When Nigel Farage announced he was going to make a statement on his political future this afternoon, Westminster and the wider UK prepared itself for drama.
Was the leader of the most popular political party in the country about to step down from his role? Was it due to his health, or the intense scrutiny over his finances from the media and Parliament?
There can’t have been many people who were expecting to hear what we ended up hearing.
On a live stream posted to X and YouTube, Farage told viewers he would be resigning as MP for Clacton today – in order to run as MP for Clacton.
To make sense of it, there are a couple of pieces of context you should know: one that the Reform leader spoke about in his speech, and one that he did not.
First, the ‘establishment’ is coming after him.
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This is true – again, he is the leader of the most popular political party in the country and someone often spoken about as a potential future Prime Minister.
The public deserves to know that he took £5 million from a crypto billionaire then lobbied the governor of the Bank of England about decisions relating to crypto.
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It also deserves to know the extent to which he and his party benefit from links to a wealthy young aristocrat who was previously convicted of fraud in the US.
Farage is going to face scrutiny. That’s part and parcel of his position in public life. Whether he chooses to describe this as attacks from some elite is up to him.
But a byproduct of the stories referenced above is that his carefully curated ‘man of the people’ image has been tarnished. What average bloke in the pub has had their billionaire mate drop £5 million into their bank account?
Has anything like this happened before?
A similarly audacious move to force a by-election happened in June 2008.
Tory MP David Davis decided to resign as the MP for Haltemprice and Howden – and as shadow home secretary – so he could run again in the resulting election.
His intention was to draw attention to what he believed to be the erosion of civil liberties in the UK, triggered by changes to terror legislation.
The bizarre move was derided as a stunt by Labour and the Liberal Democrats, who chose not to run.
That meant Davis’s 25 rival candidates included 13 independents, two far-right parties and the conspiracy theorist David Icke – as well as the Green Party, who came in a distant second.
The Conservative, who still sits in Parliament, won with 72% of the vote.
Perhaps Farage was concerned that voters were starting to wonder if he was just another part of the establishment. So, he put his job on the line to show just how bleedin’ anti-establishment he is.
Second, the context Farage didn’t mention. An investigation by the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner has been running for the past few weeks over that £5 million ‘gift’ and whether he should have declared it. Farage has denied any wrongdoing.
The Reform leader was reportedly due to be interviewed by the commissioner, Daniel Greenberg, soon – if that hasn’t already happened.
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One of the potential outcomes of such an investigation, if wrongdoing is proven, is a suspension from the House of Commons which could trigger a by-election.
Perhaps Farage believed such an outcome was likely, so wanted to get ahead of it. Perhaps he thought it was not likely, but wanted to prove doubters wrong by showing he could win regardless.
We’re barely two weeks past the last big by-election gamble in this bananas political summer. That one paid off spectacularly, with the outcome that a new PM is set to enter No 10 in less than two weeks’ time.
Will fortune favour Farage in a similar way? We might all still be too stunned to ponder that.
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