Nigel Farage lays down the gauntlet. By Brendan O’Neill at spiked.
With righteous indignation, Nigel Farage has resigned today as MP for Clacton, triggering a by-election that he intends to fight. He’s giving up his seat in the hope he’ll win it back. Why? Because he believes it should be ordinary people, not the turbo-smug media classes, who determine his destiny. ‘Why should they be the people that decide my fate?’, he asked, spitting out the word ‘they’ with highly warranted contempt. Only ‘the people of Clacton’ should be ‘the judges of my actions’, he said.
It’s a bold move. For it wrestles Farage’s fate — and the future of populism itself — from the whining and mudslinging of the cloistered media classes and returns it to the cool deliberation of the people. It was in a televised press conference that he made his announcement. His voice quivering with rage, he slammed the media for obsessing over allegedly dodgy donations he received from rich pals. He’d been subjected to ‘constant demonisation by the press’, he said, with the aim of hounding him from public life simply because he gives voice to ‘the consensual view on many issues’. He then disarmed the knife-wielding media plotters, robbing them of their power by inviting the people of Clacton to pass judgement on him instead. It’s clever. And it’s risky.
The media have been sniffing for scandal around Farage for weeks now (well, years). The latest storm involves a £5million donation he received from a cryptocurrency investor in April 2024, before he became an MP, and some financial assistance he received from his longstanding ally, George Cottrell, who once did jailtime in the US for wire fraud. The parliamentary commissioner for standards is investigating the five million quid, which Farage did not declare. The media elites are salivating. Every earthly issue must now play second fiddle to their onanistic obsession with Farage’s ‘sleazy’ antics.
Two things can be true at once. One, Farage may not have followed all the rules on these donations (let’s see). And two, the media fever over the donations is a brazen political crusade motivated less by a love for probity in public life than by an ugly, burning urge to rid British politics of its best-known populist….
‘I am the most physically and verbally attacked public figure… of modern times’, he said. He reminded us that he’s had milkshakes thrown in his face, placards bashed over his head, death threats. The breaking point, he said, was The Sunday Times allegedly publishing a photo of the house where his daughter lives. He said he’s ‘never been angrier’.
Rather than risk defeat in a populist versus establishment contest, the main parties are refusing to run candidates. The only other candidate in the by-election is Count Binface:
Who? Count Binface, “Who dares, bins.”
The major parties are hoping for a second by-election, triggered by an adverse probity finding against Mr Farage, in a coupe of months time. They are banking on voter fatigue and an adverse finding to defeat Mr Popularity.