It is now a Westminster rite of passage that, once in every political reporter’s life, they must go to Clacton, the seaside town that drowns in newspaper ink. On the train ride down, a few days before the result of Nigel Farage’s self-triggered by-election, I had premonitions of candy floss, people washing sand out of their Crocs on the beachfront and a drunk man at the bandstand, serenading us with “That’s Life!” I saw it all, eventually. But first, arriving at the station, I was politely kidnapped by a charming man in a crumpled linen suit.
John Stevens, who is standing for the Rejoin EU party in Clacton, bundled me into his leaflet-laden car and took me a 20 minutes’ drive up the coast, away from the beating heart of Faragism to Frinton-on-Sea, a wealthy purlieu of the deprived constituency that Reform hopes to re-win resoundingly this week. Posh (Winchester, Oxford), temperamentally Tory (a former Michael Heseltine sidekick) and rich (“I’m not billionaire territory, but I made a bit of money in the City”), Stevens is self-funding this campaign “because I believe in it”. He knows Farage will win (“not the first time I’ve made a bad investment”). But he hopes that of the 33 other waif-and-stray candidates, his message will produce something more significant than self-promotion. “What I am trying to do is show there is a significant anti-Brexit vote even in the heartland of the Brexit movement.” Count Binface, he thinks, is only in it for fame and fortune (more on “the bin” later).
Here in Frinton there is money and there is hierarchy and Stevens plays it, virtuoso. At each finely flowered porch he delivers, with a stoop of deference and in a cut-glass register pitched loudly for hearing aids, his pro-forma greeting: “Sor-reh to trouble you madam, I’m here a-bite the bah-lection!” One grande dame in a seaside mansion, a hoary-voiced Madame Arcati-type in bangles, a blue kaftan and huge plastic spectacles, stares and chews a wasp as he carries on his pitch, with the same simple question he asks all voters: “What do you think about Brexit?” Following Stevens around for a lunchtime canvass, I heard a range of responses to his question: “I’m all for it”; “We never fucking left. The ECHR… [etc]”; “Well, I supported it at the time, but now I regret it”; “Farage is a muppet”.
I develop a guessing-game, profiling each respondent in an attempt to anticipate their answer (Arcati was number three). To the Brexit believers, Stevens says, “I shall trouble you no longer,” and departs (persuading them of their folly comes later, he says, but first he must consolidate the Remainers under one candidature). To the Brexit doubters, he says, “I’m your man,” and palms a leaflet bearing his ruddy face and credentials. Former Tory MEP (1989-99); long-time nemesis of Nigel Farage (Stevens has been fighting him in by-elections since 2010); all-round solid chap. While he is attached to the “Rejoin EU” party label, he says he is the man for Tories who dislike Brexit and Farage – a once dominant stream in the party (ten years ago most Tory MPs were pro-EU), now pretty much dead. In theory, Clacton should be his perfect seat; not long ago, everyone here was a Tory.
Though he broke with the mainstream party in 1999 over the single currency (after which he founded the Pro-Euro Conservative Party), he has turned out to be the only Tory in Britain who was prepared to face down Farage in this election. Kemi Badenoch, who claims to be surging in popularity, declined Farage’s invitation for a contest. The local Tory councillors of Tendring council are not best pleased with Stevens’s attempts to co-opt the old brand on leaflets.
His goal now is to rescue “mainstream conservatism” by splitting the Tories on the European issue, or at least attempting a defibrillation of its moderate wing. While he hates what the Tories have become, he wants to get back the party of his youth, that slightly mythical past when it was the standard-bearer of southern English noblesse oblige and worldliness. His residual loyalty to Toryism is obvious and genuine. After one encounter with a woman who says she is resolutely voting for “the bin”, Stevens mutters on the way back down her driveway, “probably a liberal”.
You may be thinking “Rory Stewart”. I did too. Wrong. Stevens is furious with Rory for giving a soft-soap interview to “the bin” instead of promoting his own serious pro-European candidacy. He also takes a dim view of Stewart’s political career, in which he endorsed Theresa May’s Brexit deal so that he could serve in the cabinet “for 20 minutes”, and failed to stop Boris Johnson. He describes Stewart, his podcast co-host Alastair Campbell and much of the rest of the Remainer establishment as “useless”.
He is also self-aware enough to admit he may be “po-faced”. He heard the arguments about Count Binface being a part of satirical tradition. “But a joke can go too far,” he says, raising Keir Starmer’s Binface endorsement at his final PMQs. “Telling people to put their vote in a bin, while there is an ongoing, unprecedented attack on British democracy, is profoundly dangerous.” After years of standing against Farage, it is Binface, and the apathy he represents, that has emerged as Stevens’s main foe.
Stevens has been an eye-witness to what he calls “the long defeat of pro-European conservatism over 30 years” and his political career is a litany of failure – from trying, twice, to put Hezza in No 10, through to pushing for a second referendum. His political position hasn’t really changed since the late Eighties, when he was a Thatcherite and foreign-exchange trader in the City who decided a single European currency was a good idea. But this position has been increasingly marginalised ever since – he started off in the orbit of a man who served as deputy prime minister and is now considered to be an eccentric no-hoper in this by-election.
What’s funny is, contra the caricature of weeping Rejoiners wrapped in blue sky and gold stars, Stevens is quite unsentimental about Europe. His wife is French, and while he splits his time between Brussels and Spain, he refers to them as “continentals”. His pro-Europeanism is simple old-Tory calculation about the place of Britain, and particularly the City, in the world. It’s the same calculation he made on the trading floor in the Thatcher days. “They need us and we need them,” is his transactional view of the EU.
The Napoleon line, about a person’s politics being formed by the world when they were 20, bears repeating here. Like that other public-school educated City trader, Nigel Farage, Stevens watched through the Eighties how the old British merchant banks collapsed and were swallowed up by bigger foreign rivals. In this ruthless world of competition, he foresaw only decline for Britain. He decided our best hope was to go all in with Europe. Farage saw the crisis too, but it turned him into a Eurosceptic. Theirs were really just two contrasting responses to the same fear of decline, by men of strikingly similar backgrounds.
When we get to Clacton proper, Stevens’s electoral challenge becomes obvious. “Back in the EU?” spits a local man swigging an early-afternoon lager on the seafront, following a Stevens fly-past at a local café-bar: “He’s out of touch!” One of the Rejoin EU entourage laughs: “He’s not here to be in touch! Farage is his nemesis, so he just haunts him, in this very gentlemanly way.” Every man carries a shadow. Farage’s is called John Stevens.
[Further reading: Restore voters can’t stomach Nigel Farage]
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This article appears in the 12 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, A Very British Scandal
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