As they might say in Clacton ‘Come on mate, yer ‘avin a larf entcha?’
This is a story that I never thought I’d write, but has written itself.
I actually feel a bit for Nigel Farage. More in shock than glee I’d soberly point out he’s being laughed at. Reform are being laughed at. They may well have, and will happily tell you they’ll get, the last laugh, but they are being ridiculed, nonetheless.
The reason I feel for Nigel and his party outriders is this is a situation purely of their own making, and that knowing him and many of his team I simply cannot fathom how they didn’t spot the problem, and deal with it in a way that even a year ago I’d have expected of them.
Hypocrisy, as Labour have learned in two years is toxic in politics. Ridicule comes just behind it.
Nigel Farage, under scrutiny for not declaring a £5 million ‘gift’ doubles down on not registering it instead of simply regretting he didn’t. The scrutiny of the Standards Committee is not unique to him but universal to any MP. His explanation of the gift sparks interest in the media into what other financial rewards he may not have registered. The period under review is a year before any MP becomes MP, and these financial arrangements above £300 do seem to fit. The investigation is about whether it was a gift rather than donation and whether he should have registered it. That’s it.
The same journalist who delved into Starmer’s problems with gifts, reveals a convicted criminal may have funded his close friend, and as everyone knows a long active political ally, and the Times probes his property arrangements. They print a photograph of a property that is already featured in the public domain with a smiling Nigel Farage standing in the drive.
Sky news, without camera goes to Farage’s house – it’s not his adult daughter’s property it’s his but she happens to live there – no camera, no notebook – to check if he is there.
Farage, who I happen to know is, and always has been, quite rightly fiercely protective of his family is deeply angered and upset by this.
With few outside his inner circle knowing until just beforehand he decides to resign his seat, and force a by-election he has every expectation of winning – otherwise he’d never have risked the ploy – under the auspices that he will not be judged by ‘the Establishment’ but the people of Clacton, before any inquiry into his finances and whether they should have been declared has reported.
Initially Reform crow that this is a master stroke.
That man, they say – and I’d admit it – who has out manoeuvred other politicians time and time again, set agendas others have had to follow, once dealt with criticism with bonhomie and a dismissive wave of the hand, perhaps the most influential politician of a generation, has done it once again. ‘4D Chess. Next level strategy‘
Then, and quite quickly, things that should have been predicted and game played internally in Reform, start to slip out of their control.
The man who likes to call the tune, discovers nobody else is obliged to dance to it. And they won’t.
Call them ‘frit’ all you want, but nobody has to jump to as Kemi Badenoch has put it ‘the beat of Nigel Farage’s drum”
So Farage, once a very serious political tactician, is now not an MP, fighting for his own seat that he will almost certainly win in a six week campaign costing hundreds of thousand pounds of tax payers money, forced on the people of Clacton, standing against a man who wears a bin on his head – and Laurence Fox.
Winning against them, will mean he is back in the same job, and facing the same inquiry he was beforehand, with the potential of another by-election in Clacton required.
And he’s been ridiculed for putting himself in this powerful position.
Now I’d heavily caution any Conservative, indeed any other party, about laughing too hard at Reform’s voters. That’s a very foolish thing to do. I don’t, and neither should the Tories dismiss their concerns, or their fears and anger at the state of our politics.
These are not bad people, as the left will tell you, they are people searching for something that might lift all of us out of the doom mood so many of the electorate find themselves, and yes, The Conservative party must take its share of the blame that they feel like that. Labour’s made it worse, and the new, soon to be crowned Prime Minister could easily make it much worse.
I just disagree with Reform’s diagnosis and don’t believe in their solutions.
There’s risk too, in laughing at Reform’s key players, defectors and outriders. Their party has been, and still is, ahead in the polls, they will certainly not be quitting the field of play and represent a big threat to any ambitions of serious renewal the Tories may have.
But ridiculing and laughing people certainly are. It is a ludicrous situation.
It’s not a cabal, or a stitch up. It’s not an Establishment whose criteria for entry according to Reform is both opaque and generalist, but when it comes to Nigel who has walked, talked, earned and acted as if he he’d fit right in, apparently isn’t.
A good friend pointed out that Farage can’t really be called Establishment, and I think that’s probably true, but he is, as Reform have often accused others of being, ‘a career politician’.
I’m genuinely baffled how it came to this and even more how those that brought it about didn’t and couldn’t see it coming.
I’ve done this before but I’m going doing it again: I’ve always got on with Nigel Farage. Indeed I can think of scores of meetings and interactions when laughter was a key ingredient in his making his points, explaining his ideas or just talking about everyday things and enjoying life.
This time though many are laughing at, not with.
I made a decision as a BBC political reporter until 2016 that I would treat all politicians the same. So when I was asked to report on and understand UKIP, despite some being sniffy about them I maintained that they deserved the same fair hearing as any other party. I’ve always disliked reporters who want to show their audience how much they dislike those they are covering.
I confess I admired how Nigel handled criticism often with humour. He’d explain off the record what was really going on, and even admit mistakes. It made him pretty normal compared to many politicians of the time. He’d admit he hated administration and party management and revel in thinking of stratagems to wrong foot that ‘establishment’.
Yes, he was using that tag years ago.
When he came back to move Richard Tice aside as leader of Reform, I didn’t recognise him as quite the same man I’d known. He was angrier, more aggressive, and that brand of bonhomie that made him fun, and funny to be around, was in much shorter supply, especially towards those, like I had been, paid to ask him tricky questions.
His statement this week contained a response, not least to people such as myself, saying that he was indeed changed, because he was angry and upset.
I respect his desire to protect his grown up children from political scrutiny. Family should be off limits. However this was not ‘hounding’, or ‘targeting’. Jacob Rees Mogg has the grounds for that complaint when a lunatic left group called Class War actually targeted his son with shouted questions, abuse of his father in front of him, both in a street and on his own doorstep.
No, Nigel got angrier some time ago, and it’s clouded his once deft touch at second guessing his opponents moves.
The Chancellor Rachel Reeves granted the application to trigger a by-election with uncharacteristic humour:
“If he wants to spend the summer arguing with a bin, I won’t stop him.”
Daisy Cooper the Lib Dem deputy leader used PMQs to ridicule the situation and the former member for Clacton, gifting David Lammy, not always intentionally funny, a chance to scorn. He was standing in for the outgoing Prime Minister who was at a NATO summit, who branded the whole by-election ploy ‘a gimmick’
Broadcast studios were filled with Reformers giving corkscrew logic as to why this whole circus was brilliant and brave, whilst slowly but surely rubbishing a man who wears a bin on his head.
The internet is flooded with images of Count Binface, or rather the comedian and satirist Jon Harvey, and calls to vote for him instead.
His pitch is “I’m not Nigel Farage, vote for me and I’ll save you the cost of another by-election”
Because in that lies the point. If as I suspect Farage does beat a bin, and a fox, in an odd mirror of the count at Makerfield – the result will be rubbish, if the Standards Committee simply carries on the investigation, suspends him, a recall ballot is held and we end up doing it all over again.
Nigel hasn’t stolen the focus and agenda for six weeks. The ‘eye of Sauron’ as I call media focus will in short order return to Andy Burnham and the serious question of what he has in store for Britain, and who he’ll appoint to help him try to run it.
Burnham, one suspects, has looked at this whole farrago and allowed himself a wry smile.
It’s just the silly distraction he needs and wants.