There are, one might think, less humiliating things which Nigel Farage could have done with himself this summer. Perhaps he could have nipped out the front to quickly check on something without taking his keys, so that when the door slammed behind him he’d be trapped outside, possibly in his pants. Perhaps he could have used a bathroom where the door lock can’t be reached from the loo, leaving him, mid business, with the opposite problem. Or perhaps he could have gone to a party, finally worked out where he knew that person from, and enthusiastically reintroduced himself, only to realise that she’d known all along and had been ignoring him on purpose. That can also be embarrassing. So I’m told.
But these are too small for a man sometimes described as the most influential British politician of the 21st century. Not for our Nigel these petty, private embarrassments. For a man who remade British politics, in roughly the same way an enormous flaming space rock remade the dinosaurs, only face-planting and then wetting himself in front of the entire planet will do.
And so, welcome, to what we may soon have to describe as the first Clacton by-election of 2026. In the turquoise corner, a man so affronted by intrusive questions about his finances that he’s set himself up for weeks on end of literally nothing else. In the red corner… well, no one, actually: every other corner to which one might attach a colour seems to be strangely deserted. Other candidates that are running include a couple of oddballs so far to the right they make Farage look like LibDem; the more embarrassing Corbyn brother; ITV4’s Laurence Fox; and a man dressed as a fox who may, in fact, have the better acting career these days.
The most serious challenger to Farage, and my god I enjoyed writing that description, is that perennial novelty candidate, ruler of the Recyclons, Count Binface of Sigma IX – or, if you prefer the name currently being used in print across the Channel, Comte Tête-de-Poubelle. So desperate are Farage’s outriders to find a way of turning “not losing to a bin” into a popular mandate they they’re desperately trying to spread the shocking news that Binface is not, in fact, an intergalactic space warrior at all: he’s actually an Oxford-educated comic who also does documentaries about Athenian democracy for BBC Radio 4. In its way this point is quite correct – the people most likely to find employment mocking the British establishment do tend to come from inside it; that’s also how I got here. But unfortunately for Farage it is just not possible to make out that it’s your opponent who’s the mainstream politician when you’re wearing a suit and he’s wearing a bin.
Worse for the Reform leader, Binface looks like he’s having fun. Farage does not look like he’s having fun. His “hail fellow, well met” air of faux-bonhomie has long been a part of his appeal to the nation’s saloon bar bores. These last few weeks, though, a different sitcom character has floated to the surface, as the scum is wont to do: the middle-aged man so in the grip of his own self-important rage that he’ll spend 20 minutes furiously listing grievances to a captive audience like Father Ted. Perhaps this will resonate. Many people in this country really are angry these days, even if the cause is very rarely “being asked polite but insistent questions about where exactly they got all that money”. Quite possibly, though, it will not.
Count Binface is not, I am sorry to tell you, going to win. He’s unlikely even to come close, though he must have a fair shot of being the best performing novelty candidate anyone can actually remember. The thing is, though, he doesn’t have to win. To avoid humiliation now Nigel Farage needs to net at least the same vote share he did in 2024, without turnout collapsing or a significant chunk of the opposition consolidating behind a novelty joke candidate, and all without generating a single viral clip in which he loses his cool over either being asked awkward but reasonable questions about his own personal financial affairs or his main opponent being a man in a bin.
All that seems just a little unlikely. An operator like Nigel Farage surely can’t have found his way into this mess by accident. And so we are forced to conclude: the humiliation is the point. This is what he wants.
Well, I’m not judging. I’d just prefer that he indulged it in private.
[Further reading: Rupert Lowe, podcast bro?]
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Subscribe here to commentOr as Hanlon’s razor says – Farage is incompetent.
Given Farage has a smaller inner circle (just himself) than the other mainstream politicians who all have probably a few dozen people in their inner circles it’s surprising it’s taken so long for him to come unstuck.