The temper tantrum that triggered Farage's by-election

0:02This is a global production. With all the anticipation, we had pretty much worked out that there were only two ultimate endings to the announcement that he would make. Will he go or will he double down and refight it? Today, I will resign. He described himself today quite intriguingly as an influencer with seven million followers. Usually, if you have to say you're an influencer, it usually means you're not. He also makes the case of why it's really important for him to be rich. And he talked about the idea of being the most physically attacked member of parliament or politician in British history.

0:38Well, you might want to tell that to David Amos and to Joe Cox. Enough is enough. And I thought over the weekend, what shall I do? I could go out and try and make some real big money. I could go to the USA, where I've got plenty of offers. and then I thought why should I be judged today or in history in the future by Sky News and their ilk why should they be the people that decide my fate when as I repeat I've done nothing wrong I've thought about it hard and I've decided today today I will resign as a member of parliament for Clacton-on-Sea thereby forcing a by-election, which should happen, I hope, in short order.

1:27No, I've decided that the people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions. In a hastily assembled public announcement, and after a good half-hour ramble, Nigel Farage announces he's resigning as an MP to fight his own by-election in Clacton. He's furious. Has he been triggered by all the questions into dodgy finances? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:56the news agents it's meatless and it's lewis and uh nigel farage surprised everybody uh about midday by tweeting that he would be making a quote major announcement on his future in public life obviously this got everyone thinking about the possibility of a resignation as a reform party leader not least because he'd had a pretty turgid weekend um after new revelations in the sunday times which i know emily you talked to gabriel pogrand the insight editor at the sunday times about yesterday with this guy this guy called posh nicknamed posh george someone who among other things calls nigel farage daddy who's been his aide and give arranged huge amounts of services and personal services to him over previous years he is a convicted felon in the united states having spent seven months in an Arizona jail.

2:50This followed, of course, all of the other questions about the£5 million gift bung donation, whatever you want to call it, from Christopher Harbourn, also involved, of course, in crypto, much like Posh George. And there was a really awful clip of Farage basically haranguing a Sky News journalist, I think, at an airport looking depressed, looking drawn, looking gaunt, looking more irritable than perhaps we've ever yet seen him. So all these questions about whether this would all be leading to a resignation. And indeed, there was a resignation of short sorts, but it wasn't as leader of reform. Instead, he announced after a long speech, the first part of it, I have to say, doused in endless quantities and volumes of self-pity, saying he was the most vilified politician in history, that the press had been going after him, all sorts of other things.

3:39But the climax basically was that he would be resigning as the Member of Parliament for Clacton to force a by-election where he said that he would not be judged by the media, Sky News, the Sunday Times, whoever it was, but instead by the voters of Clacton saying that it would be an establishment versus reform election versus the people election, and that if he won, the people won, and if he lost, guess what? The people would lose and the establishment would win. Yeah, I mean, it was actually an extraordinary moment because with all the anticipation, we had pretty much worked out that there were only two ultimate endings to the announcement that he would make.

4:25Either he was going to step back as an MP and cite, you know, the need for sort of a bit of personal space or the need to sort out his finances or the need to, count his money or else he was going to trigger this by-election. And so social media and the commentary was basically split into two camps. Will he go or will he double down and refight it? And as he started the speech, I have to say, he did a kind of trip down memory lane of how he won Clacton two years ago and how he'd fought the Brexit vote and how he delivered Brexit. I don't I don't know why you'd boast about that, but there you go.

5:05He did. He also described the five million, Emily, sorry to interrupt, he also described the five million in a particularly charming way. I thought he described it as the equivalent of a lottery win. Very good. Exactly. He did, in fact, win the lottery by having very, very rich, influential friends. Exactly. Who gave him five million pounds. and I think we should play you a couple of bits for context of this speech because he also makes the case of why it's really important for him to be rich and why it's really important for him to be gifted all this money and for why it's really important for MPs to actually know how to do business.

5:42He calls himself at one point an influencer and an investor and I guess we will find out in the coming weeks whether that is a big selling point for the people of Clacton. But let's just play you Farage at his most self-defensive and irate. Being a member of the European Parliament for 20 years cost me a huge amount of money. But I did it because I had a goal. I had a goal and a belief that we should leave the European Union, get back to being a self-regulating nation that makes its own laws, charts its own destiny and among other things of course, controls its own borders. We might not yet, ten years on, have reaped as many of the benefits as we ought, but one day I believe we will.

6:28And let's be frank, if I hadn't done what I'd done, there would have been no referendum, there would have been no Brexit. I came out at the end of that with very little money indeed. But over the last 10 years I've been writing, I've been lecturing, I've been broadcasting, I've been investing, I promoted one or two financial products and for those that followed me into them they've more than doubled their money which I'm pleased about. I also worked extensively in those years of 2021 to 2024 as an influencer with over 7 million followers on social media. So yes, over the last 10 years, I have financially done well, but that of itself should not be looked upon as a crime.

7:16So he's bigging up the fact that we need more people like him essentially in business. It is very hard to hear what he's saying today without going back to the context that you, Lewis, referred to a second ago, which was this extraordinary doorstep interview when he arrived back, I presume it was Heathrow, but certainly at an airport, from celebrating America's Independence Day. And he was asked questions by Sky News, which really pissed him off. Was it a mistake not to declare the gifts from George Cottrell, sir? You tell your bosses, you harass my family anymore. and I'll take you to serious consequences.

7:58That's what your organisation has done this morning. Go away. A mistake not to declare the gift, sir. You do not hear me. You have broken all the rules, Leveson and everything else. Cut. So, I mean, a direct threat there to a reporter for asking a question, you tell your bosses. And certainly this whole question of whether his family was in danger, he was in danger, was a big theme today. He mentioned the milkshake that had been thrown at him. He mentioned the bollard, I think, that had hit him. And he talked about all the other occasions in which his life had been endangered that we don't yet know about as a way of justifying, as he has done previously, the need for this£5 million donation from the Thai crypto billionaire.

8:44Yeah. And Farage has this deep martyr complex, which comes out a lot. You heard it in those clips there. He talks about the idea of great, enormous self-sacrifice, that he sacrificed this extraordinary career in the city as a metals trader. Of course, he stopped doing that about 30 years ago. Hard to know whether he'd have been a success or a failure. But anyway, he talks a lot about the idea of giving up his lucrative status in the United States, his time, as he described himself today quite intriguingly, as an influencer with 7 million followers. Usually, if you have to say you're an influencer, it usually means you're not.

9:18But anyway, that's the way he described himself. And that comes out and that sort of thin skidness comes out. There is something more serious they have pointed to, which I think more reasonable people could argue about, which is that as part of one of the Times investigations into his extensive property portfolio, about which there are really serious, legitimate questions, it is true, and I was talking to a form source about this before we started recording, that they published or they took a photograph of a house that Farage has bought that they identified as his daughter currently living in.

9:52And so therefore, it would be possible for someone to be able to identify that house and that they would know that his daughter was there. Now, you know, you can make an argument there. There are legitimate questions and legitimate journalistic inquiry about all of that. But I think it is true to say, you know, my impression is that this particular bit of anger is not synthetic from Farage. Farage is genuinely livid. that his daughter, who has never sought his right to be in the public eye, and in fairness to Farage, he is also right, he has never ever tried to put his family in the public eye.

10:22He's not one of those politicians who is, you know, pictured with his sons or his daughter or his children. He's not tried to make political capital out of them. He's also had a sort of complicated family life as well, so maybe that's part of it. But generally speaking, that is true. He clearly was really angry about that. And to be honest, I think he might have been far more effective if he had majored on that part of it earlier on. Instead, what we got was the normal sort of, as I say, 15 minutes of Farage martyrdom and Farage self-pity sometimes, which, as I say, he is rather prone to, where among other things, for example, he described the idea that he's the most vilified figure in the press and he's had 20 years of the press and the establishment going for him.

10:59Well, I mean, it is certainly true that he's had some bad press over the years. It's also true to say that there are lots of political figures who would also claim and vie for that title. I think if Jeremy Corbyn were watching that, for example, I think he'd have more than half a raised eyebrow. In many cases, Farage receives a very positive press, particularly over the last 12 months or so. But that bit of it about his daughter, I'm told, is entirely real and not synthetic. Look, I think if you want to protect your family, that is a totally natural instinct. It is what anyone would understand and appreciate.

11:29But from a public perception, if you want to protect your family from being investigated, if you want to stop that kind of thing happening, then aren't you obliged as a politician to actually come forward with the answers to the questions that people are trying to ask? They didn't just stand outside his daughter's house to harass her. They didn't go after his family members to try and intimidate them. They were asking legitimate questions about money, about financial, about property that he had owned and not declared. And it seems to me very simple that if you use, as Nigel Farage has done, the media relentlessly on the way up, if you use it at every twist and turn of your career, if you depend on the media to tell your story, to tell your anti-establishment, anti-main party story all the way up for 30 years, then when the media, When those same reporters, when those same papers and journalists start asking legitimate questions, fundamentally, where did your money come from?

12:35You cannot turn around and start berating them. You cannot turn around and threaten those reporters, threaten their bosses. What he is doing in that clip is threatening people in the very way that he is talking about feeling threatened himself. I just don't think that adds up. Well, he also talks, of course, and I do think this is a really distasteful line. He talks about the idea of being the most physically attacked member of parliament or politician in British history. Well, you might want to tell that to David Amos and to Joe Cox, you know, two MPs who have literally been assassinated. That's not to undermine the threats that Farage has faced and does face.

13:08That is absolutely a matter of public record. But I think, you know, particularly given we've just gone past the 10th anniversary of Joe Cox's death, a little bit of proportion and sensibility around language and that wouldn't go amiss. So I think we have to ask ourselves, you know, why has Farage done this? Why has Farage done this? And I think that fundamentally, this is an act of weakness and not of strength. It looks like strength. And it's certainly true to say that Farage who senses and sniffs out exactly how to get the attention of limelight back upon him. It certainly will do that for a while.

13:40And look, I think we should be absolutely clear about this. Farage would not be calling this by-election if he wasn't almost as confident as you can be that he will win it. Clacton is a rock-solid seat for him. He has and has been for reform or its equivalent, its antecedent parties for some time. He has a real profound personal following there. And he will try and use it. He will try and use it clearly. clearly, and he always has Trump and MAGA never far from his mind, he is clearly trying to use it almost as a micro version, very micro it has to be said, of the 2024 presidential election for Trump, which is to say Trump was obviously being accused of serious crimes for which he would have gone to prison.

14:21No suggestion I think that that would happen with Farage here, but nonetheless he was being accused of crimes and he had built up, that is Trump, a persecution complex and narrative around the establishment, the idea of the establishment coming for him. Now, the reason, of course, that Trump isn't sat in a federal prison today is because he won the 2024 presidential election. It politically absolved him of those crimes, whether it ought to have done so or not is a different question. But it just did, because practically speaking, you couldn't have the president of the United States, the chief law officer, the chief magistrate governing from prison, right?

14:57So practically speaking, absolved him. Farage and that lot will be thinking in similar terms, that if he is able to take his case about these matters, these financial matters and so on, to the people of Clacton, and they re-elect him anyway, that it takes the air out of the balloon. And maybe it will do that, although on a very practical level, it won't, because actually the parliamentary rules of this is that he will now cease to be an MP, which means that the investigations, well, I think it is investigations now, both into the posh George elements, but also into the 5 million, will now be paused because as far as Parliament is concerned, you can only investigate a member if they are a member.

15:37But if he is re-elected, those investigations will resume. That is clear as anything and clear as a crystal within the parliamentary rules and procedures. So on a practical level, he might be hoping that in a media sense, this absolves him and it will take the air of that balloon. But on a practical level, if he is re-elected, which we must assume he will be, those investigations will resume as soon as he walks again past the threshold of the House of Commons. Yeah, it's a real reminder that actually the UK is not the US. This would not get him off the hook for the Standards Commission investigation, which is what you're talking about now, the Daniel Greenberg investigation, the Parliamentary Commissioner.

16:19What we know is that the Commissioner has the discretion to suspend investigations at any time. And if Farage is re-elected, he can just pick it up again. We'll be looking at the shape of that by-election in a moment.

16:48so i guess we are already as journalists thinking ahead to the next stage which is what does this by-election in clacton look like and who knows we might be popping up in clacton any moment soon. One of the questions is who stands and which parties decide to stand because there is weirdly a precedent for this going back nearly 20 years to 2008 when David Davis, the sort of senior conservative who was so angst-ridden about the anti-terrorism laws and the 42-day detention and the sort of the limits on freedom that that suggested, stood in a by-election in Holton, Price and Howden, his constituency and none of the other parties decided to stand.

17:32He won it by over 70%. And I don't know whether that was a sort of sign that he won or that they kind of didn't even bother to engage with the premise. This time round, things could be quite different because there is one person waiting in the wings, a certain MP for Great Yarmouth, who, who knows, might decide to trigger his own by-election and jump into Clacton. And what Rupert Lowe has just tweeted in the last few moments is this. Farage has proven one thing today, one thing only. Everything he does is about one person, Nigel Farage. The people of Clacton do not need a media circus descending on their town over a busy tourist season because their MP has made a series of bad decisions.

18:14He should have declared the £5 million. He knows it. We all know it. Now he's going to weaponise a by-election to distract from that and is going to cost the taxpayer a fortune. So I don't know whether there is a case for the other party standing back and seeing essentially restore and reform battle this one out. Would Andy Burnham feel confident enough to put somebody extraordinary in that seat as a candidate and say, this is one for Labour to take. This is how, you know, my reign is going to begin. What do the Tories feel about that seat now? I think the danger for Farage, of course, as always with by-elections is that they are unpredictable.

18:55and they can you think that as david davis found back in 2008 you you you can kind of feel if you try and call them over one issue it feels like it either goes in in two directions one a little bit well i suppose three one is it sort of lands and people really do take that issue on and they go yeah i really understand what what this is about that's what happened in makerfield you know andy burnham created that he managed to basically convey very quickly that this was a seat and this was a contest basically about getting rid of Keir Starmer and that by voting for me, Andy Burnham, you can get rid of him, i.e.

19:27success. And doubtless they will have been looking at Maker Fiat a little bit before, seeing the attention and momentum that's conferred upon Burnham, and now they're thinking, I want a little bit of that. But there's two other ways it can go as well. It's the David Davis way, as you say, Emily, which is you sort of call it on a quite sort of esoteric issue, something that isn't exactly very clear as it was about civil liberties back in 08. And, you know, best case scenario, sometimes like he's trying to articulate this, this is an establishment versus the people. It's basically me versus the establishment.

19:58Maybe that will land. But people in Clacton will really have to believe that the questions over the 5 million and now posh George and the rest of them are confected. And as we've talked about on the show before, again, reform are at their weakest when they think that our politics is like the United States. And there is a lot of evidence, polling evidence and focus group evidence to suggest that that concern about that money, not least because of the poor way that Farage has handled it, is real. And we're not in America. And those questions are real. In America, you know, we know the MAGA base and the rest of them would just ignore it.

20:31It would just be part of the white noise of American politics. That is not the case here. We're not quite as polarized. So there is that third option for how that by-election could go, which is you call it about one issue and about one thing and it becomes uncontrollable and it quickly becomes about something else. So, for example, could you imagine, I don't know, a high profile, just possible, don't know, just think off the top of my head here, but that a high profile, say anti-corruption candidate, sort of Martin Lewis, I'm not saying he'd want to do it, but someone like that stood on the basis of, right, we need to clean up parliament.

21:03And suddenly, I'm not saying Farage would lose against someone like that, but suddenly the whole contours of it become quite different and you're starting to look like the establishment guy, right? So there are dangers in this with Farage. It's not entirely clear. As I say, I'm confident that he's sure that he will win, but there's always dangers when you basically roll the dice and throw yourself into the political winds like this. You can't always control what happens next. I agree 100 % because I think the framing for Farage is not the same as the framing for David Davis. Davis could go and say, this is a principle that I care strongly about, do you want to back me or sack me?

21:41And whatever voters thought in the end, and I guess there were no other candidates, they decided that he was taking a principal stand and they would go with him. I don't think you can really stand on a principle of please don't ask me about my financial affairs. Like it doesn't really sort of go to the heart of what the people of Clacton presumably want to defend. Yes, he can make it a sort of, you know, tell them again or don't let them get rid of me or I'm your anti-establishment person. But if those questions over his money affairs don't go away, then what is the sell exactly to the people of Clacton?

22:20We don't think that he has spent a huge amount of time in the constituency. When we have been there, people have been very vocal in terms of coming towards us about how little they've actually seen their own MP. I don't think there is this sort of bed of kind of, you know, familiarity with him. We know that he was sort of nervous about doing his surgeries there for exactly the reasons that he enumerated his announcement today, sort of physical fear. But it's very hard to see what he is relying on there if, as you say, one of the other parties or indeed an independent came along and did a Martin Bell.

23:00Do you remember Martin Bell was the sort of the image that you're talking about, the anti-corruption guy who always wore his sort of, you know, pristine white linen suit, which was meant to signify that he was coming at this with no particular political agenda, but he wanted to be the anti-corruption candidate against Neil Hamilton. He was a war reporter at the BBC. And it was enough in those days to sort of set yourself apart from, as it were, the swamp, you know, the mud, the stench of corruption. I don't know who that person would be. I mean, you suggested Martin Lewis. I can't think why Martin Lewis would want to be the MP in Clacton, but it's exactly that sort of character you're right.

23:40I mean, is there a Carol Vorderman after, after, you know, the kind of stuff that she was on the receiving end of over the makerfield by election. Yeah, there is one job I do not want, and that is MP. But I'm guessing there is someone who would relish the chance of standing against Farage for exactly that sort of reason. And then, as you say, he has to redefine what he's actually offering. Because a by-election, any election, is an offer, right? It can't just be, I've been maligned and I feel a bit threatened and I'm really angry, so vote for me. You have to actually offer the people of the place you're representing something that's going to improve their lives.

24:25And wasn't it interesting that in that speech today, he didn't mention any of that. He just said, I've made a lot of money. Some of the people who follow my investments have made money. But there wasn't anything in terms of what he was actually offering the people of Clowney. Well, this is what I mean, I think, about a move. It's a move born of weakness rather than strength. Because, look, what's the sort of the big macro political context here? Basically, Farage knows that this story has run away with him. And for whatever reason, he is unable and actually, I think, unwilling to do the things which wouldn't have actually been too difficult to do, which is just do a calm series of interviews where you try to neutralize it.

25:03Now, it might well be that he knows, who knows, that there are more details to come of all of this, which will be more difficult to control, which is why he's tried to just make it radioactive and sort of just store it away, store it away and put it in a vault as much as possible. But it is he's trying, knowing that it's clear he's trying to use the momentum and the news kind of worthiness of a by-election to distract. Problem with that, as you say, Emily, is that fundamentally you still call this by-election off the back of questions about your finances. So it would be unusual if more questions, not fewer, about those finances weren't put in an effort to give the people who are effectively being set up as a jury here, the jurors, the electorate of Clacton, enough information for them to be able to make up their own mind.

25:51And there is wider weakness, too. I remember when Reform were at their sort of apogee, sort of about 30%, you know, 33 % of the polls maybe get to that level. And we talked about it at the time, maybe mid 2025. And we talked about the idea on this show that, you know, this was a political force which appeared extremely impressive, but it would be impressive, impressive right up to the point that it wasn't in the sense that this is a political force, which because fundamentally, unlike the Tories and Labour, it is not embedded around the country to such a great extent. it is a force in so many ways built on political vapor it requires momentum the entire time it needs to keep winning the entire time it needs to constantly have the approbation and support and the kind of the glossiness of of victory and momentum and all the support of the newspapers as soon as it doesn't have that anymore as soon as it starts to stall then it starts to stall and slow down very, very quickly.