Well, that rather ruins the easy version of this artic

I had expected the interesting number in Clacton to be Nigel Farage’s raw vote. It still is. Just not in the way I was expecting.

Farage received 22,329 votes yesterday. In the 2024 general election he got 21,225.

That is an increase of 1,104.

Turnout, meanwhile, fell from 58.7 per cent to 44.37 per cent. Only 35,401 votes were cast.

So I am not going to pretend this was somehow a bad result for Farage.

It wasn’t.

Indeed, the raw numbers make it considerably better than simply looking at his increased majority. Far fewer people voted in Clacton than they did two years ago, yet more of them voted for Farage.

His personal vote in Clacton is solid. Whatever effect the questions about his finances have had elsewhere, they have not seriously damaged him here. Reform also managed to get its supporters out for an August by-election which everybody knew Farage was going to win.

It would be silly to explain that away.

Count Binface finished second with 9,455 votes. That is an extraordinary number for a satirical candidate, especially one wearing a bin on his head, but Farage still beat him by 12,874.

This was a convincing victory.

Which makes what happened next rather strange.

Farage had called this election himself. He resigned from Parliament after the parliamentary standards commissioner began examining the £5 million gift he received from Christopher Harborne. The investigation stopped when Farage ceased to be an MP. By standing again, he said he wanted the people of Clacton to decide his future.

They did.

Farage won.

Before the official declaration, he appeared at a Reform event and announced that the verdict was already in. He described the result as an overwhelming endorsement and claimed he had managed to beat the “establishment candidate”.

What establishment?

The establishment candidate was Count Binface.

A man wearing a bin on his head.

Almost 10,000 voters thought the bin was a better prospect than Farage.

Farage’s explanation was that Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat activists had been campaigning for Binface, turning him into the candidate of what Farage calls the “uni-party”. Whether that amounts to Count Binface becoming an agent of the British establishment I will leave to the reader.

But it tells us something about how Farage now uses the word.

The establishment is no longer a particularly useful description of institutions, wealth or power. It is whoever happens to be standing in his way.

Even when the person standing in his way is Count Binface.

Then it became stranger.

Farage announced that he would not attend the declaration.

He said Essex Police had informed him of an organised campaign to “disrupt and degrade” the result. He was not frightened, he insisted, but he was not prepared to stand on the stage after his victory and be “demeaned and humiliated by nobodies”.

Reform later went further and said Essex Police had advised Farage not to attend because of a credible threat.

Farage’s reaction

The acting returning officer, Ian Davidson, said there was a robust policing operation in place, that the count could proceed safely and that attendance was a decision for individual candidates.

Farage has received threats and there are perfectly legitimate reasons to take the safety of politicians seriously. Nobody outside the police and Farage’s security operation knows everything that was communicated overnight.

But that is slightly different from what Reform initially appeared to be saying.

More interesting to me was Farage’s language.

“Demeaned and humiliated by nobodies.”

He was always going to win.

His vote share was likely to increase.

His main opponent was a comedian dressed as a bin.

The Labour Party had not stood. Neither had the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats or Greens. Restore Britain had also stayed out. Farage had been given about as favourable a parliamentary contest as it is possible to imagine.

And still victory had to be presented as another moment of persecution. Ever the victim.

I think that matters more than whether Count Binface received 20, 25 or 30 per cent.

Farage has always been extremely good at the politics of grievance. It is one of the reasons he has survived for so long. Whatever position he occupies, he remains the outsider. Whatever platform he is given, somebody is trying to silence him. Whatever election he wins, an establishment remains ranged against him.

The problem is that the performance becomes harder once you start acquiring power.

Farage is the leader of a large national political party. He has again been elected to Parliament. He appears constantly across British television and has his own enormous social-media audience. For much of the past two years Reform has been treated as a potential party of government.

Farage is part of the establishment

The outsider is becoming part of the political system he has spent his career attacking.

That might help explain the increasingly elastic definition of “establishment”.

It also helps explain what is happening on Farage’s right.

Only days before this result, Farage was warning about the language emerging around Restore Britain, saying there was a “very sinister edge” to it and invoking 1936, Cable Street and Mosley:

Carl Benjamin 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿@Sargon_of_Akkad

“There is a very sinister edge, things being said that we’ve not heard since 1936 and Cable Street, the days of Mosley…” Nigel Farage was a surprise guest at Mike Graham’s little live event and used the time to call Restore Britain a fascist party.

9:58 PM · Aug 13, 2026 · 95.9K Views

That is quite a journey.

Farage spent much of his career complaining that opponents smeared him by associating his politics with the far right. He now finds himself having to draw precisely those boundaries against people further to his right, however true that may be.

Restore celebrated its six-month anniversary yesterday by boasting of “historic growth”:

Restore Britain@RestoreBritain

Restore Britain is six months old day. What we have achieved in half a year is incredible, it has never happened before. Historic growth. We are just getting started.

Rupert Lowe with Restore Britain supporters

Farage was meanwhile fighting Count Binface in Clacton.

There is something in that juxtaposition.

Farage more contested on right

The British right is no longer organised around Farage alone. He faces a Conservative Party trying to recover, Reform’s own problems and Restore attempting to build a movement beyond him. The rhetoric gets nastier because the competition is no longer merely with the left or centre. Some of it is now happening inside the right itself.

Clacton demonstrates that Farage should not be underestimated within that contest.

That is perhaps the most important lesson today will bring.

I have been critical of Reform and Farage often enough. But political analysis becomes useless if every result has to be forced into the argument you wanted to make beforehand.

Farage wanted to demonstrate that the people who elected him in 2024 still backed him.

He did and they did.

More people voted for Nigel Farage yesterday than voted for him at the general election, despite a substantial fall in turnout.

That deserves to be taken seriously.

Standards inquiry into Farage goes on

What the election did not do was settle the matter that caused it.

The parliamentary standards investigation will now resume.

The voters of Clacton can decide who represents them. They cannot decide whether an MP complied with parliamentary rules. Winning an election is not a retrospective exemption from those rules.

Farage will presumably argue otherwise politically. He has his mandate now. He can say that he put himself before the voters and they returned him with an increased vote.

Fair enough.

But the commissioner still has a different question to answer.

That is where this peculiar by-election leaves us.

Farage won convincingly. Count Binface received nearly 9,500 votes. Turnout fell sharply. The investigation which prompted the whole exercise starts again.

And before the votes had even been officially declared, Farage was somewhere else explaining that he had defeated the establishment and would not appear at the count because he refused to be humiliated by nobodies.

He had got exactly what he asked Clacton to give him.

Winning was not enough.

The grievance had to survive the victory.