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For Nigel Farage, a year that was progressing quite nicely started to go wrong when the Guardian revealed he had received an undeclared gift of £۵m from a crypto billionaire. Just ۱۰ weeks later, he has been pushed into perhaps one of the biggest gambles of his political career.
That gamble is seemingly not with his role as an MP. Farage took more than ۴۵% of the vote in Clacton in ۲۰۲۴, and the heavily Reform-friendly constituency was always likely to elect him again, even before the bulk of the other parties announced they would stand aside in a byelection they have dismissed as a stunt.
The risk, instead, is that Farage comes across as self-indulgent, entitled and petulant. And if he ends up facing a parade of novelty candidates and no one else, he may appear mainly foolish.
For years, much of Farage’s electoral appeal was the idea he would be a fun person to share a pint with. But if someone on the adjoining bar stool launched into a ۱۵-minute lament of self-pity and victimisation on the scale of Farage’s video address, you would soon start thinking about moving to another part of the pub.
Before finally getting to the news that he was resigning as an MP to trigger a “people versus the establishment” byelection, Farage’s statement was a lengthy list of, at times, peevish complaints.
People were judging him for accepting the “lottery win” of a £۵m gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne; his safety was at risk; the media was persecuting him; his daughter had been approached by broadcasters.
So what is going on? The central motivation appears to be an attempt to reassert control of the political narrative, one that has slipped from Farage’s grasp since the Guardian uncovered the £۵m from Harborne, a sum variously described since as an unconditional gift, money to cover security costs, and a reward for delivering Brexit.
Since the news emerged, three things have happened, all of them deeply uncomfortable for Farage. First, the persistence of questioning about who funds his lifestyle, and the difficulty he has found in answering this, has made Farage become – by his terms – something of a hermit. Weekly, freewheeling press conferences have been replaced with choreographed video statements and occasional broadcast interviews.
Second, media organisations have been motivated to dig further into Farage’s often complex finances, including the precise number of homes he owns, and most recently his reliance on the long-time hanger-on and convicted criminal George Cottrell.
Finally, there is the scrutiny from parliamentary authorities. The standards commissioner is looking into whether Farage should have declared the money from Harborne, as well as – so Farage said on Tuesday – whether he needed to declare the assistance from Cottrell.
There is an increasing assumption in Westminster that, such is the scale of the Harborne sum, Farage could face a Commons suspension long enough to trigger a so-called recall petition, whereby a byelection is called should at least ۱۰% of the local electorate seek one.
Farage will know calling his own byelection does not stop this. Parliamentary rules are clear: if an MP leaves the Commons, a standards investigation will pause, but it resumes if and when they are re-elected.
The calculation appeared to be that, should Farage win convincingly, he could push back against a recall attempt – or if one did succeed, then campaign on a version of the slogan drawn up by leave campaigners for a possible second Brexit referendum: tell them again.
Such a path was always littered with political bear-traps. For all that Farage comes alive when he campaigns, for perhaps the first time in his career he must tackle questions he is uncomfortable facing and may not know fully how to answer. Why did Harborne give him so much money? What was it spent on? How many homes does he own? Can a self-styled man of the people really live on a largesse of wealthy and sometimes shady friends?
And now it seems likely he will face all this scrutiny alone, with Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and Restore Britain saying they will not stand in a byelection condemned as a self-indulgence; the Nigel Farage show.
They will instead, they say, focus on the byelection that happens if and when there is a recall petition.
For Farage, the argument for his gambit seemed decisive. He would be out there again, not hiding, loudly explaining Reform policies, and taking media bandwidth from Andy Burnham, who was hoping to spend the summer on a largely uninterrupted schedule of his own events.
But suddenly, with the removal of the other main candidates, the spotlight is unflinching. A man who had hoped to once again claim the vindication and support of the British people feels as if he has become trapped in a charade of his own making.
This increasingly rich and ever-more powerful career politician had hoped to turn to the public and say, once again: I am the outsider. Instead, he is in danger of becoming the punchline.
