Farage beats the bin! – Clacton results unpacked

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0:37Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots, the Spectator's daily politics podcast. I'm Oscar Edelson, I'm joined this morning by Tim Shipman and Noah Hoffman. And shock horror, Nigel Farage has won the Clacton by-election. Although I suppose you may be shocked by the scale of the victory. Noah, you stayed up, you've been following it all. Can you take us through the results? Yeah, so the reform leader received 22 ,239 votes, and that's 1 ,000 more than his total at the 2024 general election. His main rival, the comic bin, Count Binface, secured a respectable 9 ,455 votes, which is 26.7 % vote share.

1:22And I believe, Tim, it's the highest vote share of any comedy contender in history. I think that's right. Yes. And Farage has had a few in his time. But this, yeah, Count Binface has now surpassed Al Murray as the main sort of comedy contender taking on Nigel Farage. But I think you'd have to say these are sort of, this is the kind of result that a Middle Eastern potentate that is pretending to have a democratic country would kind of get three quarters of it. It's not the full North Korea, is it? Not the full Saddam Hussein, where 99 % was sort of the bare requirement and they'd find a few other stray votes just to show that it was a real election.

2:08So no, the bin has done well. I think the really shocking result, though, is lower down the scorecard when you have a look and see that Howling Lord Hope, the leader of the monster-raving loony party, only scored 80, secured 18 votes. and he wasn't even the highest monster-raving loony party candidate. Nick the Incredible Flying Brick got 28. John Curtis's five-party system coming true. Yeah, it's chaos in British politics. But yeah, the bin, the bin we'll be happy with. It would have been nice for him, I think, if he'd got 10 ,000 votes. He didn't quite get there for that. But, you know, Farage will be perfectly content with three-quarters of the vote.

2:46But he didn't even turn up. And it feels like this is the sort of farcical conclusion that this farcical process needed to finish things off. It was the bin that was very happy to announce that he was the winning candidate of those who showed up. Yeah, let's give Count Biverface maybe a little bit of airtime. Let's hear a little bit of his alternative victory speech. Hello, humans. Well, I can officially say that I am the winning candidate of the candidates who bothered to turn up for the results. That's right, 9 ,455 actual votes. Just eight weeks ago in Makerfield, I got 95. That means I've got against Nigel Farage 10 ,000 % more votes than I got against Andy Burnham.

3:38What does that tell you? Well, it tells you that Nigel, who said that he didn't want to be humiliated, maybe has been. Now, Noah, this has all been a fairly undignified process, this whole by-election. And we might even be back here again with the results of the Standards Committee investigation. But I do wonder, do you think Nigel Farage has got out of this what he wanted? Do you know what? I think I do. And it's worth looking at the turnout, which was 44.37%. It's actually not a bad turnout, given that the conclusion was always fairly obvious. And I think it does sort of indicate that people living in Clacton have made a judgment on that five million pound gift.

4:22And they agree with the reform line that this is not a big deal. It's perhaps an establishment media stitch up. And Farage, as a private individual, even though he, some argue, he did have an idea he was going to go into politics, was entitled to that gift and good on him. Who wouldn't take that five million pound if they were offered it? I do think the turnout does sort of indicate that sentiment in Clacton and also does to some extent show that people in Clacton didn't view the by-election necessarily as a farce or a gimmick in the way that opposition parties tried to push it as one. The question now is just how representative Clacton is with the rest of the country.

5:08and so even though Farage reigned supreme in his fiefdom in Essex he faces a much bigger challenge on a national scale and there's a range of different different factors for that not least the burn and bounce and we that could be fickle I mean who knows how long that will last but he also has to battle somewhat of a small revival but potentially growing of the Tories under Kemi Badenok and then of course the battle further on the right from Restore all of these different factors have eroded what was a very strong and consistent lead by Farage for a long time. As we come to the result of this by-election, he is entering back into a Westminster context very different from the one we saw in July 2024.

5:54And there are various battles ahead for him that he just wasn't facing at that time. And so the big question now is how he answers them and whether he can perform well, not just as a campaigner, but as a statesman as well. I think this is a raw test for British politics to a degree, this result. No, it's absolutely spot on. This is, by the standards of a lot of by-elections, particularly ones that are a foregone conclusion, this is pretty high turnout, 44 % or whatever. I mean, it is not unusual in a by-election to see turnout drop to sort of certainly below a third and, you know, as low as 25 % is not unheard of.

6:34But I think you will see what you want to see in this. If you're reform, I think you'll see a strong endorsement for Farage. And if you're the others, you'll say, even in a totally foregone conclusion with no credible alternative, a quarter of people still turned up to tactically vote against him. And that's the kind of the pressure that reform is beginning to fall under. Noah has taken us through a roll call of the challenges facing for us that the other one that is worth mentioning is that there's a lot of internal dissent in reform at the moment. Zia Youssef in particular, the Home Affairs spokesman, is putting a lot of noses out of joint.

7:09Even in the last sort of 48 hours, we've seen Tim Montgomery, former Tory who crossed over to reform, sort of publicly saying he thinks Zia is out of control and being sort of extreme in some of his public pronouncements. That came off the back of him calling Ben Wallace, the former Defence Secretary, a traitor. And even Farage said publicly that he thought that was going a bit far. So there's a bit of sort of internal disquiet at the moment. And as Noah observes, we've got the burn and bounce still sort of working its way through. Most pollsters I speak to think that these bounces peak within sort of two, three, four months of a new leader and tend to have evaporated completely within six months.

7:52So by next spring, we might have a firmer idea of whether the comminiscence, as some people in the Conservative Party are terming it, is real, whether the burn and bounce is anything sustained. And, you know, whether Farage, what is the sort of baseline now of reform support? It feels a little bit like they spent a lot of time trying to look like a government in waiting and that that hasn't gone as successfully as they had hoped. and we're back to Farage in his comfort zone doing campaigning and that's worked reasonably well for him here. But I think we need to talk about, you know, the security threat.

8:28Farage didn't turn up, says that there was a credible threat against him and his people are vociferously saying that's the case. Essex police have put out a statement saying we received, there was no reason not to attend, bluntly. That has then prompted a series of reformed people to hit the airwaves, Suella Brafman among them saying, you know, basically the police are liars. We don't trust the police. And, you know, she went on the BBC saying, you know, I trust the police about as much as I trust the BBC. So even at the moment of his victory, you've got reform playing this as a sort of grievance card against the establishment saying the police can't be trusted.

9:08You know, we don't rely on the police for guidance about whether it's safe for Farage to attend. An interesting fact that I gleaned from this morning's Morning Press, the Spectator's morning newsletter, is that Nigel Farage is the first winning candidate since Bobby Sands not to attend the declaration. Bobby Sands, let's remind ourselves, was on hunger strike in jail at the time. Yeah, yeah, he did have a pretty good reason for not attending, other than, I think, Farage did say in his alternate victory speech that he didn't want to be standing on a stage with a bunch of nobodies. and on those quote-unquote nobodies now just a final question Count Binface has done really really well 9000 votes is not to be sniffed at Nigel Farage is calling him the uni party candidate as we look ahead to potentially being back here for another collection by election in the not too distant future what lessons can we learn sort of from uh from from how well a candidate could do if they did have a proper party machinery behind them if it was a Labour party candidate canvassing with all the full force of the Labour party machine behind them Yeah, really interesting.

10:09So I think when it comes to Clacton, you know, the likes of Labour and the Greens are never going to get anywhere. And I struggle to see how the Tories can really revive that either, because Farage has done very, very well embedding himself in that community. I mean, countless journalists travelled to Clacton to write dispatches in the build up to this by-election. They all very much reached the same conclusion, which is that in that area of the world, Farage is king. Now, of course, as you said, there was a big protest vote. But I imagine if you look at the makeup of that protest vote, it would very much split between a lot of the other parties.

10:47It's very hard to see how there could ever be a left wing party leading in Clacton. And of course, the Tories, even despite the Kemi renaissance, so to speak, have really, really a damaged brand working against them that they are a long, long way from alleviating at all. so you know this combined sort of funny character as a vehicle for a protest vote was a success but if you put the other parties into the mix I'm not necessarily sure one in particular would do as well as Count Binface did I think it would be interesting to see how Rupert Lowe goes down in the area but generally Farage as an individual as a character and with the reform brand behind him does do well.

11:33And I don't think there is a single opposition party that could take the fight to him in a way that the likes of Campin face did, funnily enough. Yeah, I mean, I kind of agree with that. I think, you know, the alternative would have to be a Conservative candidate, and you would have to then get mass tactical voting from the left supporting voters for the Tories. And I think, you know, you might get that. But I think the lesson probably here is that however many parliamentary standards investigations rule against Farage over the donations and the gifts, I think, you know, you could see someone turning 25 % into 40 % or even 45%.

12:14But it feels like this is a fairly impregnable fortress. Now, obviously, if Rupert Lowe's Restore were to win, you could perhaps expect them to peel off a few percentage points from reform. And that might put things in the realm of a bit more interesting. But it feels like it's a bit of a forlorn hope if people think this kind of the route that they took to get rid of Boris Johnson by running sort of standards investigations and a recall vote is going to stop Farage. I think that is optimistic on the part of anyone who envisages that. But I do think that the wider picture is that there is the propensity for widespread tactical voting against reform.

12:56And I think while my conclusion would be that this means Farage is pretty safe as an MP, but it means that his position as a potential prime minister is perhaps slightly more problematic than, is revealed to be slightly more problematic than perhaps some people in reform would have hoped for. Great. We've got Berman and Bounce, Keminaissance, and now Farage has reasserted his grip over Clacton. politics looking increasingly interesting as we head towards conference season. Thank you so much, Tim. Thank you, Noah. And thank you for listening.

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