NEVER before has the conclusion of a parliamentary by-election been so much more about the choreography than it was about the actual result, and it's possible that Nigel Farage's seemingly bizarre decision not to attend the declaration of the vote in Clacton he engineered himself may have won him a small tactical victory over the Conservative Party in particular.
Reform UK strategists had presumably given considerable thought to how they could most effectively counter the narrative that Farage had wasted everyone's time by choosing to pointlessly "spend the summer arguing with a bin" as Rachel Reeves put it, and what they appeared to settle on was an attempt to turn the tables and make the major established parties look ridiculous by associating them with Count Binface, who Farage painted as the candidate of the "uniparty" and alleged had received assistance from Tory, Labour and LibDem canvassers.
Those parties may in retrospect regret what had initially seemed the masterstroke of assisting a joke candidate to emerge as the main challenger to Farage in Clacton, because the Binface campaign gained sufficient momentum to keep the turnout perfectly respectable for a by-election in August, and to permit the division of the electorate between pro-Farage and anti-Farage camps to be clearly visible in the result – with the pro-Farage camp winning by 63.3% to 26.9%.
It might have been wiser to instead foster the impression that Farage was standing completely unopposed, and thus allow interest in the by-election to wither, which could at least have detracted credibility from Reform's victory by severely depressing the turnout. As it was, Farage's result was solid enough to give him the option of staying away from the declaration without risking the impression that he was shielding himself from humiliation at the hands of voters.
He avoided the head-to-head images with Binface that his opponents were dreaming of, and portrayed the declaration as a sort of circus-wake for a political establishment that had not only been defeated, but had supposedly humiliated itself by coalescing behind an absurd champion.
The Tories may feel that their strategy of boycotting the by-election has still achieved its primary objective, in the sense that it was less harmful to sit back and allow Farage to defeat a loose proxy rather than to directly suffer defeat themselves. However in the medium-term they may have created problems for themselves.
If they end up spearheading the campaign for a recall petition to force a second Clacton by-election, Farage will be able to say that it is they who are wasting time and public money when they have already run away from contesting the first vote and unsuccessfully thrown Binface at him.
Kemi Badenoch has stated that a second by-election would be a serious affair, as opposed to the "stunt" that the first one was, and that she would therefore be giving local voters the chance to vote for a serious Conservative candidate. But that will effectively mean that the Tories not only have to compete with Farage, but also with the vote total and vote share that Count Binface has just recorded.
That may not be totally straightforward given that Binface very nearly matched the 27.9% vote achieved in Clacton by the Tory candidate in the 2024 General Election. If Farage is able to gloat that a "serious Conservative" proved a less successful challenger to him in a recall by-election than a satirical "independent space warrior" did a few months earlier, his tactics for neutralising the consequences of the standards investigation against him will have paid off.
That said, the effect on the Britain-wide state of play is likely to be neutral. Reform have slipped significantly in the opinion polls in recent weeks, and it's hard to imagine any colourful goings-on at the Essex coast proving enough to put that process into reverse. If there is any wider significance to the by-election result at all, it's restricted to the utter failure of a string of minor parties to seize a golden opportunity to break into the big-time in the absence of all the non-Reform big players. The Social Democratic Party, for example, has long painted itself as a sleeping giant that is capable of providing a political home to the substantial portion of the electorate that is both socially conservative and economically left-wing. But with just 0.7% of the vote in Clacton, it now looks more like a single-cell organism that is still snoozing.
