Clacton is a conundrum. A day out there can lead you from day-trippers enjoying the beautiful sandy expanses of the Essex coast to villages so poor the houses are essentially disintegrating beach huts. This is a land where the old – and so many are old – arrivals from London’s east end reminisce with cockney pride but fear their old home city. Where an exhibit at the local museum describes a seaside town “unlikely to regain its former glory”. Where kiss-me-quick meets slow decline, and penny falls meet crypto millions.
Nigel Farage has chosen to gamble his political reputation here, among the amusement arcades and rollercoaster roar of the pier, as questions mount over his finances, and undeclared gifts and benefits-in-kind given to him and his party, Reform UK. Not that most people we spoke to seemed to mind all that – either questioning the truth of these stories, brushing the scandals off as “his business”, accusing “all politicians” of crookedness or even sympathising: “If someone gave me five million quid I’d take it!”
This is Farage Country. It has voted Ukip, twice, and Reform by 8,000-odd votes ahead of the Tories back in the 2024 general election. It may not tell a story of the country at large, where national polling suggests Reform has dropped behind Labour, and Farage’s personal ratings have tumbled to Keir Starmer’s and Boris Johnson’s lowest ebbs.
But it is a Reform heartland, and feeds Farage’s soul. The party’s morale and identity depends on keeping people like the voters of Clacton on side, even if it cannot win a general election via this comfort zone alone. And the man himself has certainly found his comfort zone again, walnut-tanned and schmoozing in his shades – visibly relieved after a series of tetchy and evasive interviews about the £5m transferred to him before he announced his return to politics from Christopher Harborne, the Thai-based crypto billionaire.
“I’m With Nigel” placards peer out from windows and garden stakes all over bearing his photo – Ferris-wheel halo, Kitchener finger. “These signs were printed by a company in Kent,” said a handyman in Jaywick, a village down the coast from Clacton-on-Sea that for many years in a row has officially been England’s most deprived neighbourhood. “He could have had them printed here and brought that business into our economy. I’d like to vote Reform, but he’s just not a local person, he’s in it for himself.”
A teal Reform UK double-decker whirred through the centre of town. Howlin’ Laud Hope, leader of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party (no fewer than three of his party’s candidates are standing) tipped his Stetson from a Wetherspoons to passersby on the prom. A Baptist minister told us she was voting for Count Binface. A 19-year-old girl buying a Happy Meal wanted to vote for him too, but wasn’t sure beyond a 99p cap on 99 flakes whether “he would do anything else”.
If Clacton has failed to escape its faded seaside town reputation, then this by-election cements it with its distinctly end-of-the-pier flavour. The main parties refused to stand against Farage, which has left a vacuum for comedy candidates, and assorted eccentrics and fundamentalists, to flood a ballot paper so long it’s costing four times more than usual to print. A man with a bin on his head is, at the time of writing, Farage’s main challenger.
While Reform’s political opponents chuckle about this in Westminster, it’s less funny to people here we’ve spoken to – who, even those opposed to Farage, feel as if they’re becoming the butt of the joke.
At the local library, in a focus group held by the research agency More in Common of nine locals considering voting Reform, they were split on who is causing most trouble for Clacton’s reputation. “He’s taking the mickey out of the voters,” said a tradesman, of the bin-headed comedian, Jon Harvey. “He’s a joke candidate but in my opinion he’d be equal to Nigel Farage, who’s a one-trick pony and barely turns up,” said a shop-worker. “He makes us look like right plonkers and racists,” said a teacher, of Farage.
Others are frustrated and confused about the lack of proper choice in this poll, despite the 34-candidate-long ballot paper. Sitting outside the wind-whipped Rainy Bakes bakery in Jaywick, Sandra – who runs a weekly “Chatty Café” with residents there – told us she is “really disappointed” she can’t vote for another of the mainstream parties, saying she felt “hopeful” about Andy Burnham’s Labour. “They’ve obviously made an agreement between them that none of them are going to put anyone forward, I don’t really understand it and I am cross they haven’t.”
As Clacton MP, Farage “hasn’t helped us at all”, in her view. “It’s an utter insult to the people that live here – if you don’t want to hold a surgery and actually hear from local people, don’t be our MP.” She was also angry about the cost of the vote, which could be around a quarter of a million pounds.
The “celebrity” style of being an MP – more often on telly, perhaps, than at constituency surgeries – was praised by some residents we spoke to for “putting Clacton on the map”. But even some pro-Reform folk had doubts. Mike, a retired chemistry teacher who backs Farage, felt it might have been wise to put some of the £5m he’d received from Harborne into a shop or some kind of retail space in Jaywick.
“A lot of criticism will be he probably hasn’t done that much for Clacton. I would say he has done what he said he would do, and that is to raise the profile of Clacton, but I’m not aware of any money he’s brought into the area,” he said. “Some of the five million could have been put towards one of the empty shops in the area and that sort of thing, it did cross my mind.”
A teenage girl whose family live in a caravan here argued with her dad about voting Reform. She didn’t agree with their immigration policies, but most of all was worried about what the repeal of the Equality Act would mean for women’s rights. “I don’t know why Nigel Farage would want to do that; half the population are women.”
We found a clear divide along gender lines, with significantly more women than men expressing misgivings about their MP. They were far more likely to call the by-election a “waste of time”, “laughing stock”, and “waste of money that could be used for other things”, as well seeing Farage as an egotist.
My grandma grew up in Coulsdon in deep south London, but her family moved to Clacton-on-Sea when she was working in London after she’d finished school. She used to tell me stories of “the Eagle” steamer she would take from Tower Pier down the Thames estuary to the Clacton coast in the Fifties to visit them at weekends. She would mime hoiking up her skirt and kicking her legs out, and sing all the words to “Knees Up Mother Brown”.
Over the postwar decades, Clacton became something of an “east London diaspora”, in the words of Dr Matthew Grant, a historian at the University of Essex. It earned the nickname “Little Dagenham” at one point, and still many residents mention their London roots.
“Clacton really grew in that post-war period, where you had regenerating, the slum clearances, lots of people moved out and Clacton became a hopeful destination for people retiring.”
This trend is behind not just an ageing population, but strong community ties – with volunteer groups and heritage projects thriving – amid poor economic conditions. Clacton’s “sense of nostalgia” has created a “lost community in the past, an almost mythic sort of cockney idea of community”, said the historian.
It also “plays into some of the contemporary politics of feeling the globalised economy isn’t working for them”, and a sometimes inward-looking suspicion of immigration. “I’m too scared to go back to London now,” said one woman, who had grown up in the east end. One man kept repeating: “Just look at Tower Hamlets”.
The Clacton constituency is mostly coastal, and has one of the oldest populations in the country. Home to a number of very poor wards, there are smarter areas too, including the upmarket Frinton-on-Sea, where the average house price is £100,000 higher than in other nearby resorts. Wages, employment rates and life expectancy are low, while crime is high. A direct train to London, and the rising demand for carers in the area, are bringing more diversity to the town, which is largely white.
A life of your front door always being open, shared ditties and dialect, cheeky chappies and tarts with hearts has almost become a folk story passed down the generations in places like Clacton.
“You get a kind of hankering for the cliché, for the stereotype. A younger generation being told by their grandfathers of the good old east end, cor blimey guv, all that nonsense,” said Dr Andrew Branch of the University of East London, who is researching the emotional geography of Clacton. “Some articulations of that east end identity seem to be a default white identity… Part of that troubled identification with east London is it’s often enacted by a generation that never experienced it firsthand.”
While it was clear from our conversations that younger voters were far less enthused by Reform, we still met youngsters who felt cheated out of good prospects, solid jobs and nice lives, caused in their view by immigration. “I like most of the stuff Nigel Farage stands for: making Britain Britain,” said an 18-year-old plasterer on a residential street set back from the seafront. “Less violence, there’s quite a lot of that with illegal immigration coming in.”
What united the Clacton locals we spoke to was a frustration with politics, years of neglect by the Conservatives and Labour, and being “on the map” for all the wrong reasons. Nigel Farage may be gambling his future on their support – but it seems, at least in this sticky, sunny stretch of Essex, they think he and his party are worth a gamble too. On their future, yes, but on the old days too.
Listen to our special episode of The Politics Show, recorded from Clacton, on the New Statesman podcast.
[Further reading: Meet Nigel Farage’s true nemesis]
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