled into the high 60s through the 2010s before slumping to barely 60% at the election that carried Starmer into Downing Street. 

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Seen in one light, the Clacton caper is proof of the point that Farage has been making all along — namely that British politics is controlled by an Establishment cartel that is now engaged in an all-out coordinated war against both him and his politics. Farage resigned his Commons seat after the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards opened investigations into his failure to declare a £5 million personal gift from his sugar daddy, the crypto-Croesus Christopher Harborne. Rather than await the slow ecclesiastical processes of Westminster discipline, which might eventually have ended in suspension and a recall petition, Farage leapt ahead, testing himself against the people of Clacton instead. He also reminded them that: “I could go out and try and make some real big money. I could go to the USA, where I’ve got plenty of offers”, which will no doubt go down extremely well on the Essex seafront. 

The open question is whether the response of Britain’s sensible parties in declining to stand against him is the tactical masterstroke that their press cheerleaders seem to think. Kemi Badenoch dismissed the contest as a “fake” election, while Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens unanimously refused to lend legitimacy to Farage’s stunt. And yet together the exnominated parties have conspired to prove Farage’s core point — that they are indeed “all the same” and will do anything to preserve the status quo. Labour in particular has form here. When Farage first descended upon Clacton in 2024, Labour HQ set about stripping resources from its own local campaign, dispatching its characterful candidate, Jovan Owusu-Nepaul — who was “getting more retweets than Keir Starmer”, according to a party source (shocker) — to more electorally profitable territory in the West Midlands and leaving local activists aghast that the party appeared content to grant Farage an unobstructed run. Even then, the instinct was less to defeat Reform but to contain it.

One hesitates to improve upon an opponent’s script so generously. For years Farage has insisted that Westminster is not a genuine arena of political disagreement but a single interchangeable establishment, united less by ideology than by its instinct for cartel behavior whenever an insurgent threatens the settlement. One might have expected his centrist adversaries to resist the caricature. Instead, they have enacted it with touching fidelity. Against the dismal backdrop of this de haut en bas consensus, Harvey’s intervention becomes easier to understand. He is doing what the establishment doesn’t dare to do, which is actually to participate in democracy.

Meanwhile, he offers a critique of political celebrity. At precisely the historical moment when every ambitious politician has become the curator of an increasingly elaborate personal brand — Farage himself used the word “influencer” in his Clapton speech — Harvey performs the opposite maneuver. He abolishes the individual altogether. The bin is an anti-charisma machine. It is commonplace and probably entirely accurate to note that Farage is the 21st century’s canniest political operator as well as its most recognizable figure — and without Farage, Reform would be nowhere. Against all this, the bin performs an act of almost monastic self-abnegation. 

It asks a question almost indecent in its simplicity: if a proposal sounds perfectly sensible when uttered by a man dressed as a bin, why has Westminster spent so many years insisting that it was impossible?

I have known Farage for over 30 years, and happily campaigned with him in 2016 for Brexit. I remain convinced he was the main architect of the great popular vote to leave the EU — the kudos claimed by Boris Johnson and his former henchman, Dominic Cummings, is simply not credible. Brexit happened because of the mobilization of the British working and lower- middle classes, and it was Farage who mobilized them. Many of those enlisted then moved into Reform and helped its massive popular vote at the last election. For Reform to hold on to those voters it needs Farage as its guiding spirit. If anything happens to him, it is over for the party.

Those were the stakes he was playing for in making his decision to resign: but it may well answer nothing, except the question of how much his standing in a far corner of Essex compares with that of Count Binface. It will not disperse the problem of Farage’s undeclared £5-million gift from a crypto-currency billionaire, or of the largesse the Sunday Times claims he received from George Cottrell, a convicted fraudster. Assuming he wins his by-election — and given the competition, it is hard to believe he will not — the investigation into his financial arrangements by Daniel Greenberg, the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, will resume the day he returns to Westminster. If Farage is found to have behaved improperly and is suspended for 10 days or more, his constituents could launch a recall petition and trigger a second by election. Should that happen, the main parties (which seem to expect it almost as a certainty) have indicated they would contest it.

Where, though, are the people of Clacton in all this? At the 2024 general election 58% of them turned out to vote, just 1.7% lower than the turnout nationally. It will be interesting to note how many will turn out to vote in the Farage vs Binface contest. One difficulty for him is that he has not been a frequent visitor to his constituency, though has acquired a reputation for frequently visiting the United States, as he did last weekend. Will voters regard this by-election as having been called lightly or frivolously? After all, if Farage was true to his word, and had done no wrong, there would not have been any need for a by-election at all. Some Clactonians, even some who voted for him in 2024, may feel they are being trifled with, or that he is trying to avoid, for a short time, serious scrutiny. If they are asked to turn out again a few weeks later to go through the process again, the situation would be so unprecedented that it is hard to predict what would happen.

Farage is not stupid, and presumably took all this into account before calling his by-election. Perhaps he thought all the main parties would take him on and, having defeated them, would not bother to orchestrate a recall petition should Greenberg find against him, and should he receive a suspension of more than 10 days. Now, because the other parties will not fight in this by-election, he may find himself fighting a second in a climate of voter exhaustion, and unable to rely on his own supporters turning out again — especially if his opponents exploit the findings against him necessary to provoke a second contest as evoking sleaze.

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By Aris Roussinos

As elsewhere in 2024, the growing uninterest in politics in Clacton seemed to reflect a larger than usual disenchantment with the established parties, especially with the Conservatives, who had been the incumbents. Although Reform only won five seats in that election, they had the third largest popular vote, ahead of the Liberal Democrats, who won 72. The fact remains that under the first-past-the-post system, Reform were lucky to win any seats at all. Since 2024, Reform has waited for pivotal moments to transform its undeniable ability to garner votes into an ability to garner seats. Perhaps it thought that moment had come when did well at the 2025 local elections; but its support remained concentrated in certain geographical areas.

Perhaps it thought that moment would come in the Gorton and Denton by-election, at a time of spectacular unpopularity for the Labour party; but the combination of a poor candidate and a strategy to harness ethnic minority voters gave the Greens the seat. Perhaps it thought it would come at this year’s local elections, but some stunning local triumphs were not followed by victory at the Makerfield by-election, in a seat where Reform had won all but one of the council wards in the local elections. Again, there was an indifferent candidate; but whatever the reason, Reform did not break through and win a by-election that would have pitched a defeated Labour party into turmoil. To lose one such contest was a misfortune; to lose two started to look more than careless. For some time some connected with Reform, which has money and a gift for commanding publicity, have admitted there is struggle to find top-class candidates, even for local government. As the Conservative party’s opinion ratings slowly improve, the appeal of Reform to ambitious politicians diminishes: and the need for the pivotal moment becomes ever greater.

Even if Farage wins a second by-election — which, one must stress, would be a far harder task than winning the first — there is no guarantee that would provide the pivotal moment. Perhaps the party’s most profound problem is that they have lost their unique selling points. They may want to be tougher on illegal migrants, and bid farewell to the ECHR, but so too does the Conservative party. For a long time people on the Right preferred to support Reform because to them the Conservatives were the party of 14 wasted years, their dismal reputation compounded by the horrors of Johnson and Truss. But that party is now under new management; Mrs Badenoch is more popular now than her party, but the party’s popularity is slowly rising too.

A by-election, or possibly two by-elections, in Clacton could give Reform an opportunity to rebuild its momentum. Or, a second election following sleaze allegations could allow the old parties to prove there is life in them yet. For some months it has been said that Reform peaked too soon. Farage wishes to defy that belief. It may take until well into the autumn to see whether he is right, or whether the much-canvassed people of Clacton have had enough.